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Jul 30, 2020 Nalini Barma

Does Your Company Culture Align With Your Outsourced Contact Center?

Outsourced Contact Center

In a lot of our blogs, we talk about just how important the customer experience is to a successful customer service strategy. 

In fact, in a recent blog titled, ‘How to Seamlessly Merge Employee Experience and Customer Experience’, we looked at the innovative steps some contact centers are taking to infuse an incredible employee experience with world-class customer experiences.

Just having amazing employee experience isn’t enough, however. To truly wow your customers with world-class experiences, you need to find an outsourced contact center whose company culture aligns perfectly with your brand.

A positive culture is crucial to your business success - more than 50 percent of executives say corporate culture influences productivity, creativity, profitability, firm value and growth rates. Company culture leads to passionate customer service agents who are able to answer customer queries, create loyal customers and boost your brand’s profitability.

So, when choosing your outsourced contact center partner, how exactly do you determine cultural alignment between a third-party and your brand? Advantage Communications has listed some tips here:

Acknowledge company culture at the vendor selection stage

Your brand’s request for proposal (RFP) is a crucial step in ensuring you choose the right outsourced contact center to partner with. It specifies what services your company is looking for and lays out how you will assess each third-party that makes a bid on the contract.

One of the first steps to cultural alignment between your brand and an outsourced contact center, is to include a section in your RFP. Ask what measures the vendor will take to align with your company culture, and see if they will send you some examples of how they’ve done it with previous companies. 

Talk to the outsourced contact center’s employees

There isn’t anyone that knows what it’s like to work with a company better than the employees themselves. If you get the chance during the outsourced partner decision stage, sit down with the employees of that company and see how they feel about working there.

You will want to find out how passionate these employees are for the success of the company and the clients they work with, and how they interact with the other members of their team - these are all signs of a positive company culture. 

Experience company culture with a site visit

Corporate culture is formed from a company’s daily practices, values, traditions, beliefs, employee programs and office environment. When all these combine to create a positive culture, it’s reflected in employee performance, happiness, productivity and retention.

There’s no better way to gauge an outsourced contact center’s company culture than attending a site visit and experiencing it first hand. Here at Advantage Communications, for example, we take aligning our customer service representatives with your brand seriously.

That’s why we have a client branding methodology. By creating an area in our contact center that is branded for a particular client with key messages and imagery, as well as brand-specific employee training, we are able to create a team of customer service agents who are completely aligned with your brand’s values.

 

Only work with a leadership team you trust

The company culture of any outsourced contact center is shaped by its leadership team. Their values, mission, management styles and workforce decisions are what builds the corporate culture within their company. Being able to trust the leaders of an outsourced partner is essential if you want to achieve cultural alignment between your brand and the vendor. 

Communication is a key aspect of this. You want to ensure the leadership team is not only responsive, but also willing to collaborate with your brand. Communication and collaboration is a crucial aspect of continually improving your customer service strategy, driving new growth and improving revenue figures.

 

If you have any further questions about aligning your brand’s company culture with your outsourced contact center, contact Advantage Communications today. Our team of customer experience strategists would love to answer any questions that you may have. 

 

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Published by Nalini Barma July 30, 2020