How BPOs and Call Centers can benefit with StaffTimer

Most companies look to utilising BPO when in the initial stages of their business. They are a popular option for entrepreneurs primarily for one reason – they’re cheap. Despite these tough times, BPOs continue to operate with work from home arrangements. This makes them very essential at this moment for the survival of businesses.

What is a BPO?

It stands for Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). It is the process of taking non-core activities of a business and outsourcing it to a third party. These have advantages and disadvantages of their own. Call centers are a form of BPO centers that deal with inbound and outbound call services such as providing sales, customer service and technical support, etc.

Why depend on BPO?

Businesses seek BPO services for many reasons. Some of these advantages are:

24/7 Customer care

Perhaps the biggest advantage is that businesses will be able to provide customer support as call centers continue to operate around the clock.

Reduced Costs

BPO saves the cost of having an in-house customer support staff due to difference in wages between countries.

Professional Staff

Businesses can save time and money to get staff trained for customer services when call centers offer trained agents instantly.

Business Stability

While saving costs and running professional customer support by a third party, businesses can focus on their own core services and ensure things continue to run smoothly.

What are the biggest challenges for a call center?

All call centers face problems keeping businesses running smoothly. However, there are issues that are very troublesome:

Low Budget

This is one of the biggest bottlenecks BPOs face. From poor internet connection to IT issues. Having a bad budget affects the quality of work delivered.

Lack of Skill

Being based in developing or third world countries, employees lack the fluency and common knowledge of the people living in the countries where the outsourcing company resides. This creates frequent confusion, poor communication and bad treatment from customers.

Absenteeism

Continuous and demanding schedules take a heavy toll on employees’ well-being. Hectic routines may cause them to appear less for work.

Low Career Growth and Engagement

There isn’t much room to progress for the agent. Not being motivated enough or encouraged contributes a lot to the lack of a team’s performance.

Manager Attrition

Even managers cannot take it much longer with stressful and grueling work routines. With them frequently leaving the company, call centers suffer the lack of a proper advisor and leader very often.

Bad First Contact Resolution

One of the most common issues faced by call centers is during First Contact Resolution. Callers who have to call again to resolve their issues often respond with low customer satisfaction.

Why is time management important to call centers?

Other than maintaining quality and staff performance, the most important thing to manage is time for many reasons:

• BPOs may have a lot of clients across the globe and seeing how much companies need them, they cannot afford to lose these clients to competitors which makes the survival of their own business difficult. 
• These centers may have a lot of employees that work different shifts because of timezones. 
• BPOs depend on offering their services continuously so it’s extremely important to ensure productivity stays consistent around the clock.

How to Increase Call Center Performance?

Using a time-tracking software like StaffTimer will help boost employees’ productivity and improve results in many ways:

• Track how long agents are productive during their shift
• Note the tasks and activities they do throughout the day
• Get in-depth reports on their productivity
• Monitor their activity in real-time to see how they handle calls
• Assign tasks to specific people through text or voice messages.
• Get daily videos for each agents’ summary of tasks and activities.
• Track their idle and productive time via keystrokes and mouse click intensity every minute.

Final thoughts

Using BPOs is an effective way to save money and manpower so that businesses can dedicate more resources to their core services. But it’s important to ensure the vendor they choose does a good job to satisfy needs. This will allow the level of customer satisfaction and longevity of a business to increase significantly.