Hyper-growth shouldn't mean compromising your brand CX. On the race to profitability, startups and scale-ups face a huge amount of pressure, multiple break points, and no shortage of challenges. As you look for stability and calm, relying on an expert CX outsourcer can not only add tremendous value, but it can be the difference between chasing and achieving profit.

As you make a push towards accelerating revenue, controlling burn rates, and managing rigorous investor expectations, we've put together a helpful set of features you should look out for when leaning on an outsourcer to protect & project your brand investment.

1. Domain expertise

As a hyper-growth brand, you've put a huge investment into your product. Entrusting this investment to an outsourcer is a huge step, carrying with it a number of risks that could quickly kneecap your performance. However, when it comes to maintaining remarkable customer service as you expand operations, an outsourcer with experience supporting hyper-growth brands is not only a sound decision, it can add a tremendous amount of value across your entire operation. Working with such partner lets you tap into extensive industry know-how & best practices, and dynamically transfer that to your program for quick and continuous success. The ideal outsourcer should have a successful track record of working with other growing brands, navigating the hyper-growth journey and solving common CX challenges to ensure your customers are well-supported as you scale up.

Things to look out for:

1. Has the outsourcer had previous success with a brand like yours?
2. What were the timelines of success - does this meet your goals?
3. What is their current client tenure?
4. Do they have client references? Speaking with a current hyper-growth client of your potential outsourcing partner is an essential way to gauge their performance.
5. Analyze the language they use - every industry has its own vernacular - if they know your industry, they'll speak your language.

2. Global, Elite Turnkey Service Delivery Options

By building an outsourced team, you reap the rewards of an established operation working across multiple geographies, giving you access to a worldwide network of turnkey contact centers with multiple service delivery locations, pricing options and languages. Ideal for disruptive startup and scale-up brands across industries, branded sites ensure complete brand extension, meaning your agents are immersed in the brand and live and breathe your core values from day one.

Things to look out for:

1. Brand immersion and site customization - are they tailoring their contact center floors to the branding & culture of your organization?
2. Are they giving back to the communities in which they operate?
3. How does client success differ across their locations?
4. What does agent churn & satisfaction look like across geographies & sites?

3. Wave 0: Upfront Leadership Training & Investment

An expert outsourcer understands that when launching a client at a contact center, having your leadership trained and invested upfront - before any agent is hired or trained - is imperative to program success, and will result in dramatically higher performance and returns for your brand. Through the Wave 0 methodology, leaders are rigorously trained on your brand processes, products and top call drivers so that they are fully prepared to manage the operation from day 1, and become effective ambassadors of your brand. As part of their training, leaders take calls to better understand your customers’ needs and set the right tone when managing the customer support team.

Things to look out for:

1. Take notice of who you are interacting with - is it your vendor's C-level team, or a more junior team?
2. Discover who is trained first when launching your program - if management isn't involved, this is a red flag.
3. How many layers does your vendor org chart have? Be wary of layers - the more flat an organization is, the more quickly it can anticipate and adapt to your needs.

4. Precision hiring to secure top talent

By outsourcing your customer support team, you get access to a highly skilled and experienced recruiting team that can quickly pinpoint the best candidates for your contact center, while managing employee retention, fostering engagement and controlling churn. Hiring and retaining the right talent the first time saves money and ensures your frontline is an engaged extension of your brand values. Their passion, customer focus and adaptability create the customer relationships you need to drive results.

Things to look out for:

1. Recruitment areas - does the outsourcer understand where the best talent is located?
2. Does the outsourcer have a defined and rigorous process for identifying and selecting candidates?
3. Do they have a track record of recruiting the top talent - can they demonstrate this?

5. Advanced training for agent outperformance

Today's customers expect more knowledgeable, efficient and friendly service than ever before and are quick to spread the word about a bad experience. Your brand can’t afford to lose out on potential revenue because your agents are underprepared or undertrained. Working with an outsourcer lets you take advantage of cutting-edge learning technology for onboarding agents, including training simulators, gamification and virtual learning, that empowers your team to continuously improve their proficiency and overachieve for your brand.

Things to look out for:

1. Any good training program will have data around speed-to-proficiency - make sure to ask for it
2. Does your chosen outsourcer use Training Simulators to speed-up training times and increase day 1 performance?
3. Beyond initial training, does the outsourcer offer its agents ongoing training for evolving their skillsets?

6. Project management support for a seamless launch

Once your customer support leaders and agents are fully primed and ready, an outsourcer ensures your program launch and implementation go off without a hitch. Having an experienced project management team dedicated to coordinating and planning your program launch lets you do it right the first time, while redirecting valuable internal resources toward other important revenue-generating activity.

Things to look out for:

1. Do they have a PMO group with defined implementation & launch procedures?
2. Do they have a implementation timeline they can show you?
3. Case studies around successful launch and implementation examples

7. Speed-to-performance

With so many benefits that set your frontline apart, including selective hiring, smart training and aligned leadership, your outsourced customer support team becomes rapidly proficient and hits the ground running. This efficiency is critical for hyper-growth brands, since it allows you to achieve and maintain green KPIs following launch for better results, faster. And with all-encompassing workforce management, an outsourced team ensures that your frontline is always high-performing and driving strong results for investors.

Things to look out for:

1. Does your partner have a sophisticated Workforce Management team?
2. Can they show a successful history of rapid speed-to-green?
3. Take a second look at their training programs - this is where speed to proficiency is born

8. Business Intelligence for Performance-Improving Insights

There’s no growth without continuous improvement. And you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Working with an outsourcer gives you access to business intelligence and insights that help you identify key challenges, build alignment across the organization, and uncover opportunities to improve customer-focused processes. Because better outcomes for your customers means better outcomes for your brand.

Things to look out for:

1. How deep are their Business Intelligence capabilities? Are they both Insightful and Actionable?
2. Review the types of analyses your vendor can perform - do they include Complexity Studies and Churn Analytics?
3. Are they able to provide insight across the lifecycle, and feed that back into your contact center for improved agent interactions and performance?

Rapid growth shouldn’t cause your customer experience to suffer. Especially because protecting the relationships you’ve cultivated up until now is exactly what your brand needs to scale up successfully.

Working with a partner allows you to build, launch and implement a flawless outsourced customer support team the first time, so you can reduce costs, scale confidently and innovate continuously, while scooping up well-deserved market share.