Have you been considering partnering with a BPO provider but aren’t sure what it takes to make it a successful partnership? The onboarding process is the foundation. In this post, we’ll look at the phases of an effective onboarding process, some ways it may go awry, and how The Office Gurus can help.
The Phases of Onboarding in BPO
Discovery & Alignment
The first part of onboarding could be argued as the most important: finding the right BPO partner to work with. There are a lot of BPO providers out there, but not just any provider can help you reach your goals. You have to take the time to learn about each provider and find the one that aligns most with your values.
Once you’ve found the right company to work with, you need a solid line of communication with them. They might have the same values as you, but until you meet and discuss what you’re looking for, they aren’t able to help you reach your full potential. It’s key to make sure they understand your expectations early on, set key performance indicators (KPIs) to track, and identify the resources needed to accomplish this.
Knowledge Transfer
You’ve established a connection with your chosen partner, and you know that this partnership is aligned, but they still don’t know what your processes are and how you run things. This is where knowledge transfer comes in, another critical step in the process. Knowledge transfer bridges the gap between your company’s plans and your BPO partner’s skills. This means showing them the tools and platforms you use and providing them with live exposure to them in use.
It helps to have a collection of information about your tools and processes in one place, so your partner can reference it while they’re learning. This may take some time to put together initially, but in the long run, it takes some pressure off your team and gives them more time to address other pressing issues.
Training & Certification
Now you have your BPO provider, and they have information about your systems and procedures, but they still don’t have experience using them. During the training stage, they have the opportunity to work hands-on with your company. This training should be aligned with your goals, and one effective way to accomplish this is through scenario-based learning, in which agents are placed in scenarios similar to those they would experience on the job. AI-driven tools can also be used during this training process to show agents feedback on how to improve in real time.
Pilot Projects & Soft Launch
The pilot project stage of onboarding acts as a bit of a trial run for the partnership. It goes beyond just training, but you don’t quite reach the level of a full-scale launch. With pilot projects, you get the chance to connect actual customers with agents from your BPO and see how interactions unfold. This gives the agents a chance to practice what they learned in training, but the smaller scale allows them to work through any problems that arise before they become too large to handle.
Pilot projects also create an opportunity to get feedback from a smaller group of customers about what’s working well or what may have some hiccups. When you gather this feedback during the soft launch, it’s much easier to adjust the process and make those improvements for a handful of customers rather than your entire customer base. That way, you’ve found the majority of the issues before they’ve become full-blown problems.
Ramp & Optimization
You will reach a point after these pilot projects where you feel confident in the new partnership and the new process is solidified. This is cause for some celebration, because this means it’s time to ramp up to your full scale. At this point, your work with the BPO provider technically reaches its culmination. However, that does not mean everything will always be as it is. Once you fully adopt the new procedures, you continue to gather feedback from your customers and look for places to improve.
It is helpful, though, to remember that you now have the support of your BPO provider. Since you set up the ideal KPIs to track and you established your goals early, you can rest assured that they will be watching these for you, striving for those same goals. Communication with your BPO partner is essential at this point for both parties, so you know efforts are running smoothly, and your partner can make adjustments early, before issues escalate.
What Could Go Wrong?
Without any of these steps, you could see the entire partnership crumble. For example:
- Without a solid plan: Your BPO provider chooses KPIs to track and goals to be working towards. Those KPIs and goals aren’t aligned with yours, and you find that after some time, there’s no improvement happening, and in fact, you might be losing ground. You’ve spent months chasing shadows and wasting resources, and now you have to take even more time to fix this.
- Without a line of communication: You’re left in the dark as to what’s going on. You have customers telling you that processes are going well, but the numbers are hidden from you, so you really can’t be sure. Some customers have come back reporting issues, but it might be days before you reach your BPO provider, and it could be even longer before improvements are made.
- Without proper knowledge transfer: Suddenly, customers that have been around for years decide to go elsewhere. They say that they’ve never been treated this way, and everything is different now. Problems that used to be solved in one call now take multiple calls to find a resolution.
How The Office Gurus Do It Right
Thanks to The Guru Way, The Office Gurus can assure you that the onboarding process will go smoothly. We believe that outsourcing partnerships are built on connections among people, ideas, and technology. We will be there with you every step of the way, so you’ll never be in the dark about what’s going on. What matters to you is what matters to us.
Ready to partner with a company that puts you first? Connect with our team today to find out the next steps.
