BPOs and SSCs businesses have often the customer satisfaction as their #1 priority. Lots of efforts and valuable resources are engaged for the sake of a happy customer. A number of BPOs have a QA responsible if not a whole small unit dedicated to track and analyse what’s wrong, because yes, there’s always something wrong.

Unmet deadlines, uncomplete deliveribales, low service quality, lack of proactivity, absence of engagement towards the business needs,… If you work in or manage a Shared Services Center or a Business Process Outsourcing company you must be familiar with all these critics. We all know how frustrating and disappointing it can be to make huge efforts seeking that satisfaction and to end up with an unhappy customer, just like if you weren’t doing any efforts at all.

Today I’d like to share with you some small aspects which surprisingly will have a big impact on your customer satisfaction indicator.

Make your SLA clearly defined: An SLA mustn’t be short. Yes, you can issue an Executive Summary version if needed, but the SLA/SMF is going to be your only contractual document. Use it to make sure your customer has no further expectations beyond what’s explicitly written there.

Stick to the SLA/SMF: Looks simple but lots of outsourcing/offshoring service vendors are falling into the pitfall of exceeding the customer expectations. And while there’s nothing wrong with delivering the service going the extramile, the pitfall appears when the customer starts considering it part of the regular service, even though that part wasn’t included in any previous service agreement. The outcome of such a situation is usually a ver low customer satisfaction indicator.

Propose new SLA revisions: Although your Service Level Agreement might have a 2 or 5 years validity, it’s worth it to make regular revisions, on a yearly basis for instance.

By nature SLA’s tend to require frequent revisions at the beginning of the service delivery migration/hand-over. The next phase is normally more stable and thus needs less updates, but still a regular revision would help for example bringing more service scope to the unit or including new business needs.

Warn your customer of service outages risks: Don’t hesitate to communicate every single and little possibility of service delivery interruption or service quality drop. Anticipation will be appreciated by your customers and somehow will help you share the risk responsibility. Moreover big announced and planned risks are usually better perceived than a small but sudden risk that nobody anticipated.

Rebrand you “Customer Satisfation Surveys”: In despite of their high subjectivity level, customer satisfaction surveys are of vital importance when it comes to measuring a BPO/Outsourcing unit performance and most importantly the way the customer perceives the service quality. A good tip that will most likely turn the survey results more objective is to rebrand/rename that tipical Customer Satisfaction survey into something different. While its purpose will be still the same, something differently named like “Process Improvement Feed-back” will give for sure a more profitable outcome. Not only will it be a reliable and objective feedback on your current service quality and performance but a well-crafted survey will give you the answers to the question “How are we supposed to correct/improve this?”

Work out your own processes: Sometimes the customer might be right Always there’s a room for improvement. Never disregard any improvement possibilities you might come across. Invest some decent part of your resources in process analysis and improvement actions, it will be worth it. That’s just like having an R&D inside your unit. Successful businesses invest in improvements.

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