CX outsourcing to meet seasonal demand
Scaling Talent and Culture for your business peaks
Opinion by Clinton Cohen, CEO of iContactBPO
Managing the ebb and flow of demand and supply through seasonal demands is a massively challenging task, especially when it comes to safeguarding your customer experience. Seasonal businesses know all too well the challenges of rapid deployment of skilled human resources, processes, technology, platforms and management to underpin the booming sales season, and then the contraction again to more subdued, normalized cycles.
As a niche BPO provider specialising in CX outsourcing – what we refer to as BPX – iContact BPO has seen the gambit of customer expectations playing out. Most customers expect instant gratification, regardless of communication platform used, and they expect those responses whether it is a weekday or weekend. It means that for many businesses serving customers across geographies, their operations have to be accessible and operational, on-demand, 24 hours a day, 7 days per week.
Very few businesses are geared for this kind of operation, nor do they have the appetite to invest the kind of capital and expertise needed to set up and manage 24/7 service operations that are simply not their core business, and especially where seasonal/cyclical demand plays a role.
What we are seeing is that the companies that can offer this immediacy, real-time accessibility and personalisation of the customer experience through an outsourced CX partner derive a distinct competitive advantage. However, finding, vetting and managing the relationships with a CX outsourcing partner typically demands sophisticated internal management time to assess their skills and competencies, industry specializations, language proficiencies, cultural fit, size, technology and CX capabilities.
It’s an imminently more complex task when the demand is for a few hundred outsourced CX agents on a temporary basis to handle peak season demands, at pace, at volume and at high quality and compliance levels. Pulling all that talent together, in one concerted, focused and highly managed effort is a job best handled by CX outsourcing specialists with solid BPO operations, tech infrastructure, management skills and quality and compliance controls.
The solution lies in what iContact BPO refers to as BPX and which is premised in three fundamentals – your Brand, our People and the Customer Xperience.
It’s about providing access to better and newer technology, process enhancements, quality management, workforce flexibility, access to specialized people skills, cost savings, operational efficiencies, multichannel customer service channels and sophisticated agent recruitment processes – all needed to deliver on superior outsourced customer experience for you seasonal peak demands, as and when needed.
As just one example, iContact BPO recently geared up for a US-based automotive client, hiring 100 skilled agents in less than 100 hours using sophisticated video recruitment and vetting tools, including management appointments, to handle an incredibly pressured and time-sensitive campaign. One of the key benefits of working with a partner like iContact BPO to augment your team for high season demand is that we’re able to rapidly recruit and scale skilled agents who are already in our pipeline of trained agents.
Add to this all the technology, compliance, quality assurance, management skills and back-office support already in place, and you have a ready-to-deploy outsourcing solution to meet even your most challenging seasonal CX demands.
For more information go to www.icontactbpo.com