The role of a business process outsourcing (BPO) company is to help organizations reduce time spent on IT-intensive procedures. So, if there’s any industry that understands the importance of customer experience, it’s BPO.
You already offer a service that eases customers’ worries, which is an excellent start. However, your efforts shouldn’t end there—it’s critical to track the overall experience that companies have with your service to identify areas for improvement.
This requires ongoing data collection, analysis, and implementation. Thankfully, artificial intelligence (AI) exists to make this process easier.
If you’re looking to enhance CX in your business, then the following customer experience trends in the BPO industry may point you in the right direction.
How AI enhances the customer experience
Delivering a great customer experience today means understanding your customers as well as how to exceed their expectations. To achieve this, though, you must monitor and analyze customer behaviors and patterns.
That being said, there are limited hours in a day, making artificial intelligence a critical component in capturing and analyzing this information. With the right AI tools, you can:
- Provide customers with accurate and personalized recommendations in real-time
- Support real-time decision-making for your sales and customer service teams
- Enhance communications by making omnichannel data analysis seamless (e.g., email, chat, and phone)
- Improve communications between customers and representatives using context and sentiment detection
With capabilities such as these, BPOs can ensure a better end-to-end customer experience.
Business process outsourcing customer experience trends in 2022
Evolving technologies and customer behaviors are transforming the way BPOs build customer experiences (CX). With the industry on track to become a $525.2 billion market by 2030, it’s more critical than ever to polish one’s CX strategies. Otherwise, keeping up with demand and competition will prove to be challenging.
Let’s review some of the emerging trends in BPO CX.
1. Customer-centricity is paramount.
The concept of outsourcing business processes is appealing. This means that attracting customers isn’t the challenge—keeping them is. Maintaining a low churn rate is possible if you focus on better CX throughout the customer journey.
BPOs can achieve this by using AI to uncover customers’ needs and share that information with sales and support teams. By making each touchpoint meaningful, you can create a personalized experience that each customer will cherish.
For example, when a customer calls your contact center, the agent should be able to understand what the customer wants based on previous interactions with him or her. This allows agents to provide relevant answers and suggestions right off the bat.
Besides improving customer satisfaction, AI also helps increase conversion rates for salespeople.
Consider using a CRM that imports customer and prospect information for your teams to access or, better yet, employ conversational AI tools that deliver real-time insights, such as past customer conversations related to the topic you’re discussing at that moment.
Agents can use this information to make better decisions and interact with customers through the lens of personalization.
2. Omnichannel has become automated, but is still human.
If you’re engaging with your customers through multiple channels, but the experience isn’t consistent or seamless, then building an omnichannel strategy will help. It’ll turn your multi-channel approach into an omnichannel experience that delights customers from first contact to final sale (and beyond).
It works because it prevents customers from having to re-explain issues they already laid out in an email to customer support. Omnichannel also benefits your customer support teams by giving them data to better understand customer needs and concerns.
If it’s done right, you’ll have a system that follows customers throughout their journey across various channels (e.g., email, online chat, phone, social media). AI can pull insights from these conversations about customer behaviors, patterns, topics, and intents.
With this information, sales and support teams can quickly identify issues and resolve them on the spot. It also highlights red flags that could lead to a customer leaving. AI automates gathering and analyzing data to quicken decision-making on the human side.
It’s a better experience for customers, especially as chatbots have a long way to go to provide the level of satisfaction that a human agent can.
3. The need for real-time communication is growing.
Online chatting. Phone calls. Quick email responses. Whatever channel customers use to access support, they’re expecting near-instant responses. Some BPOs are resorting to chatbots to provide around-the-clock communications.
Using chatbots is a great way to capture information and intent from customers and prospects after hours. However, they should only ever be an extension of your other customer support services, because AI chat tools are limited in scope and quality and this can leave customers frustrated.
So consider AI chat as a filter and “answering machine” to drive leads to your sales and support teams. Use algorithms and machine learning to direct people to resources that can help them now. Then refer others to human agents when human intervention is necessary.
If your BPO offers pay-for-performance outbound calling services, you can automate this process without wasting money. For example, Symbl.ai will disconnect your system within three seconds of detecting an answering machine.
If a message is to be left, then Symbl.ai can ensure that the message begins quickly, so you’re not paying for partial messages. Symbol.ai can also detect when a person picks up, so that you can jump on the call and deliver a seamless customer experience.
4. AI integrations with customer conversations.
What’s great about today’s conversation AI tools is the real-time insights provided for phone and chat communications. For example, agents can determine the sentiment of customers in both current and past conversations.
Perhaps the customer speaking to the support team had an issue in the past that wasn’t resolved and is now having another issue. Your support agent can provide assistance for the current problem and also bring up the prior issue to resolve it while on the call.
Integrating conversation AI into calls personalizes the customer experience and improves satisfaction and churn rates. The fact that your teams can track data and use it in real time will set your BPO apart from the competition.
5. Emotionally intelligent CX is enhanced by context-aware AI.
One pitfall of AI solutions is that they’re not capable of understanding the context of conversations. This causes them to miss important details or misunderstand what customers are trying to say.
That’s why some companies are turning to emotion-detecting AI to improve customer service. These systems analyze conversations and pick up on emotional cues such as anger, frustration, sadness, and happiness. They even identify patterns to detect trends that agents can use to better understand the intent and issues of a customer.
This type of technology is proven to be very effective at enhancing the customer experience. For example, Symbl.ai is a conversation intelligence platform that transcribes and analyzes conversations in real time. It also has monitoring dashboards to track agent performances in customer calls. One can identify whether or not the salesperson shows empathy toward customers and whether his or her calls end with customers feeling happy or disgruntled.
It’s critical for sales and support teams to create emotionally intelligent customer experiences so that clients feel valued and subsequently stick around for the long term. Additionally, product teams can use it to gather feedback and ideas for future product or service updates that appeal to current and future customers.
Upgrade your CX strategy with the help of conversation AI
If you want to take advantage of these five trends, then it’s time to leverage conversation AI for your customer experience strategy. Doing so will empower your customer-facing teams with analytics that can help them make decisions with the aim of positively affecting the customer experience.
Symbl.ai makes this possible for BPO’s real-time or asynchronous conversations. It does this by empowering you to:
- Identify sentiment and how it relates to the topics discussed
- Monitor and flag calls with questions/concerns left unanswered, or where the sentiment was negative
- Find competitive mentions on sales calls and the types of questions asked regarding them
- Analyze sales calls to find questions about services to make improvements
- Find opportunities to upsell, convert, or prevent churn
With a conversation intelligence tool, BPOs can stand apart from competitors and ensure the best possible customer experience. Conversation AI works as a second pair of eyes that oftentimes catches issues your agents otherwise wouldn’t have while taking customer calls.
If you’d like to learn more about how Symbl.ai can improve your BPO’s customer experience, speak to one of our experts today.
