Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is the fastest growing segment of IT outsourcing, as organizations see the opportunity it offers to outsource business processes with the following benefits: the ability to focus on core competencies; cost savings; improved business process quality; flexibility in terms of technology; and reduced time to market.

There are quite a few challenges in setting up an Outsourced Contact Center and ensuring a fast positive cash flow. They include problems of initial investment, acquiring the first customer, consistently surpassing customer expectations in quality and quickly moving up the value chain in a seemingly overcrowded market. In order to achieve this, extensive domain knowledge and the technology / architecture that support your performance objectives are vital.

Setting up a Contact Center that is competitive in its range of services is more complex than it actually seems. Some common dilemmas associated with this segment are:

Differentiated customer service - To optimize each customer relationship through differential treatment. For an organization today the foremost challenge is to cut through the clutter of the existing product and service offers. The next logical step for the organization is to train and enable its agents to be able to use the information in the most appropriate manner. For instance, the organization can have real-time suggestions appearing on its agents' screen, prompting them to interact with the customer in a specific way.

Declining service levels - To address the declining weekly service levels of 60% as against a set goal of 80% of calls in 20 seconds.

Large call inflow or dropped calls - To take care of large call inflow and dropped calls during peak time.

Analyze and upgrade infrastructure - Analyze existent infrastructure and look for options to upgrade Call Centers.

Brand value - To retain brand value in case of an outsourced Call Center.

Agent performance – The daily tracking of agent voice files is a difficult task given the operation team’s meeting of the daily targets. This leads to a large part of the agent performance (almost 30%) being left unevaluated resulting in revenue loss.

Customer expectations vs. organizational perception - The area of customer service is a sticky scenario with a major disparity in the way an organization feels it delivers customer service to what the customers actually get.

Changing technology - The ever changing technology to meet the customer demands and take the customer experience to the next level is now what sets the competitors apart and in this regard the implementation and the scalability of technology plays a vital role.

Lack of system integration - The lack of system integration in many Contact Centers leads to agent spending on wrapping-up calls (an average of 6 mins per call) then on talking to customers (an average of 4 mins per call).

Integration of business, technology, and customer care - The other foremost issue with an organization is to bring about an integration of these three vital pillars and develop a customer-facing solution to enhance the organizations customer interaction processes.

Revenue generation - Organizations are aware that every time a customer interacts with them, they have an opportunity to cross sell or up sell their products and services. With the customer information they have, how can they provide online 'prompting' to agents enabling them to get the most out of their interactions?