Humans still want to interact with other humans when they need help, despite the acceleration of digital channel adoption over the past few years. Major businesses have struggled to keep pace with the volume of interactions and increasing expectations of their customers. All this means there’s a greater need than ever for outsourced customer service and business process outsourcing (BPO).

The global BPO market is expected to grow 4% (compound annual growth rate (CAGR)) by 2024 to reach $76.9 billion¹. Meanwhile, the contact centre portion of the BPO industry is estimated to grow $14 billion by 2025 at a CAGR of 3%².

While demand is growing for BPO providers, so is the competition. Digital-first service providers — companies with digital and analytics-based offerings as a core value proposition — are now challenging incumbent players. According to McKinsey & Company, over the past five years, digital-first providers have grown by an estimated 22%, almost three times faster than comparable mid-tier incumbents³. Forward-thinking BPOs are using technology such as conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation to enable their clients to achieve strategic business outcomes — such as improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, driving revenue, and supporting expansion into new markets — more effectively and efficiently.

If traditional BPOs don’t want to cede more market share to digital-first competitors, they must find ways to accelerate their transformation. Focusing on strategic shift will enable BPOs to deliver profitable yet cost-effective services and overcome challenges such as:

Augmenting human agents and optimising conversations

For complex issues, humans still prefer to talk to humans. In a 2020 survey, nearly 80% of people polled wanted to speak with an agent. Yet, over 33% of callers waited for over 30 minutes and 72% ended the call while still waiting to speak with an agent.

The crux of the problem that BPOs can help their clients solve today is to deliver personalised, empathetic service for customers who want and need to interact with humans to resolve their issues — and do so cost-effectively.

From the BPO perspective, conversational AI and automation can reduce the average handle time (AHT) and improve first-call resolution (FCR) by helping agents resolve issues faster and improve quality and performance management. These services can also help reduce costs by automatically monitoring and analysing 100 percent of customer interactions.

Automation and conversational AI will enable multimodal customer service, creating an omnichannel experience and therefore standardising the organisation’s CX across the enterprise.

Other benefits include the automation of feedback to help agents improve their performance while reducing after-call work (ACW) and other manual efforts to free agents for the next call.

Smart solutions such as these also allow an organisation to use predictive analytics to improve sales effectiveness and gain insight into trends and points of friction.

In comparison, domain-specific (in this case, contact centre-specific) conversational AI has experienced tremendous leaps in sophistication to deliver transformative business value.

Choosing a conversational AI and automation platform gives BPOs access to a rich combination of AI-powered technologies. Natural language processing and understanding (NLP/NLU) has components of conversational AI that help computers understand and interpret human language. Attended and unattended robotic process automation (RPA) can emulate the actions of a human interacting with digital systems to automate repetitive tasks and end-to-end business processes.

Other advanced features include intelligent decision support, which uses machine learning and reasoning to discover insights, find patterns, and uncover relationships in data, automating the steps humans would take if they could exhaustively analyse large datasets.

AI-powered software called intelligent applications can also be included in a BPO solution. This contains rules engines, user interfaces, notifications, alerts, and other components that handle specific use cases within the contact centre.

Voiceprint biometrics can recognise voice patterns for frictionless verification of individuals such as agents, eliminating the hassle of manual authentication and protecting the business against fraud.

Next Steps

While the outlook for BPOs is strong demand for their services, their challenges are far from trivial. They must deliver better outcomes and value for their clients more efficiently than the competition. Augmenting and enhancing human agents with conversational AI and automation optimises and transforms the customer and agent experience. This enables BPOs to achieve higher margins and profitability through improved operational efficiency and automated scalability, ultimately improving their customer interactions.