Digital disruptors: What to look out for in your Contact Center Outsourcing (CCO) providers?
By Skand Bhargava, Practice Director at Everest Group
Read time: 4 minutes
Digital disruptors are dramatically different than their traditional counterparts in multiple ways. Most are witnessing exponential growth, which means they need to determine how to best manage current needs and predict how to best support future ones. They have large risk-taking appetites and like to test ideas as well as learn quickly from their failures. They have built their operational framework keeping technology at the center. In addition, they take a customer-centric view to their business processes, often refining them to enable their customers to perform tasks more quickly and easily. And their growth strategy is rooted in delivery of an enhanced customer experience (CX) that strives to ensure that every interaction is tailored to each individual customer’s needs and expectations.
To support their explosive growth and expansions, an increasing number of digital disruptors are realizing that outsourcing their customer contact centers make good business sense for multiple reasons. Yet, not surprisingly, they look at their partnership with their contact center outsourcing provider through a different lens than traditional firms. The following four points highlights the nature of asks of these digital disruptors from their contact center outsourcing providers.
What should digital disruptors seek from their contact center outsourcing providers?
1. Understanding of customer service requirements – During their initial high-growth phase, most digital disruptors focus on driving higher customer acquisition targets and fail to prioritize their customer service needs. They look for guidance from their third-party provider to not just drive operationally robust and efficient contact center operations but also in identifying processes that might need technology interventions and sourcing the right technologies
2. High-degree of flexibility and scalability – Given the nature of their businesses and high growth aspirations, they need a partner with robust workforce planning solutions and sites in multiple locations, particularly to manage huge seasonal impacts and increased queries during peak times
3. Invest in strategic partnerships – Digital disruptors like to build strong, intimate partnerships with their third-party service providers. As their contact center outsourcing partners will play a key role in driving sustained growth through improved stickiness, digital disruptors require a skin-in-the-game attitude.
4. Future-ready talent – As their own operating environment is technology-driven, digital disruptors fully expect their outsourced contact center agents have strong domain/process expertise and the ability to interface smoothly with new-age technologies, such as robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI). They are ready to collaborate with the contact center outsourcing partners to get the right talent for their customer experience needs.
Clearly, digital disruptors are more demanding of contact center outsourcing providers and want to leverage them to create additional value and improve their competitive positioning. They expect providers to build capabilities that allows contact center operations to be fast, agile, and continuously innovate while scaling up to help them disrupt the status quo in the industry. They expect them to bring out changes in their outlook and enhance their capabilities to position themselves as strategic partners. As they look to engage outsourcing providers, digital disruptors must clearly focus on the above four factors to determine the best-fit amongst prospective providers to support their customer experience goals.
