Managing call center operations today has become more challenging amid economic constraints and ever-present budgetary issues. And rising call volumes—along with increasing customer expectations—only add to the headache, requiring you to find innovative solutions to maintain high service standards.
Outsourcing has long been a strategy to help alleviate some of these pressures, with business process outsourcing (BPO) handling routine tasks to improve efficiency and reduce costs. However, as the complexity of customer interactions grows, knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) has emerged as another solution, too. It allows you to outsource specialized, knowledge-intensive tasks to experts, ensuring top-tier service and more effective support.
In this article, we’ll explore exactly why knowledge process outsourcing is quickly becoming a popular way to enhance customer support, how it fits into call centers, some of its benefits (and drawbacks), and the difference between KPO and BPO.
Most of us are probably familiar with business process outsourcing (BPO), a service where third parties are contracted to handle different business operations, freeing up employees and saving costs. And while it’s a very potent solution to help businesses cover their bases, another outsourcing service is quickly becoming more relevant.
Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) is a subset of outsourcing that involves delegating specialized, knowledge-intensive processes to external experts. While it may seem similar to BPO, KPO serves a specific purpose: to outsource complex tasks that require a specific level of knowledge or expertise that average employees don’t have.
On top of that, call center knowledge process outsourcing allows you to elevate the quality of service you can provide by gaining access to professionals with deep knowledge.
By adopting call center knowledge process outsourcing, you can streamline critical processes, enhance decision-making, and improve your call center's overall effectiveness and efficiency—which means your customer experience gets a boost, too.
For instance, you can use KPO to:
Adding KPO to your call center opens you up to a new way of handling complex customer needs and managing difficult operational tasks. You can significantly enhance your call center's performance by leveraging specialized knowledge and expertise from these outsourced contractors. Let’s check out some of the biggest benefits that you can take advantage of:
Outsourcing these knowledge-intensive tasks to specialized providers can lead to substantial cost savings—especially for rarer skills or difficult-to-train tasks. Tapping into a global talent pool with access to skilled workers (and cheaper labor costs) can help businesses save on operational and staffing costs without compromising quality. This allows you to allocate resources more efficiently and redirect those costs to other critical parts of your business.
With KPO, your call center benefits from the expertise of highly skilled professionals with knowledge that may otherwise be hard to find. This ensures that customer inquiries are handled with greater accuracy and precision by contractors who are best equipped to handle these situations over your average agent.
The addition of powerful quality assurance software can take this a step further by continuously monitoring and evaluating performance, leading to consistent improvements and maintaining a high standard of service.
Outsourcing complex processes to experts streamlines your operations, making them more efficient and freeing up resources. Contact center knowledge process outsourcing providers are well-equipped with the latest tools and technology for their contractors to handle these complicated tasks swiftly and effectively. This means you can reduce the time your in-house teams spend on resolving complicated issues they may not be fully prepared to solve.
One of the most direct benefits of KPO is improving the overall customer experience. Access to specialized knowledge allows for faster—and more accurate—resolution of customer issues, leading to higher satisfaction rates. When customers can interact with experts who truly understand the issue and can resolve it, their overall experience is significantly improved, improving brand loyalty and trust.
KPO offers the flexibility to scale your operations up and down based on demand. This added adaptability can be vital in fast-paced markets where customer (and operational) needs can change rapidly. For example, using contact center knowledge process outsourcing during peak periods can improve overall wait times when your regular staff is overwhelmed. Or, you can maintain a small staff of contractors during slow periods and ramp up as your business grows.
By now, it’s pretty clear that contact center knowledge processing outsourcing is a great tool in your toolbelt. But how does it directly impact your call center in a measurable way? Here’s how:
Call center knowledge process outsourcing offers plenty of benefits, as we’ve covered so far. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s a perfect solution to every issue you may have. Adopting KPO can be a huge boon to your call center, but it does come with drawbacks that can equally hamper you.
Outsourcing requires your company to share sensitive customer information with third parties, which can be a red flag when it comes to data security and privacy. Taking the time to set clear expectations and implementing stringent data security protocols (like encryption, regular audits, and compliance with data protection regulations) can all offset these risks.
You should also look to work with the best contact center outsourcing companies with a proven track record of maintaining data privacy and security.
Differences in language and communication styles can impact how your teams collaborate. By placing clear service level agreements and establishing ongoing communications, you can help minimize these issues. Additionally, some language barriers can arise, too, meaning you may want to look into collaborative tools and comprehensive training to help overcome language gaps.
Like communication, different cultures coming together globally can also bring difficulties that can affect work styles and customer interactions. This can be offset with training programs that focus on cultural awareness and sensitivity, and the ideal KPO vendor should already be familiar with how to include their contractors.
You can also encourage cross-cultural team-building activities to bring your teams closer together and improve cooperation and understanding of each other.
Integrating data from various sources can be a hassle, and even more of one when third parties are added into the mix. Ideally, your chosen KPO vendor should be equipped to make these integrations as smooth as possible, ensuring that everyone has access to the information they need. You should also prioritize using technology solutions that are known for being easy to integrate into existing systems to help alleviate the friction.
Change can be hard to deal with, and adopting contact center knowledge process outsourcing can easily be met with resistance from your teams—who may be worried about job security or workloads. Implementing a structured change management plan that includes clear communication and thorough training sessions can help put your agents at ease with this new shift. You’ll want to encourage your agents to buy into this new change by showing them how it can improve their work instead of replacing them.
The single most impactful aspect of adopting KPO is picking the right vendor. Looking beyond costs and taking into account their expertise, reliability, and cultural fit should be a priority. After all, those are all challenges of their own and not ones that can be fixed easily.
While call center knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) and BPO share similar acronyms, they each serve their own distinctive functions within call center operations.
BPO focuses on outsourcing routine, process-driven tasks like customer support, billing, and data entry. These tasks typically require less specialized skills and are often more repetitive or tedious.
In contrast, KPO involves outsourcing more complex, knowledge-intensive tasks that require significant expertise and domain-specific knowledge, such as data analytics, market research, and tech support.
KPO isn’t an alternative to BPO—they’re complementary tools, and you can take advantage of them differently. Let’s check out a comparison:
KPO and BPO differ significantly in the scope and complexity of tasks they handle. BPO deals with straightforward, high-volume tasks, aiming to improve efficiency and reduce costs. On the other hand, KPO tackles more challenging tasks that require specialized knowledge, critical thinking, and problem-solving abilities. By using both together, you can streamline your routine operations while leveraging skilled contractors for difficult, high-value tasks.
Outsourcing, as complex and controversial as it may seem, is crucial to our new globally connected world. The adoption of call center knowledge process outsourcing has evolved as a unique way to elevate customer service and manage difficult tasks that your average agent may be unable to handle. From providing data analytics, QA assessments, crucial tech support, and more, it stands as an excellent option for businesses to increase their effectiveness.
And if you’re looking for how you can get the most out of your call center and your KPO within your contact center operations, you need a QA solution that works for you. Scorebuddy is an AI-powered QA solution that can track and validate the effectiveness of your KPO. It can highlight what’s working—and what isn’t, while helping you improve your overall customer experience with its powerful QA tools.
Interested in maximizing your call center operations? Try a free demo of Scorebuddy and see what happens.
