The global outsourcing industry had experienced sustained revenue growth between the years of 2000 to 2012, followed by a disruption in the years 2012-2015. At present it is experiencing a growth surge. The latest IDC report by GII predicts that the Global Outsourcing Market is expected to reach US $202.6 billion in 2016 with a five-year CAGR of 5.3%. In addition, the outlook towards BPO has changed with BPO now being considered as a transformational tool. Businesses are now expecting it to add more value beyond cost reductions. Outsourcing facilitates broadening of market base, enhancing business-customer relationships, provides new answers to complex and changing questions and pushes business process transformation.

It has becomes important for companies to ensure that they make their choice of a BPO partner with care and consideration, given that the decision to outsource and the accompanying adjustments and changes that come with it can be daunting. Managing a relationship with the wrong BPO provider can be disastrous. Knowledge of the essential traits that contribute to the performance of a great BPO partner would come in handy in making the final decision.

9 Essential Attributes of a Successful BPO Partnership

Here are nine essential attributes that distinguishes a top performing BPO partner from the rest leading to a highly successful BPO partnership. An effective BPO partner:

Inculcates a Partnership-based approach

A survey conducted by the Everest Group found that adopting a partnership-based approach towards BPO governance is a best-in-class BPO practice. This approach involves both parties taking a collaborative approach to governance with the BPO provider playing the role of a strategic partner and both parties adopting a flexible attitude towards business objectives as the relationship matures. Both parties take a fair approach towards conflict resolution. It would also require a shared approach towards governance, operation, management and organizational structures.

Emphasizes on Conferring Value beyond Cost Reduction

An ideal BPO partner should not restrict itself to fulfilling the essentials but must think in terms of delivering value far beyond the minimum. A high performing BPO provider should think of how their service can help their client far beyond the limitations; how they can contribute in terms of improving collaboration and innovation and should have specific ideas on their contribution as well as strategies and ideas with respect to the future. Today’s BPO providers are expected to go above and beyond the SLAs where possible, keeping the company goals and vision in mind. In a survey of businesses, 2/3rd respondents definitely expressed a requirement for BPO partnerships to be value-based and not just simply about reducing costs. A BPO partner should address both tangible as well as intangible objectives.

Leverages Latest Technology for Business Process Transformation

A high performing BPO partner customizes their processes using technology to multiply value. Cloud computing, analytics, social media, automation are among the latest technologies employed that differentiate the top BPO provider from the average as it helps them to innovate and confer advantage. A survey conducted by Everest Group showed that 56% percent of high performing businesses said gaining access to technology in a BPO partnership was important, while only 27 percent of typical performers agreed.

Possesses Capabilities that Assure Results

A suitable BPO provider would possess the necessary wherewithal including processes and technology that can be used to re-engineer your processes to help achieve your goals within the specified time limit. It would be utilizing performance metrics that help in monitoring the performance of the outsourced processes as well as how it impacts the overall performance of the company

Possesses Comprehensive Industry Domain Expertise Enriched by Analytics

Companies must carry out thorough research into the capabilities of the potential BPO partner. Some of the necessary attributes that the BPO provider must possess include the possession of in-depth knowledge of industry verticals and best practices. The BPO partner must display considerable expertise and experience in the desired industry line. They should have worked with other businesses and organizations in your industry and so should be well aware of industry specific context, terms, concepts, facts and trends that are necessary for ensuring that exact and precise BPO services are provided.

Offers the Right Outsourcing Solutions in the Right Location

As BPO options expand and outsourcing providers expand their footprint world -wide, choosing the right location for outsourcing becomes critical for the success of business strategies. Keeping the number of available options in mind (nearshoring, offshoring, onshoring), companies must identify the BPO partner with global service delivery centers that is best suited for translation of their BPO goals. Different businesses benefit from different kind of outsourcing models. An experienced BPO partner would provide you with the best possible solutions for your BPO requirements, ensuring that your process is executed in in a location that is conveniently located to your business, not affected relatively by prevailing global forces such as wars and conflicts and equipped with disaster recovery options.

Promotes Business Adaptability by Offering Scalability

Keeping the uncertain and dynamic global economic and business conditions in context, an effective BPO partner would have options for scalability incorporated as part of its outsourcing mandate. They would be able to scale up or down the operations of the project in accordance with the requirements. The quality of a BPO partner can be evaluated from the way they are able to modulate a project in response to changing requirements as well as opening up in new locations, where required. They should be able to align their schedule along with yours.

Comprehensively Invests in Human Talent

A high performance BPO partner will invest in its human resources as the success of any BPO enterprise is dependent on the quality of the staff. High performing staff will ensure that a BPO project ranks high on all KPIs. Surveys show that most companies realize that the success of BPO initiatives hinges upon the investment in manpower. 75% of top business performers credit the success of their BPO activities to the quality of the provider’s BPO people expertise. Only 38% of average business performers realize the value of its human resources.

Complies With International Industry Specific Process Quality And Data Security Standards

The right BPO partner should have processes and procedures in place that are in alignment with standard industry regulations concerning quality management, data quality and security. Data security has become a serious issue worldwide with many high profile security breaches having occurred in recent times. Confidentiality and data protection remains a vital issue of concern for companies intending to outsource. A reliable BPO partner would address these issues by ensuring that they possess accreditations from top industry specific regulators which are a measure of their commitment to data security, confidentiality, protection of healthcare information, and other industry-specific requirements.

Provides Business Continuity Planning And Disaster Recovery Options

A reliable BPO service provider would possess contingency plans to ensure business continuity in the case of emergencies and disasters. The Business Continuity Planning options would include measures to minimize service disruption and enable resumption of normal operations as well as facilitating shifting of services. Embarking on an outsourcing journey requires enormous amount of research and planning before settling on the right kind of BPO partner that helps businesses achieve their mission-critical goals. Inserting the above points in their BPO partner selection checklist would help businesses make more effective and accurate decisions regarding the choice of a suitable BPO partner. The careful and well-researched choice of an efficient and experienced Back Office Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services provider would help businesses achieve their goals in a comprehensive way.

CXREFRESH          CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE       BPO PARTNER

As brands seek to remain relevant and deliver value to their customers in the digital age, customer engagement has become a focal point on the agenda. Marketers now know that engaged customers buy more, spread more word of mouth, and are more satisfied and loyal.

Highly engaged customers gain more value from your core offering and will devote their own time and effort to creating value on behalf of your brand. Brands that invest in a well-thought-out customer engagement program are seeing meaningful business results through co-designed products or services, user-generated content, grassroots publicity, and broad brand reach.

To get to these kinds of results, you need a well-designed and managed engagement strategy—not just a collection of ad-hoc tactics.

In our experience working with clients, we have identified five key steps to developing an effective customer engagement program:

1. Align The Organization
   The strongest customer engagement programs don’t rely only on individual marketing touch points. They leverage the entire customer experience as a continuum for customers to deepen their relationship with the brand.

This “continuum of engagement” will require a cross-functional team across the company—marketing, product, customer service, etc.—to develop and execute a seamless customer engagement program regardless of channel or stage in the customer life cycle.

Executive support is critical at the early stages—helping secure resources, selecting members of the cross-functional team, and establishing a chain of command. An effective practice when selecting program sponsors is to find an executive champion outside of marketing who will co-sponsor the initiative along with the CMO.

Furthermore, a critical step in this phase is to define what “engagement” means for your brand.

2. Design Your Strategy
   After gaining executive support and buy-in from key teams, you’ll want to develop an overarching strategy for your customer engagement program. Not only should this strategy be aligned to key organizational objectives, it should provide a guide for the relationship your brand wants with customers. It should outline the value your customers will get from engaging with you, identify your business goals for the program, establish measures of success, and present a plan for tapping customers’ key motivations to engage.

In this phase, you’ll hypothesize a “theory of engagement” for your program: which types of engagement activities deliver the most results and which emotions these activities should tap into to drive customer behavior. This ideation process is a valuable part of aligning the team around the objectives of the engagement program. You should validate and refine your hypotheses using data, insights, and driver modeling.

The outcome of the strategy phase will be a customer engagement ladder that depicts a customer’s journey toward high levels of engagement with your brand. Your ladder should be designed to realize increasing value for your customers. A well-designed engagement ladder becomes the architecture that supports tactics and campaigns.

3. Develop Tactics
   A customer engagement program needs to operate seamlessly across channels. To maximize value, it should be consistent and synced, regardless of where a customer engages. Since today’s customer expects always-on, personalized, and unified experiences from brands, it’s critical to offer the right engagement opportunities—tailored to each customer—across all channels: mobile, web, social, and physical.

Of particular importance, mobile is one of the most powerful platforms available to brands. Even very simple mobile engagement produces strong impacts on both web and physical engagement, as well as on sales. In addition, depending on your industry or business, social media offers multiple opportunities to facilitate and encourage customer engagement.

Online and traditional advertising, loyalty programs, brick and mortar locations, and customer service also offer engagement opportunities. They should be optimized to put customers on the engagement path and help them move up the ladder over time. These programs can act as feedback loops to help route customers back onto the engagement ladder over and over, regardless of where they interact with the brand.

4. Pilot And Scale
   When preparing to introduce new components of an engagement program, build in the discipline to filter ideas and test them with customers to prove their value. Testing techniques that have been effective for our clients include agile pilots, A/B testing, and cohort analysis.

Once a new program has been validated and optimized through piloting, it’s time to scale. Scale requires putting the right processes and systems in place to offer and manage each new program for the broader market.

5. Measure And Manage
   The measurement strategy should provide leaders and teams the information needed to make smart business decisions and optimize the engagement program. When determining what to measure, it’s important to identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most and find ways to streamline information so the critical insights come clearly to the surface in actionable ways.

A challenging but valuable exercise is to develop a customer engagement score—combining multiple behavioral measures of engagement into one KPI. Increases in this score can be linked to improved sales and other business results, helping quantify the ROI and value of your engagement program. Furthermore, customer engagement scores can also contribute to predictive customer lifetime value models.

Other sophisticated methods of customer engagement measurement can produce what we call “magic numbers:” flags that call out critical behaviors requiring action, such as flags that indicate “at risk” customers who are likely to churn and need reactivation or “ready to advocate” individuals who should be recruited into advocacy programs or provided with special referral offers.

Customers today decide when and how to interact with brands or whether to ignore a brand entirely. A customer engagement program is essential to capture and retain customers—not just their dollars, but also their respect, affinity, excitement, and willingness to spread word of mouth.

Now is the time to think through this process and deepen your relationship with customers—and in return your brand will increase satisfaction, loyalty, reach, and sales.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT       CXREFRESH       CX    CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE      GLOBAL CX

Consider the rise of customer success. Because 70 percent of consumers feel contacting customer service is a frustrating experience, few speak up until they’ve had a truly bad time. The trouble is, just one negative experience is all it takes to send more than half of consumers packing for a competitor. 

That’s why, instead of waiting for customers to call in, customer success managers monitor usage data like average session duration and login frequency. Although customers might hesitate to reach out about a page that won’t load, constant refreshing can signal that they’re struggling.

But customer success isn’t the only area where leaders need to pay attention. By sleuthing out signals in audience data, entrepreneurs can identify unmet needs, root out unwanted functionalities, and discover new ways to monetize existing products.

With almost any product, highly engaged users make up a small percentage of total users. Among those talking about the product, however, engaged users tend to dominate the conversation. As a result, companies often assume that what engaged users want is what the user base as a whole wants.

Shared some insights for every type of company to consider when it comes to improving CX.

• To the customer, it’s all one big team: Customers don’t care which department they talk to when they need help. They just want to get their questions answered and their problems resolved. A company may have different teams, but the customer doesn’t care. As mentioned above, the solution is to bring all interactions and data into one place. When technology doesn’t work together, neither can teams. When teams can’t work together, they can’t give a personalized customer experience. This frustrates both customers and employees.
• Create consistency in your processes to create consistency for the customer: When companies get big, they often have multiple teams with multiple processes. This can become painfully frustrating for customers who end up talking to different people in different departments. There could be conflicting information and explanations. That leads to confusion, and often a loss of confidence. Ultimately, that can lead to lost business.

The company may define its brand promise, but it is the customer who decides whether or not the company delivered on its promise. There’s a lot riding on delivering a positive customer experience. You hire and train good people, but you must also give them the tools they need to deliver a CX that not only meets the customers’ expectations but makes them want to come back. Be there for them – no matter how they reach out to you – be consistent, and build your brand through satisfied customers.

Consumers interact with brands across a multitude of touch points through the buyer’s journey. Every interaction makes an impact on your prospects that will set the stage for the relationship, making it crucial to ensure that every touch point comes with a positive experience, but above all, companies must monitor the big picture: the total experience customers have from end-to-end in doing business with your company.

In order to gain more meaningful insights into the results, we had respondents categorize themselves into one of four levels: ignore, novice, competent, and mature.

• 
  Ignore – These are companies that don’t view customer experience as a crucial differentiator. There are no efforts towards developing a CX strategy or measuring CX initiatives.
• Novice – These are companies that recognize the need to improve a customer’s experience. They’ve put basic steps in place to identify and measure CX-related issues, but don’t have a clear CX strategy in place.
• Competent – These companies make an effort to deliver a high-quality experience for their customers. They have a clear CX strategy with processes firmly in place to measure results.
• Mature – These are the cream of the customer experience crop. Their CX strategy is embedded in everything they do. Customer feedback forms the core of their strategy and decision-making, and they continuously iterate their CX practices to meet customer demand.

Only 12% of companies identify as being Mature CX companies, while 38% identify themselves as Young, 40% as First Steps, and 10% as ignore.

Click here to know more details about CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE.

CXREFRESH CX STRATEGIES CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE GLOBAL CX CUSTOMER SUCCESS

Delight Customers

If you are trying to build a business that grows in the future, remember the only way is to delight your customers. More importantly it is to create delight with meaningfulness. If you don’t genuinely love your customers and want to solve an important problem, you will only burn money and feel that you have bought customers loyalty.

But money will not buy you loyalty, ever. This is why customer experience is more important than ever.

This is why we started CXREFRESH. It is the community of global CX leaders that are changing the way businesses are readying for growth in future.

To Know More Please Click Here.

On the first day of 2019, it is incredibly important for us to share the greatest shifts in that changed the world of business in many ways. We are a CX design company. We see the world of business with the lens of customer experience simply because, the customer can make or break anything.

Setting context : SnapDeal

SnapDeal shot to fame as one of the fastest growing, powerfully funded e-commerce company in India. They evolved fast. In 2016-2017 though things started falling apart. The business, the regulations, the funding, mass firing, negative PR and almost everything that is enough to shake the morale of absolutely anybody.

SnapDeal scripted the biggest CX-in business turn around in 2018

When most people had written off SnapDeal, when everybody started talking about the other darlings of the E-commerce world, Kunal quietly put the deck of cards together. He went back to the drawing board and SnapDeal has emerged a winner. The traction is increasing, customers are buying more. The business is seeing positive growth.

They focused on CX. Everything else was noise.

The CX/REFRESH team assessed the overall voice on social media and otherwise around SnapDeal. We saw a comeback simply because the customer got what he paid for. More promises were kept. The failure rate was reduced.

Setting context: twitter you did it!

The pundits in Silicon Valley and otherwise globally were quick to remark that twitter possibly is losing its grip. Jack had it going good for a while but the product had lost its relevance.

From Jack’s letters to employees to the sheer focus on product, partnerships with policy makers globally and better advertising value proposition, twitter made a comeback.

After the purge, twitter still has a massive loyal active base

twitter did a great job by purging fake accounts. This is what any responsible social media platform must do. The overall uptake of twitter has only increased since then.

Now of-course there is a long way to go for twitter to still find itself in the hands of the next billion connected users. We are hopeful that their purposeful approach on building meaningful CX will only grow twitter to be more relevant for the world once again.

CX is the future of business success

Sheer focus on CX is critical for business success. In the past 2 years we have undertaken 300+ hours of CX/REFRESH Workshops and 10+ CX/REFRESH Audits. From product to sales and marketing, CX is relevant at every stage of your business growth.