Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is when a business outsources one or more of its competencies to an outside provider. A BPO provider can take on the business’s front-end operations like customer care, support, sales, marketing and offer back-end support of core competencies such as total quality assurance, human resources, payment processing, and information technology services. Outsourcing to a BPO provider can be cost-effective and beneficial to smaller bootstrapped companies with limited resources. Larger companies too may find that outsourcing can help them focus on their core competencies better. These are the typical services offered by traditional BPOs.

The dawn of a new age in data analytics has witnessed the rise of smart BPOs for businesses, combining traditional BPOs with the latest technology in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Smart BPOs provide innovative services that decrease costs and increase business productivity. The advent of artificial intelligence in the BPO industry can potentially grow the sector even further.

The role of AI in the BPO industry

The development of machine learning and artificial intelligence integrated into BPO services has revolutionized customer engagement. AI uses machine learning neural networks that are programmed to think, learn, adapt, and compute beyond the capabilities of human beings to help build accurate predictions on business processes and decisions.

AI-based speech recognition, virtual assistants, and interactive voice responses have substantially decreased the customer waiting time before reaching a customer care executive. In addition, furthering the role of AI-powered omnichannel routing allows for seamless switching between multiple channels, like chat and voice calls, with the agents always having your query or complaint details ready to be addressed.

Smart BPOs have fully embraced artificial intelligence to help businesses optimize and automate their services, make business processes cheaper, environmentally friendly, and more efficient.

Advantages of Smart BPOs

Traditional BPOs are more dependent on their employees, relying on expensive staffing, training, outdated technologies, and outdated business practices. Although past businesses have thrived with the conventional BPO model, current times have witnessed a substantial increase in competition and need more innovative business solutions. Smart BPOs are more technology-centric companies that have built their business capabilities around integrating software stacks, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to offer multilayered AI software stacks. These stacks solve and serve multiple business problems. These AI stacks have advanced interpolarity and are programmed to collaborate and work within stacks. Some of the most significant advantages for your business if you choose to switch to a smart BPO are:

1.     Cost Reduction:

Smart BPOs drastically reduce employee hiring, training, and office space costs. Businesses can further improve cost-effectiveness by picking services offered as per requirement basis. For example, a company with an outsourced HR department can opt out of the service without letting go of its employees. Furthermore, when a company decides to outsource its core and non-core competencies to a smart BPO, it also avoids potential technological hardware and employee costs.

2.     Service Automation:

An excellent smart BPO should ideally have a team of specialists working round the clock to help you serve your individual business needs. For example, a BPO specializing in AI and machine learning can set up an AI bot that constantly improves its natural language understanding and processing capabilities to address customer needs. This application of AI allows for customer complaints and queries to be solved quickly by streamlining the entire customer communication process.

3.     Risk Management:

Businesses that outsource to smart BPOs can manage risk more efficiently than companies using traditional BPOs or in-house operations. Employing analytics and artificial intelligence, smart BPOs may help you identify potential risk factors well in advance. Hence, businesses can alter their resources and efficiently manage core functions. These smart BPOs can also mitigate internal resources to cover critical business functions effectively.

4.     Multi-lingual Support:

There are three types of outsourcing offered to businesses in the BPO industry: onshore, nearshore, and offshore. Irrespective of whichever kind of outsourcing you select for your business needs, multi-language support is essential. For example, a company catering to a global consumer base will need international language capabilities for its support and marketing that targets any native natural language of the consumer. Multiple language support is achievable through programmable AI-powered chatbots using machine learning and data to learn and communicate better with customers. For instance, a customer fluent in a regional language will connect to a customer service representative fluent in said language. Companies achieve cost efficiency by eliminating the need to hire specialists proficient in multiple languages.

5.     Customer Acquisition and Retention:

Utilizing consumer data and business analytics, smart BPOs can create predictive models to predict the retention and attrition rates of their consumers. They may further determine consumer preferences and dislikes and find better ways to address the customer’s queries. With the advancement of AI and data analytics, smart BPOs will help businesses increase customer acquisition and decrease attrition. AI Chat features available to customers have been an excellent way smart BPOs have reduced customer attrition rates. They help provide timely and straightforward solutions to customer issues via chat instead of spending countless hours on voice calls with a poorly managed traditional BPO.

6.     Improved Documentation:

Traditional BPOs are typically restricted to simple document scanning, saving, and printing services. On the other hand, smart BPOs offer innovative services such as software stack technology, word recognition, high speed, and volume scanners, and various workflow management. Performing bank statement ingestion, insurance claims, loan applications, document digitization, and invoice processing has never been easier with smart BPOs. Hence, allowing for a faster experience in documentation and document handling. Cloud servers allow businesses to access their data quickly in real-time as well.

7.     Improving non-core and core competencies

Companies strapped on their resources or just focused on the proper appropriation of resources can outsource non-core competencies to a smart BPO. Hence, business owners grow their businesses and gain a competitive advantage due to the freed time, space, and resources. An excellent smart BPO will also provide you with the added benefit of a better customer experience and the capability to take on core services.

In conclusion, if you are a business owner, you may want to consider the benefits of switching your services from a traditional BPO to a smart BPO. Smart BPOs offer a wide range of evolving features that only improve with time. Businesses need to stay current with technology to sustain profitability.

Smart BPO services by InflectionCX

Inflection offers AI-powered smart BPO services for businesses to transform their engagement with stakeholders, internal and external. Our team of highly trained professionals utilizes Inflection’s AI software stack to deliver cost-effective, superior experiences to businesses and their clients. Our agents are trained in voice and multi-channel support to transform the customer experience. Contact us to explore how Inflection can help you deliver superior experiences whilst being cost-effective.