Contact center outsourcing partners are experts at what they do. However, that doesn’t mean that as the business owner of a brand’s customer experience department, you ignore the work of aligning and staying in lock step. A strong and frequent cadence of communication will be essential to ensuring that your contact center outsourcing partners are successful. Together with your BPO provider, you’ll want to proactively evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of contact center processes, policies, technology, and employees. Regular evaluation leads to streamlined operations, greater value for clients, appropriate customer satisfaction levels, and win-win scenarios for both clients and the outsourcing provider.

This blog post provides a few ways to ensure that your governance model for contact center outsourcing providers leads to a long-term, mutually beneficial partnership. Whether you represent a brand outsourcing its contact center for the first time or if your business has been outsourcing for awhile, this blog post provides an essential communications checklist.

1. Proven Governance Model and Account Management for Contact Center Outsourcing Providers

A strong governance model should operate across three levels: the Steering Committee, Account Management, and Service Delivery.

• The Steering Committee includes senior management from both organizations and meets regularly to ensure alignment with the client’s vision and direction.
• The Account Management layer is where the outsourcer’s account manager interacts with the vendor management team at your organization.
• The Service Delivery layer involves the operations team engaging with your project management team.

This partnership should be based on open communication, mutual commitment, and clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Regular meetings ensure that program commitments are met on both sides:

• Quarterly Business Reviews (Joint Steering Committee): These high-level strategic meetings should review account status, overall satisfaction, and future activities, with representation from senior account and operational teams.
• Business Review Meetings/Customer Council (Monthly): These meetings should focus on tactical priorities, assigning responsibilities, and reviewing satisfaction conditions.
• Results Meetings (Bi-Weekly): The account management team representing the contact center outsourcing partner should regularly review with you performance trends, collaboratively identify areas for improvement, and jointly develop corrective procedures.
• Calibration Meetings (Weekly): These meetings might review random cases to ensure that the quality of the outsourced team aligns with your expectations. The outsourcer should take immediate actions based on these findings.

Each business has different levels of involvement in daily operations of outsourced contact centers, and outsourcing providers should adapt and be flexible based on the preferences of their clients. A structured governance and communication model ensures contractual obligations and client satisfaction levels are met consistently.

2. Insist on Proactive Continuous Improvement

A responsible contact center outsourcing provider independently seeks, suggests, and implements (with your approval) dozens of small and large continuous improvements throughout the life of the contract. As part of a quality management process, these enhancements should be discussed with client stakeholders during weekly and monthly meetings, as well as quarterly business review sessions. These discussions improve communications and enhance collaboration on identifying viable future opportunities. Some companies prefer to include “continuous improvement” as an agenda item in every client-vendor meeting, while others create a specific, cross-functional subcommittee to address continuous improvement.

Staying abreast of the market through a monthly Competitive Intelligence meeting, subscribing to numerous publications, and using the wealth of knowledge from internal experts will ensure that emerging issues are proactively addressed. Each outsourced site director and management team should stay updated on market trends relevant to their programs, adding value through intelligence gathering and applying best practices based on industry expertise.

A structured continuous improvement methodology balances enhanced quality offerings with additional cost efficiencies. This framework drives efficiencies through facilitated working sessions with operations staff and key business owners, uncovering process and technology innovations that reduce operating costs and improve customer satisfaction.

3. Use Technology and Data-Driven Insights

Working with an contact center outsourcing provider that applies Six Sigma methodologies to process improvements will enhance quality while reducing costs. Similarly, monitoring performance measures and benchmarks at defined intervals will offer valuable business insights.

Reporting is a major opportunity for contact center outsourcing providers to share valuable data with their clients. Requesting that your provider create a customized reporting package based on your unique requirements is an up-front must to ensure that your business gets the answers around performance that it needs in order to effectively communicate status and progress to senior management as well as to ensure the business is progressing the way it should. Data-driven reports should be supported by narrative insights accompanying weekly or monthly reports, to address root causes and corrective actions where applicable.

During the program development phase, a subject matter expert (SME) on the outsourcer’s team should collaborate with your team to determine specific reporting needs. The SME should provide sample reports, make necessary modifications, and develop approved mockups using an appropriate reporting platform. Rigorous testing ensures reports are validated before deployment.

During the first production week, you should expect your contact center outsourcing provider to offer various customized reports. Standard reports typically include:

• Daily/Monthly Summary – Breakdown of incidents received, answered, escalated, average handle times, queue times, etc.
• Weekly Account Management Summary – Performance results, quality assurance, escalations, training updates, and pertinent business insights.
• Category Report – Summary of customer feedback and requests into key categories.
• Escalation Tracking – Logging and tracking of all escalation issues, resolution steps, and turnaround times.
• Update Tracking – Ongoing log of updates from clients, account managers, and websites, ensuring representatives are trained accordingly.

Managing contact center outsourcing partners effectively requires strategic planning, strong communication, and a commitment to continuous improvement. A structured governance model, continuous improvement initiatives, and robust reporting capabilities ensure a seamless partnership with clients. By fostering open collaboration and leveraging data-driven insights, outsourcing providers deliver enhanced customer experience, optimized operations, and long-term success. For more information about how Advensus approaches client partnership, contact us.