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Call Center Customer Service Outsourcing Defined

Call Center Outsourcing Defined

As the labor shortages continue throughout the business world, call center outsourcing is a big topic of discussion for many contact center executives today. Although some may choose to turn to traditional solutions such as business process outsourcing (BPO) or legacy technologies like interactive voice response (IVR), others may want to explore some contact center innovation ideas such as conversational AI.

Executives are looking for call center solutions that no longer depend on human agents as heavily, especially for Tier One questions and inquiries. They want solutions that can easily scale up and down with unpredictable volumes while providing added value at a cost-effective price.

Automation technologies such as machine learning, natural language understanding, and intelligent virtual agents are growing in popularity as customer service climbs to one of the top fields for high attrition rates. According to one recent study, 45 percent of surveyed customer service agents are considering quitting within a year.

What is call center outsourcing?

Call center outsourcing, also referred to as BPO, is the process of hiring a third-party vendor to provide supplemental staffing for contact centers. Many of these are offshore solutions and can be the most expensive method for adding talent as they have high training costs and attrition rates. They may lead to poor customer satisfaction and damage to a brand’s reputation.

What are some trends for call center innovation in 2022?

Due to the fact that many existing solutions such BPO, IVR, and other legacy-based systems have many shortcomings and weaknesses, contact center automation and conversational AI adoption are surfacing as successful call center management solutions in 2022. Machine-based learning and natural language processing systems can resolve Tier One requests faster with zero hold times.

What are common BPO disadvantages?

While contact center outsourcing providers add staff, they don’t have unlimited capacities. Often, high premiums are charged once a certain number of live agents are taking calls for a single customer. BPOs frequently require exorbitant training cycles that can take weeks to months, and they can require rigid contracts that don’t take into account seasonality or agent off-time.

A/B testing in a BPO environment is often not feasible, which limits the vendor’s ability to pivot quickly when key metrics are lagging. Compared with the agile capabilities of point-and-click AI solutions, BPO systems are slow to change. In addition, BPOs are also experiencing high attrition rates, as employees flock to gig economy jobs.

How can conversational AI solutions solve these problems?

Since conversational IVR solutions are driven by sophisticated machine learning technology, they can be trained once on a particular company’s call center protocols and product and service lines. Furthermore, as the AI-driven solution takes calls, it learns more about inquiries, customer intents, and brand details, making it more effective as time goes on. No knowledge is lost when someone decides to resign.

Because conversational AI can detect multiple customer intents, it is capable of sophisticated dialogue management, resolving Tier One inquiries immediately with no hold times. Any particularly complex questions can be intelligently routed to the correct live agent along with the information that has already been gathered to eliminate customers needing to repeat their requests.

Conversational AI provides a consistent customer experience that represents a company’s brand the same way every time and frequently improves customer satisfaction. For instance, Replicant’s Thinking Machine solution delivers average CSAT scores that are equal to or better than human agents.

What additional advantages does conversational AI solutions deliver?

Unfortunately, BPO solutions do not provide the data that contact centers need to improve performance. Conversational AI, on the other hand, delivers deep analytics that go beyond the traditional ones, providing contact center leaders with insight into new call flows to automate as well as more information about call types and patterns.

Our Solution

If you’re evaluating remote call center solutions, learn more about Replicant’s intelligent virtual agent offering. It was created with the latest machine learning technology and offers an efficient customer service solution. Our conversational AI system understands natural language processing, improves and learns over time, and offers analytics and data to help improve call center customer service.

Our latest guide, “The Great Resignation: Why Your Contact Center Won’t Survive without Automation,” provides answers to some of today’s most pressing challenges:

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