The glory days of the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry are facing the test of time. With growing alternatives, particularly AI assistance, the privacy and security challenges with BPO have become more critical than ever.  Now that AI is in play, there are certain unique advantages that can help overcome challenges faced by BPO companies and contact centers.

Challenges faced by traditional BPO service providers

Business process outsourcing has been around for a long time. Since then, there have been upgrades to processes and equipment, but the growth has been limited by certain consistent challenges that still persist:

• Manual processes

BPOs have so far heavily required a large volume of manpower and manual processes. The lack of automation has created many human dependencies to keep up with BPO requirements.

• Manpower costs

The growth for BPO service providers remains linear as long as there is an equivalent need for manpower and necessary, timely pay raises. The manpower costs keep the growth stagnant for companies while challenges keep rising.

• Scalability

Considering both points above, a BPO service provider consistently faces a lack of scalability. The only way to drastically scale is to prepare proportionate manpower and process groups.

• Lacks quality control:

In BPO and call centers, the quality of service heavily depends on manual training, supervision, and individual competence. These subjective variables are harder to control and get precision of. Consistency is among the key priorities in the majority of BPO requirements.

The need for AI in the BPO industry

There are multiple factors that drive the developments in the BPO industry. Among them, the major ones are the very high competition and ease of penetration in the market. Companies have to adapt to any competitive advantage they can get. 

Moreover, the customers have changed drastically as well. From post-sales support to query resolutions, customers now have higher overall expectations. The pressure to reduce costs, stay competitive, be efficient, and still deliver better customer service can be tricky.

Artificial Intelligence and its applications can present an opportunity to transform business process outsourcing once and for all. The emergence of solutions like AI chatbots, AI assistants, and AI automation can unlock great value for the industry.

Seven applications of AI in the BPO industry

Artificial Intelligence can be applied in several different areas of BPO operations. There is no limit to how many AI applications or use cases can help BPOs and call centers. Let’s look at some popular ways AI can be helpful in the BPO industry.

1. 24/7 instant support

AI chatbots and assistants can help BPO service providers be available at any time of the day and respond to inquiries instantly. This could drastically disrupt the turnaround time for BPOs and change the value they offer to their clients.

2. Personalized interactions

Conversational AI with NLP, sentiment analysis, and contextual awareness can add a lot of value to customer-facing BPO operations. AI can personalize every interaction with customers, adding more quality and effectiveness to BPO services.

3. Self-service for customers

AI-powered customer care centers can help users by providing self-service where they can find answers to their queries without any need for human interactions, making the user experience more convenient.

4. Automating BPO operations

A big benefit of AI implementation is that it takes care of repetitive generic tasks for BPO companies like data entry, ticket creation, rep allocation, and so on. This automates BPO operations significantly by improving overall productivity and quality of work. 

5. Better quality control with AI

Quality control is a complexity, especially for a big BPO organization. It is hard to ensure the right quality standard is followed through training and work. AI can help over there with the automated quality monitoring and training performance analysis.

6. Efficient resource allocation

AI can also leverage data and awareness about the work allocation of different agents to identify who can be the best-suited agent for the next ticket in line. Such use of AI can optimize manpower utilization and reach the peak profit.

7. Reducing labor cost:

Automation, productivity, and self-service offered by AI can minimize the need for more human agents. It can eliminate the need for staff overhead and limit labor costs, putting BPO operations in better health.

That’s not all of it. There are other applications of AI, such as chat summarization, automated transcripts, and customer sentiment analysis. The list goes on as the horizon of AI applications keeps expanding every single day.

Concerns regarding AI in the BPO industry

AI in the BPO industry can perform many of the things that have been done manually so far. While it provides consistency and accuracy, it can also threaten to replace staff and limit the number of jobs in the industry. It is safe to assume that entry-level or repetitive roles in BPO centers are most susceptible to this threat of AI.

It would force BPOs to work on reorganizing their structure and staff roles so that all the agents can still be helpful, just in a slightly different role. AI involvement could be favorable and productive as long as you account for interoperability with existing BPO infrastructure and processes.

The growth potential of AI in the BPO industry

While AI is growing faster than ever in the BPO industry, there is still a lot of room for further advancement. There are several different areas in which BPOs can work on using AI:

• More emotional intelligence:

AI can work on emotional intelligence and empathy to get closer to real human interactions. It might take time, but this advantage will be a game-changer for conversational AI applications.

• Emphasizing resolving complex queries

Currently, AI is still starting off with entry-level complexities to be certain of its output before investing further in it. Moving forward, it is safe to assume that AI will aim to handle complex queries as well.

• Analytics for better decision-making:

AI will also evolve further to understand subtle signs about customer experience on a deeper level with data analytics. This would enable BPO companies to make better decisions and analyze the capability growth.

In summary, there are a lot of ways through which AI can be helpful to BPO companies and their manual assistants. Depending on your website, traffic, and future plan, we can help you transform your BPO operations with AI. Just drop us an email, and we can move forward from there.