25 may, 2020. – Normalization is beginning to emerge. Uncertainty in the economy is decreasing as we have more visibility about the end of confinement and the format it might have. In this context, the different sectors are already considering a post-COVID-19 strategy to improve the relationship and experience with their customers. The test bed of the prolonged state of alarm confirms that such a strategy will necessarily be digital, with workers carrying out their activity telematically in many sectors where this reality is feasible, according to the digital consulting firm Vector ITC.
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) stands out, at this time, as a collaborative model that many companies can use to rethink some of their activities after the impact of the health crisis. The commercial area is one of the areas that is necessarily facing increasing digitization and automation.
Against this background, Vector ITC is one of the companies that is betting on offering commercial BPO services. They call it BPO Sales & Performance Services and define it as a “service that boosts sales, thanks to an integrated process of locating potential clients in digital channels, optimizing the generation of leads on site, heating up opportunities, thanks to a lead nurturing process, and converting to visits in the client’s office network by telephone agents specialized in teleconcertation”.
The Call Centre is evolving towards a more efficient model: Contact Center
It is important to note the role being played by the “new sales agents” that make up the BPO commercial services. From the traditional Call Center, model, which only uses the telephone channel and shows some wear and tear, we have evolved to the Contact Center. This includes different forms of communication between the agent and the contact (email, simple and rich SMS, chat, social networks… in addition to telephone calls). The Contact Center is better adapted to the new needs of companies in order to improve their relationship with customers: improvement of the user experience and personalization of offers to align them with the customer profiles they manage.
Therefore, the professional profiles that make up the new Contact Centers are more specialized and have experts in Marketing Automation to make all processes more efficient. This is the case of Vector ITC, which within its Sales & Performance area integrates a stable team formed by managers, UX copywriters, digital designers and developers.
In any case telephone agents or tele-operators are still a very necessary base team to win the last meters in the close to the commercial action. During this health crisis, Vector ITC’s telephone agents have perfectly adapted to the new reality of teleworking at home, thanks to the telematic tools and virtual collaborative spaces that have been quickly implemented. The “remote” model is not new for these workers, who already enjoyed work flexibility measures aimed at family conciliation -for example, the possibility of taking advantage of several teleworking days per month-.
Impact of COVID-19 on TelcoThe commercial area of the Telco sector in Spain has lived, until now, two very different realities during this crisis. The first, of slowdown and uncertainty, with the initial prohibition of non-presential mobile portability. The second, after the publication by the Spanish Government of the Real Decreto-ley 11/2020 de 31 de marzo, that reverted this prohibition, allowing the changes of fiber operator that do not require the presence of an installer.
Vector ITC points out the publication of this decree as a turning point. As a result of this fact, most of the agents of its platforms in Spain and Latin America (Peru and Paraguay) are operating and developing their activity from their homes with total fluency and normality.
At the present time of progressive lifting of the lack of financing, the Telco are pressuring from the media so that the portabilities include, also, the presential ones: those in which a technician has to go to the domicile to enable the line.
Karen Liedl
