BPO Call Center: What is it? Types, Functions, Pros & Cons

Suddenly, business is booming. You’re a SMB – a small to medium-sized business – and you have more customers and clients than you’ve ever had before. But that also means you have more callers, more connections which need to be made, and more customers needing help. You simply cannot handle it all on your own.

But with a BPO call center, you can.

• What is a BPO call center?;
• Types of BPO call centers;
• What BPO call centers do?;
• How MightyCall can help;
• Pros and cons of call center BPO options;
• When to use business process outsourcing for call center activities?;
• What businesses should use BPO centers?;
• How to integrate a BPO call center into business operations?;
• Use a BPO call center for your business to deliver high-level customer service.

What is a BPO call center?

Business process outsourcing (BPO) call centers let you delegate handling your business phone calls (customer help, answering questions, etc). These call centers can be or in other countries, but they are staffed by people who know your business and can answer questions well.

Types of BPO call centers

There are of course different types of BPOs. To determine which one is best for you, it’s important to keep in mind your business needs and what you wish to accomplish by working with a BPO call center provider.

By call type

Some BPO call center services only operate regarding certain call types. Once again, which one you select to use will entirely depend upon your business needs.

Inbound BPO call centers

Inbound BPO call center services only handle incoming calls. These can include customer complaints, or just general customer service.

Outbound BPO call centers

These involve the BPO agent making calls instead of receiving them. This can be for any number of reasons: responding to emails sent by a customer asking for help or attempting to find new customers.

Virtual BPO call centers

Virtual outsourced call centers can be inbound, outbound, or both; the difference here is that no one is sitting in a cubicle amongst hundreds of others. Instead, they are sitting at home or wherever else they work from, as they’ve logged in online and are making calls over their computer.

By reaction type

Outsourcing can also work by “reaction” type – that is, the reason for the call being made. Some react to customers, whereas others are proactive.

Reactive call centers

These business process outsourcing call centers are by far the most common. People call them, and they react. These call center services are only there to help when asked, they do not do any calling on their own.

Proactive call centers

These BPO call center vendors, on the other hand, reach out to customers. Folks who work at these call centers likely will do some analysis first of what the customer (or potential customer) needs before making the actual call.

What BPO call centers do?

The day-to-day work of a BPO contact center depends upon, as you may have guessed, the type of call center. Here’s what the lives of call center agents look like:

Inbound

At an inbound BPO call center company, a given call center might:

• Helping customers make orders: Although paying online has become more and more popular, some folks still prefer to order over the phone. These call center companies can help with that process.
• Answering questions about the company: This type of BPO call center operation is what most people think of when they think of this type of business. You call, you get an answer from an agent.
• Address complaints: If callers calling in have complaints, they can take them in and record them for the client company.
• Marketing: Did a customer see an ad and want to learn about a sale? A call center can help clarify that for them.

Outbound

Outbound BPO call center services can:

• Respond to customer complaints: Let’s say a customer leaves a ticket on a website. These call center BPO organizations can then call the customer and, in reaching out, get their questions answered.
• Telemarketing: Let’s face it. People may complain about telemarketers, but it’s an effective way of getting your product out there. Call center outsourcing can be a key way of being able to get telemarketing done.
• Fundraising: Are you a charity? Outsourcing can help you raise money by literally conducting your fundraising.
• Research: Do you want to learn more about what people think about your product? Outsource the survey and have an army of callers get results.

Virtual

Virtual contact center BPOs, on the other hand, combine all of the above:

• Handles both incoming and outgoing calls
• Sales and telemarketing
• Answering customer support questions

How MightyCall can help

Since virtual call centers combine all the best while eliminating the worst about call centers, it’s worth looking into working with a virtual one. Or, if you run a call center, it’s worth making the switch. And when looking at the MightyCall’s call center software it becomes a lot easier to make that decision.

MightyCall offers critical online tools that can help the most complex BPO contact centers operate successfully:

• International numbers: These allow you to operate across country borders, vastly opening up your potential workforce.
• Softphones: With these tools, your workers do not need to be working from a deskphone in a cubicle – they can be working from anywhere, saving them time (and saving you money).
• Call notes: If your employees can’t pass each other physical notes, no problems: Call notes allow them to leave “notes” on a given call, reminding or informing the next worker about what went on.
• Automatic call distribution: Maximize agent productivity by routing your calls through pre-set rules.
• Ring groups: With this feature, reduce wait times dramatically by routing calls to entire teams to get callers their answers quicker.
• Call monitoring: Monitor the calls your employees make to help with coaching and improve performance.
• Call whisper: With this, managers can “whisper” to agents during calls, without the client knowing, to give tips or other helpful advice.

MightyCall is made to connect businesses with their clients – which is why it’s a perfect BPO call center for your business.

Pros and cons of call center BPO options

When considering using a BPO call center, there are some important pros and cons to keep in mind. It’s crucial that you work through all of them before deciding whether or not a BPO is right for you.

Pros

1. Price: It’s simply cost effective to outsource the task to professionals. Yes, “outsourcing” has a bad stigma. But call center business process outsourcing saves you money. And if you’re a burgeoning SMB, it’s understandable that you cut costs where you can.
2. No need to train: A BPO will train their own employees to work for you. You don’t need to spend the time coaching or giving advice.
3. No more closing time: With virtual call centers, people can work from anywhere in the world – literally (well, anywhere they have internet). Which means that, if you work with the right BPO call center, you can guarantee that you never need to worry about closing time.
4. Make more contact than ever: You have tons of people at your disposal, as opposed to the few you might be able to hire with your own company.
5. Focus on what matters most to you: When the weight of having to focus on overseeing calls and connections off your shoulders, you can focus on everything else that actually matters to you.

Cons

1. People don’t always love telemarketing: If you decide telemarketing is the way to go for your business, you can make a lot of money. But if you become associated in people’s minds with a telemarketing brand, you may risk turning off potential clients.
2. Some customers really do not like call centers: When it is obvious that a caller is speaking with a call center and not a formal company employee, sometimes callers can get frustrated. Balancing price vs. customer frustration here can be important.
3. Uninformed agents: If all goes well, the call center should inform its employees properly. But if you have one which has not done its due diligence, they may not be able to provide all the answers customers are asking for – which can cause further frustration.
4. You have divulged information: While these organizations are incredibly trustworthy, some business owners do not like having to divulge private information (or information about their customers). If you’re concerned about privacy, it might be a good idea to check reviews of previous call center clients.
5. Your own customer service capabilities may atrophy: If you outsource your customer service capabilities for a while and then suddenly have to start doing customer service again for whatever reason, you/your company may have been rather out of practice for a while (especially if you’ve let go all of your customer service agents).

When to use business process outsourcing for call center activities?

When can it be useful to adopt these services? Here are a couple examples:

1. Getting your products out there: If you want to quickly let a large amount of people know about your products, opting for a call center capable of telemarketing can be a smart way to go about doing so.
2. You anticipate a boom…: If you have yourself together, you might be able to predict when you’re about to hit it big. If you can tell that things are firing on all cylinders, it might be a good idea to get ahead now.
3. …or you realize you’re about to bust: Conversely if you are firing on all cylinders while trying to deal with a huge amount of customers who need help, opting for a BPO call center can be a good pressure release valve.
4. There are always people: Having trouble hiring folks? There will always be people working at call centers, which means you will always have customer support staff ready.
5. You need to cut costs: Call centers are cheap. A lot cheaper than having people on staff. When it comes down to outsourcing, sometimes it’s just the numbers.

What businesses should use BPO centers?

But what types of businesses should use outsourcing? Here are a couple suggestions:

1. Insurance: Lots of people call insurance companies all the time. Outsourcing those calls can be a good way of keeping everything flowing smoothly.
2. Banking: Sometimes people need help with card fraud, and sometimes others just have questions about how their account works. Not needing to keep folks who answer those types of questions can free your tellers up for other services.
3. Energy: People have questions about the greenest energy a company offers, or how their bills are structured. BPO call centers can provide the answers.
4. Medical billing: Similar to insurance, people often have questions about their medical bills. Outsourcing means those questions still get answered in a timely manner.
5. E-commerce: If you run a small website, you might not be able to have on-staff salespeople. By outsourcing, you can save big while having reliable and effective customer service.

How to integrate a BPO call center into business operations?

So you’ve decided that a BPO can be right for you. But how do you actually implement a BPO call center? It’s actually relatively easy.

1. Double-check your numbers

Does this work for you? Are you certain? It’s really important that you know that this is what you want to go about doing. Find out everything it will require of you. Not only will this save you time and money, it will also help you make the right choice. Because switching may include letting go some current staff, and if you do that only to realize that perhaps letting them go was not the best decision for you, you may come to regret it.

2. Choose a type of call center you want to go with

Are you only looking for inbound calls? Do you want to focus on outbound? How about virtual calls? Just because you decided you want to go with outsourced call center agents, it doesn’t mean you also have inherently figured out how you want to take advantage of them.

3. Pick a reliable service provider

When picking a BPO call center provider, it’s important to keep a few things in mind, like

• Price: How much will it cost you? Are they cheaper than what you’re already using?
• Location: Can they provide 24/7 service? Are they in your time zone – reducing usefulness – or elsewhere?
• Specialization: Is it a call center which has worked in your field before? Some outsourcing companies are jacks of all trades, but others may implicitly understand how yours works.

4. Make sure they have the information they need

When sharing information with your selected BPO center, be sure to not hold back on what they might need. They do not need everything, obviously; but if you’re overly careful, they might be deprived of the key pieces of information they need to do their job.

5. Figure out the legal situation

If you are going with a call center outside of the United States, you may want to consider talking to a lawyer. Not out of concern that you are doing something illegal – you aren’t – but just to make sure that everything when it comes to taxes and the like is straightforward. There’s also the question of privacy; you are handing over customer data to a third-party company, so you want to make sure you’ve dotted your i’s and crossed your t’s.

6. Work on the details of your transition

How long do you want to take to transition to the BPO call center industry? Do you want to make it happen as soon as possible, or do you want to drag it out? Do you currently employ people who have contracts which cannot quickly be ended and who will be replaced by the BPO? There are a lot of final details you need to think about before beginning your transition.

7. Check in with the results

Once you go for it, the conference center should work like an automatic process: you no longer will need to give input unless it is requested. However, that does not mean you should not pay any more attention. BPO call center agents are going to be the first thing callers associate with your business – which means that if they are not doing a good job, it will hurt your image. That means you should check in on occasion; success rates, call connections, satisfaction from clients, and more are all things you should be on the lookout for.

Use a BPO call center for your business to deliver high-level customer service

So, what is a BPO call center? It’s an organization that allows you to delegate business communications with clients to professionals, freeing you for other strategically important tasks and allowing you to further develop your business. This service allows you to keep doing what you do best while also being able to meet your customers and callers where they need to be met. It guarantees that “you” are always available for them, no matter what time of day – meaning that BPO call center agents can help dramatically expand your reach and satisfy your customers for an affordable price.

Written by  Anthony Constantini

Anthony Constantini, a copywriter at MightyCall, brings years of experience in telecommunications and beyond.

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