Imagine this scenario: Your technology is exceptional. Your customer satisfaction scores are high. Up to now, you’ve kept the business functions that support your customer experience in-house to ensure you meet the standards for quality, service and support that your customers have come to expect. But your portfolio has grown, and so has your customer base. And your geographic reach is broader, too.
At this point, the strategic conversation around the customer experience (CX) moves from “How can we serve them well?” to “How well can we serve them?” It’s a subtle shift, but one with significant consequences.
As companies grow — especially those with product development and manufacturing as their foundation — finding a trusted business process outsourcing (BPO) partner who can take over non-core functions is as important to long-term financial health as is iterating the next breakthrough offering. Non-core business functions can be expensive to staff internally, and since they’re not necessarily part of your company’s DNA, they’re challenging to maintain in a way that keeps you on top of modern tools, processes and technologies, which is why many companies rely on BPO partners.
What Is the Role of BPO?
The benefits of business process outsourcing (BPO) are many and varied. BPO partners can help companies lower costs, improve efficiency and gain access to specialized expertise and innovative technologies in business-critical areas. They can make organizations more flexible, agile and scalable in a competitive world of increasing complexity and immediacy. They can help accelerate digital transformation, empower companies to embrace new business models and enable them to reinvest in the heart of their business.
Business process outsourcing has taken off for exactly these reasons. Already a $300 billion category, relying on BPO partners for back- and front-office business functions as well as specialized areas such as supply chain, customer experience and product lifecycle management will continue to accelerate. Like you, these BPO organizations are experts in their field. Like you, they strive to deliver exceptional service to their clients and — if the model warrants — their clients’ customers. But unlike you, they live and breathe those areas of expertise that aren’t core to your business, which makes them exceptionally valuable to have on your side.
A (Very) Brief History of BPOs
Business process outsourcing got its start in the 19th century as manufacturers sought to subcontract production tasks. BPO soon blossomed to encompass data processing, distribution and business services. Technology and globalization paved the way for offshoring to geographies with skilled labor and favorable business environments. Today, 250+ BPO companies take in $50 million in revenue annually.
Outsourcing Customer Management: Using BPO to Make CX a Competitive Differentiator
All of this exceptionalism is, of course, driven by data — the minutiae of every transaction and interaction that matters to your company, tucked away in servers, cloud deployments, personal devices, IoT devices and other nooks and crannies across touchpoints far and wide. The importance of wrangling that data and analyzing it for actionable insights cannot be understated. Machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and, more recently, generative AI have created a world of real-time data that can be harnessed to make better-informed business decisions and give customers the relevant, instantaneous experience they’ve come to expect.
While it may seem counterintuitive to outsource customer management, it’s not — when it’s done right, that is. Using data judiciously to achieve one’s business goals has always been a boardroom priority, but the ability to do so in real time, with data from across the entire ecosystem, is something different altogether. It’s made customer experience a synonym for business durability.
But not all companies have the tools in place to capture data effectively, streamline data management across sources and siloes and then interpret that data in a way that confers competitive advantage. That can lead to big blind spots, misguided strategies and poor experiences (both internally and externally). It can turn loyal customers into a competitor’s customers in an instant. Outsourcing CX to a customer management specialist can help you turn your data into a goldmine of information and insights that put you at the head of the pack — and keep you there.
Why It’s Important to Continuously Collect and Act on Customer Feedback
Let’s take a look at BPO through the lens of customer management services, a field that embraces all things CX with disciplined, data-driven strategies that ensure customer success. If you pay attention with intent and an open mind to the direct and indirect information customers provide — including data as well as straight-from-the-source customer feedback — you’ll likely discover exactly what it is that your customers appreciate, what they’d like you to change and what will cause them to walk away. You’ll uncover avenues for innovation and how to avoid the road to ruin.
Gathering essential information on a customer’s post-purchase experience can be enlightening and (literally) enriching. Doing it in a habitual, repeatable and scalable way that produces tangible business value is where customer management BPOs excel. A data-driven customer success strategy empowers you to navigate roadblocks and make well-informed decisions about product and service adjustments.
Customer management experts can help you:
- Analyze the product adoption experience to gather essential information about customer sentiment and feed the relationship a steady diet of helpful resources so customers get the full return on investment out of their technology
- Assess customers’ experience with and usage of your product(s) to make sure they’re utilizing features to their full extent — a care-and-feeding exercise that lends itself to customer retention
- Proactively capture revenue by managing renewals, monitoring warranties and pinpointing upselling and cross-selling opportunities
Customer Management BPO Case Study: Extreme Networks
Buying software and technology is one thing. Getting the most out of it once it’s installed is quite another. Technology that languishes can be just as detrimental to CX and long-term customer retention as technology that doesn’t perform as advertised. That’s where a customer management BPO partner can help you shine.
Despite limited bandwidth and budget for customer success initiatives internally, Extreme Networks was eager to collect vital data about its CX, so the team engaged Shyft Global Services to delve into how customers were using their products. Over a series of initiatives across various products in Extreme Networks’ portfolio, Shyft assessed customers’ onboarding experiences, software usage and cloud subscription renewals. Shyft then analyzed the data and delivered actionable insights to Extreme Networks’ product marketing and product lifecycle teams, empowering them to make smarter decisions about product features, innovations and customer support.
How Can BPO Help Your Organization?
Shyft Global Services provides end-to-end technology services for both the product and customer lifecycles. Product lifecycle management solutions cover supply chain management, integration, global field services and depot repair for a wide range of technologies and industries. Customer management solutions are designed to fully support the customer lifecycle from pipeline generation and prospecting to concierge support and ongoing account management.
Outsourcing customer management can streamline your CX operations, strengthen your brand and help you deliver an optimal customer experience through the support of experts in:
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Sales and operations, so no revenue opportunity goes untapped
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Customer success, driving advocacy and engagement throughout the entire lifecycle
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Financing to make sure billing, invoicing and other financial services run like clockwork
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Engineering to augment and scale your technical expertise
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Business intelligence for essential business analytics, market and diagnostic analyses, actionable insights and a better understanding of regional behavior
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IT training to ensure customers get the most out of their investment in your products
Ready for Flexible, Scalable CX BPO?
At Shyft, we dive deep into the data to provide expert guidance and support, and to anticipate the needs of your customers before they arise — so you both can thrive.
Learn how partnering with Shyft for comprehensive, scalable customer management services strengthened Extreme Networks’ CX and opened the door to profitable renewals and upselling opportunities — and how you can do the same for your company.
About the Author
David Mustafa serves as a Sales Director within the Customer Management Services organization of Shyft Global Services, a division of TD SYNNEX. David has been with the company since 2010 and holds more than 20 years of experience managing high-performance teams in various industries. Driven by an entrepreneurial mindset, he is passionate about diverse business opportunities, transformative strategies and developing leaders for the businesses of the future.
