The insanely honest guide to outsourced CX

Let’s get clear about who this is for. This Guide is for challenger brands… ambitious, young and hungry businesses who believe outsourced CX doesn’t need to suck.

Challengers like you are trying to carve out a new piece of a competitive market with a new approach. And once you get there, you’re planning to own it. And you need to get there first, fast, and do it better than anyone else.

Many challenger brands have discovered that customer experience (CX) is key to making this happen—and the need for consistently great CX became all the more pressing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In fact, CX has become one of the key battlegrounds for businesses today. It’s as important—if not more important—than the actual service you provide. And to be brutally honest, delivering consistently great CX is hard. Really hard. It takes commitment. It takes adaptability. It takes technology. Most of all, it takes effort—day in and day out.

Customers have never been closer to businesses—the number of channels customers and businesses can interact within has exploded. This is a double-edged sword. First, you’ve got more avenues to sell into. But at the same time, you’ve got to meet customer expectations across every single channel, again and again.

You’re ready for the next phase of your development. But development always equals growing pains. And that’s because you’re trying to figure out a bunch of new and different things as you go, while at the same time.

More often than not, companies like yours are started by brilliant industry experts—people who are skilled navigators in their field. However, these brilliant folks often have limited exposure to other aspects of running a business.

Suddenly you realize that you need to staff up and add a broader range of expertise to your wheelhouse. And if you’re honest with yourself, you likely don’t have the full gamut of expertise in managing customer experiences, training agents, and maintaining the highest standards.

There are just too many unknown unknowns. But one thing you know for sure is that most outsourced CX doesn’t work anywhere near as well as it should.

Your biggest worry, as it should be, is that your growing group of hard-won clients won’t get the service and attention they deserve. And you’re worried that if you don’t get it right, this phase of development could be your last.

The good news is we can tell you everything you don’t know. Honestly. Everything.

Think about the possibilities:

It turns out that when you combine all this, strange, new, and abnormal outsourcing-y things start to happen:

Done well, exceptional business process outsourcing treads a balance between efficiency—a focus on greater productivity, streamlined operations, and lower costs…

…and effectiveness, where the goal is to add value through business insight, partnership-led innovation, industry expertise, and personalized support.

With an agile, flexible, responsive, and scalable CX service provider, one doesn’t trump the other. Efficiency and effectiveness reach an ideal balance. And responsiveness delivers better outcomes—not just more efficient transactions.

Agile and scalable CX programs nurture passionate, empowered agents that go the extra mile to make customers happy. They obsess over pre-assignment team-building and devise processes for onboarding, agent training, problem resolution, and process improvements that fit your business.

If your outsourcer can answer these questions and satisfy these expectations, you may well have found the right fit. This will be a partner that can help you hit your business goals while delivering better, more seamless experiences to customers across all channels.

We believe this passionately. It’s why we spend so much time with our clients thinking about how they can simultaneously better serve their customers and better establish a foundation for the wider business to adapt and scale.

In fact, Relationship-based Outsourcing has unlocked strategic growth, delivered awesome CX acceleration, and exceeded critical KPIs across a ton of businesses like yours. We’ve made a living by turning CX from a headache into a growth engine.