BPO call centers: What you need to know (& a superior alternative)

The talent pool for call center agents is shrinking, making it harder for contact center leaders to maintain a stable, well-trained workforce.

Attrition rates in support teams are a constant challenge, with some contact centers experiencing up to 100% turnover annually. While this doesn’t always mean replacing your entire staff, it can mean cycling through the bottom 25% of employees up to four times a year.

As agents come and go, rushed training and understaffing lead to lower-quality customer interactions. This can result in longer wait times, frustrating customer experience, missed efficiency metrics, higher call abandonment rates, and declining customer satisfaction scores (CSAT).

Many contact center leaders are now exploring more reliable alternatives to deliver consistent, high-quality customer service year-round. One of those options is business process outsourcing (BPO).

What is a BPO contact center?

A BPO contact center is a third-party service provider that handles customer service tasks on behalf of your company. Businesses can outsource their customer interactions such as phone calls, emails, technical support, market research, and live chats, to these centers to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

Benefits of using a BPO call center

A BPO provider can offer a range of services, handling everything from hiring and training agents to managing daily operations. This allows your company to focus on its core activities while still delivering customer support. Here are some of the key benefits of using a BPO call center.

24/7 support offering

With the ability to outsource your contact center operations to different corners of the world and different time zones, you can cater to customer needs at any time, day or night. So, when a caller has an issue outside of normal business hours, they can still resolve their query efficiently.

Scalable support for volatile call volume

To manage call peaks in your contact center, you can usually either hire temporary staff or outsource to BPOs. Temporary hires are generally more of a culture fit and provide a higher quality of service. However, the difficulty of finding enough staff can put immense pressure on your hiring and training teams, especially in rushed circumstances.

BPO call centers can easily scale their workforce to handle fluctuations in call volume, whether due to seasonal demand, marketing campaigns, or unexpected surges. This flexibility means you won’t need to hire and train temporary staff for short-term spikes.

Cost efficiency and lower labor costs

When you outsource to a BPO, labor costs are often lower, saving you money on salaries and benefits. Additionally, the overhead costs of maintaining an in-house contact center—such as office space, equipment, and utilities, are significantly reduced or eliminated altogether. This allows you to reallocate resources to other core business operations while still providing reliable customer support.

The problem with relying on a BPO contact center

Having outsourced vendors handle calls can be a more cost-effective way to provide phone support than in-house staffing. However, using a BPO service to help with staffing and answering calls often only passes on the problem to another company with the same problems.

Unpredictable costs

BPO services charge based on factors like agent wages, attrition costs, and agent utilization to make sure they meet their margins. These costs can be hard to predict, especially during peak seasons, holidays, or emergencies when call volume fluctuates.

As BPOs often face similar staffing challenges as in-house teams, costs can quickly add up, making this approach more expensive than initially anticipated. You may end up paying a premium to pass your internal challenges onto another company and paying their margins.

Limited control over brand experience

As the frontline of customer interaction, your contact center plays a pivotal role in shaping brand perception and loyalty. However, companies often overlook the link between their brand image and customer service experience. A BPO service often has lower wages to meet its margins, which makes it difficult to get high-quality agents. This can affect customer satisfaction and loyalty if it delivers poor or inconsistent service from agents who are not trained or motivated enough.

Communication barriers

While BPOs can help you deliver 24/7 customer service, outsourcing support to different regions has a downside. If you have a primarily English-speaking customer base, language barriers can make for inefficient communication. Even slight differences in tone or understanding can negatively impact the quality of service and customer loyalty.

Lack of control over the quality of customer interactions

Outsourced providers are often the cheaper and easier approach. However, they experience all the same human labor challenges and often produce low-quality agents and customer service levels. When you outsource, you often rely on BPO call center agents who may not have the same investment in your brand or thorough onboarding processes, leading to less personalized, inconsistent service.

Data quality concerns

As a contact center leader, you know that customer feedback doesn’t just shape your support strategy; it can and should influence strategy for every department in your organization.

When you outsource your call center operations, your customer calls often happen in a silo, and data entry may be inaccurate, limiting your ability to gather and share all-important customer insights. Without real-time customer insights, understanding customer needs and what your business needs to improve customer experience becomes harder, and knowledge sharing across your organization is restricted.

A better alternative: Deploy PolyAI’s AI-driven voice assistants

Offshoring can be cheap, but rapidly evolving economies leave many companies chasing affordable talent across the globe. With PolyAI, there is a better alternative.

How AI voice assistants enhance customer interactions

PolyAI offers the world’s most lifelike voice AI for enterprise customer service. With voice AI that feels like talking to a real person, you can expect a 50% reduction in call volume, dramatically decreasing call abandonment rates, improving customer engagement, and empowering every customer to get the support they need when they need it.

Listen to how our voice assistant handles John’s billing query

Time to value

Time to implement is critical. A simple telephony integration is all that’s required to route calls between a PolyAI voice assistant and your team. This is virtually the same for every voice assistant, which means you can start taking customer calls in just 8 weeks.

Operational efficiency and cost savings with voice AI

Your agents likely spend too much time handling repetitive, low-value tasks when they could be focusing on more meaningful, complex customer interactions that drive revenue and turn potential customers into paying customers. PolyAI voice assistants can take over routine tasks like answering FAQs, tracking orders, and managing customer authentication. This reduces customer wait times and helps you retain business, preventing customers from turning to competitors.

In addition to lost revenue opportunities, phone calls are the most expensive customer service channel. A typical 3-4 minute call costs between $2.70 and $5.60, making it essential to maximize the value of each interaction. Automating routine calls can reduce key KPIs like your average handle time (AHT) by 20-30% and give you more capacity to serve your customers without sacrificing the quality of customer service.

Find out how to calculate the ROI of a customer-led voice assistant in our guide.

Scalability for growing businesses

Mismanaged or unplanned peaks in call volume can negatively impact the quality of customer service you provide. Inexperienced agents often take longer to complete tasks; telephony teams need to update recorded messages to explain disruptions, and contact center managers have to try to call in staff to meet demand. This all adds up to create inefficient customer service.

PolyAI voice assistants mitigate unexpected call peaks with voice assistants available 24/7, enabling you to quickly handle more calls without preparation. The structured conversational data gathered from each interaction also enables you to identify bottlenecks in your processes to help prepare for future busy periods so you can maintain high service levels as your business grows.

Speak to us today and discover how PolyAI can help enterprises be the best versions of themselves in every customer call by consistently delivering the best brand experience, achieving accurate resolution, and uncovering data-driven business opportunities.