Customer satisfaction is a key measure of BPO success. For over a decade the BPO industry has been defined by an ability to deploy an army of agents to undertake a wide range of customer contact activities. BPO success and growth hinged on an ability to throw more ‘bodies’ at a task, lift and shift it from a costly developed market to a cheaper alternative or deliver it more effectively through the economies of scale any outsourcer worth its salt would have.

Differentiation and driving BPO success
Things are, of course, changing. Rather than being paid to build costly centres and staff them with hard-to-locate agents, BPOs are changing their business approach. Outcome and deliverable-based models are increasingly common; invoices processed, payments received, customers signed up are far more common measures of value than FTEs deployed on a task. And the smarter and more innovative BPOs have used these alternative measures of value as ways of clearly differentiating their product from that of the competitor still stuck selling those ’bodies’.

Often forgotten in this race to transform not just the service delivery itself but the mode with which value is measured is the end customer, the very person financing the whole deal!

What the survey says…
According to a survey of two hundred BPO clients by InformationWeek and sister publication Managing Offshore the most important measure of successful outsourcing was cost reduction, which two-thirds of surveyed companies used to measure BPO success. Less than a third of those surveyed say they were seeing any measured or anecdotal improvement in customer satisfaction. An inability to cost effectively collect meaningful data or trust in a BPO to deliver unbiased data is often cited as the principle barrier to using CSAT as a measure of value.

Just as the more far sighted and innovative BPOs moved from simple FTEs deployed as a means of value to deliverables and outcome-based measures these same organisations are starting to use customer satisfaction as a means of tracking and proving service efficiency and quality. Some are even writing improved CSAT into contractual SLAs. So, as well as delivering a specific task more effectively and efficiently a BPO is also now committing to improving the customer experience in the process.

Net Promoter Scores, the answer?
Of course, there are lots of reasons why a BPO might want to do this now rather than before. Experience, proven capability and a belief that they can square the circle of doing more with less and still delight the end customer being one. The other is an ability to accurately and cost effectively survey meaningful samples of end customers. Measuring Net Promoter Scores, for instance, hasn’t been an inexpensive undertaking and whilst a BPO might aspirationally like to do this wafer thin margins have simply precluded it becoming part of any contract. Until recently.

Smarter BPOs are realising that interactive outbound messaging such as SMS and interactive voice is an ideal way to collect feedback. For just a few pence per completed survey BPOs can accurately collect, measure and report customer opinion – and use it as a measure to differentiate their capability above their completion still promising cost savings alone.

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