I was discussing conventional PR with one of India’s leading BPOs when the conversation veered towards how they, as a BPO, started engaging with a global automobile major. It started as an outsourced HR function and grew so efficiently that this BPO organization went from strength to strength, that today, they’re handling a huge chunk of whatever is oursourceable, including the holy grail of outsourcing – customer support.
The customer support outsourcing presents an interesting case – the client organization prepares an exhausting document of all possible customer questions and its answers and the BPO organization merely employees people who can answer customer queries based on this master document. The BPO’s representative also mentioned that they’ve gone beyond the question, ‘Are you from the company…or are you from a call center?’. That question perhaps started from the frustration of not addressing customer queries well, but I suppose BPOs have evolved confidently.
That said, I’m reminded of two things – as a parallel to the BPO example – I heard from a client for whom we handle social media engagement – oh-so-successfully, if I’m allowed a minor, bashful digression.
The first was, ‘We do not want an agency to handle our social media engagement – we’ll execute it internally’.
We did precisely that at first – consulted with them on how they should address the social media space, helped them identify specific objectives and vehicles they should be using to achieve those. And, we let them handle the execution. It went nowhere.
We pushed for a trial period where we showed them how well we can execute and not just consult on top-level strategy, since ground execution is an equally critical part of social media outreach. Needless to add, the client was floored and have since outsourced the execution part to us too. It was just a matter of proving our value.
The second thought was about customers of a client asking us (without knowing who is handling the tool, of course!), ‘Is this the company or is it an agency?’.
My first reaction to such queries is, ‘Does it matter?’. Personally, as long as we’re able to add value within relevance and do not sound ignorant, it does not matter. When customers have largely stopped expecting the brand to be directly handling customer support, why does an agency handling social media outreach become a moot point? This is not about honesty or transparency – this is simply about a brand/ organization not having adequate bandwidth to handle social media engagement as much as they do not have bandwidth to handle customer support via say, telephone!
Agreed – for customer support, it is more templatized and customers proactively reach out to the call center. In a social media engagement situation, it goes way beyond pre-defined support queries, requires engaging with customers where they’re present online socially and needs the panache to jump into a conversation intellogently…and all this requires quick thinking and presence of mind. That is precisely where an intelligent agency adds value – the function is no doubt outsourced in two parts, the strategy and the execution; the former for the simple reason that it is a specialized function and the latter, for lack of bandwidth internally. Plus, like in a typical outsourcing decision, the organization needs to be focusing on its core competence.
So, the parallel with an outsourced BPO perhaps ends at the point when a client decides to outsource the social media engagement function and assumes a new form of an intelligent evolution of outsourcing – one that necessitates a much deeper understanding of the client and its line of business.
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