The trend towards outsourcing has always been viewed with mixed emotions. When people start telling customer service horror stories typically the words “barely spoke English” are somewhere in the mix. On the other hand, one cannot discredit the entire outsourcing process because of the vocal minority that has received subpar service.

Recent economic hardships have prompted businesses to reevaluate their approach to customer service, and for many that means bringing service and call center jobs back to the United States. For outsourcers in India and the Asian Pacific, this means that being cheap alone doesn’t cut it anymore, service levels need to raise to retain the clients.

Labor availability is the major reason why this has not been an issue in the past. Applicants are generally so plentiful in these outsourcer locations that should one agent not make the quota there were two others ready to take his place. The BPO just replaces the ineffective, inefficient agent with someone else.  However as businesses realize that cost effectiveness is coming at a sacrifice to for service, this operation style is being phased out. To remain competitive outsourcers need to invest in training programs and technology that will give their agents an edge as they deal with customer inquiries.

Dan Boehm of Spectrum Corp said in a recent interview, ““Western influence (economic and customer service strategy) is driving requests for our solution.  What I mean by this is the US or European customer are talking to the Philippines BPO more frequently and helping them to understand that it is easier and cheaper to train the existing employee than it is to replace them.  To help the agents do a better job our wallboard and monitoring solutions are suggested to the BPO.”

Call monitoring, desktop analytics and call center wallboards all play an important role in fostering more informed, better prepared call center agents. Knowing for example, how many customers are on hold and what your target talk times should be, gives agents guidance, allowing them to self correct as needed . Reports produced from analytics software can be transmitted through either call center wallboards or desktop analytics, giving everyone a real-time view of what’s going on.

If BPO’s want to compete with call center alternatives like home based-agents and near sourcing, they’ll need to rely on technology and techniques that improve the performance of agents, rather than how cheaply they can serve their clients.

Chris DiMarco is a Managing Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page. Follow him on Twitter (News - Alert) @cpdimarco.

Edited by Juliana Kenny