When businesses begin discussing business process improvement (BPI) to drive efficiency and productivity, customer support might not be the first area that comes to mind.
After all, with so many internal systems, workflows, and tools demanding attention, why focus on the front lines of customer interaction?
The answer is very simple: aside from being reactive, customer support also acts as a channel for gathering insights, discovering patterns, and finding new opportunities for an actually consumer-driven transformation. Thus, more often than not, businesses find that their BPI starts with a single customer conversation.
Why Customer Service is a Real Business Performance Driver
We can all agree that the sole purpose of BPI is to drive business growth. And aside from faster workflows and leaner operations, this growth includes measurable outcomes, like increased revenue and customer loyalty. Research shows that businesses prioritizing customer experience can increase sales revenue by 2-7% and profitability by 1-2%. Additionally, as much as 73% of consumers report feeling like their brand experience influences their purchasing behavior.
Given these numbers, it becomes clear that customer service is a strategic asset that directly drives performance. As the most direct touchpoint with your customers throughout the entire lifecycle, support teams gather invaluable feedback that can indicate friction points, unmet needs, and opportunities for improvement.
To truly harness the power of customer service in driving BPI, companies need to adopt a customer-centric approach in their process development. This means aligning your BPI with actual needs and expectations expressed by your audience, rather than focusing solely on internal efficiency metrics. After all, who knows what works and what doesn’t better than the clients who actually use your products and services?
The Role of Outsourced Customer Service in Driving BPI
When companies start their business process improvement, they must be prepared to reallocate resources and realign focus, depending on the chosen methodology. Take the Lean method, for example: it requires teams to evaluate each step in a process (like customer support) and classify it as either valuable or non-valuable from the customer’s perspective. Despite being quite effective, this approach requires significant time, attention, and manpower, often pulling resources away from core operations.
That’s precisely why many businesses turn to outsourced customer service providers as strategic partners in their BPI efforts. Outsourcing can act as an active support for your process improvement as it relieves your internal teams from extra tasks. A well-equipped partner can take the lead in gathering and analyzing critical customer insights:
- collecting feedback
- evaluating interactions
- identifying pain points
- and reducing problem points.
As such, they serve as an extension of your BPI strategy, helping you to continuously refine processes and make sure that each step in the customer journey offers real value both to your clients and your brand. As a result, you get operations that are not only faster but also more agile, meaning, better equipped to meet your customers’ expectations while delivering measurable gains in revenue and return on investment.
Where to Start With Your Support-Driven BPI
The only question now is where to start? How do you create support that works to improve your business processes?
At the heart of any BPI lies careful analysis and evaluation of the existing operations. This holds especially true for support processes, where customer service metrics act as early indicators of your business’s operational health. For high-performing companies, it’s important to use these metrics to pinpoint inefficiencies, address systemic gaps, and find opportunities for optimization across departments.
Therefore, our first goal is to establish a strong performance measurement framework. The KPIs included in that network might vary from business to business and largely depend on your industry and its general standards. However, there are still some universal customer support data points that should be tracked by everyone. For instance, these are metrics like First Response Time (FRT), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and First Contact Resolution (FCR). These are just a few of the more direct measures reflecting how well your internal systems are supporting your customers.
*Example: Let’s imagine you are facing consistently low FCR rates – what can this tell you? It’s true that the reasons behind this issue might be different:
- Maybe you have an insufficient knowledge base,
- Or the workflow of your team is disrupted or misaligned,
- It’s even possible that your agents simply lack training in handling customers.
Yet, it’s only by evaluating this metric that you can actually sit down and discern what the potential triggers might be.
The Importance of Listening & Hearing
That said, just documenting those metrics alone is not enough. What separates average companies from industry leaders is the ability to listen, interpret, and act. This is where Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs and feedback loops come into the picture. You see, conducting audience surveys, collecting conversations, analyzing social media, and support tickets grants businesses an opportunity to hear directly what their customers are experiencing and expecting. Usually, it’s exactly these real-time, customer-sourced observations that help identify the root causes of recurring issues and ensure that process improvements are based on reality and not just assumptions and potential prognoses.
Eventually, we can say that support-driven BPI starts with shifting your focus toward identifying and understanding customer pain points and expectations, and then using those insights to guide process improvements that deliver real, aligned value.
Creating a Customer-Centric BPI Strategy
Okay, now we know what we need to track to make sure that our customer service drives our business towards success. But that’s just the first step. The next stage is to create a strategy for your BPI that will somehow have your customers in focus.
To plan this out, you need to take into account customer feedback, operational efficiency, and cultural alignment to create sustainable value. Here’s a rough plan we created that takes into account all three aspects.
Step 1: Establishing Customer-Centric Process Foundations
To make sure your BPI is led by your customers’ insights, you need to know their lifecycle. That’s why the very first thing that businesses need to do is to map out the end-to-end customer journey, identifying the most critical touchpoints and pain points in customer interactions. After this “roadmap” is outlined, you can move to segmenting your audience, categorizing users based on age, profitability, behavior, or needs (e.g., high-value vs. transactional customers). This will help target your processes so that they hit close to home and actually help increase customer retention.
Step 2: Choosing the Relevant Process Redesign Methodologies
This is probably the most confusing step of all, but bear with us. To know what exactly to do with your BPI, you need to choose a method that will guide you. There are several proven options, such as:
- Lean → focus on eliminating “waste” while maximizing value.
- Six Sigma → a data-driven approach directed at minimizing variations and inefficiencies in processes.
- Kaizen → focus on employees as a source of continuous gradual improvements
- TQM (Total Quality Management) → the main focus lies in customer satisfaction and requires all employees (at all levels) to be involved in process improvement.
- BPR (Business Process Reengineering) → aims to radically redesign core processes.
Now, what some companies found to be the most relevant for creating a customer-centric process organization is combining Lean approach with Six Sigma. In short, it means eliminating activities that don’t add value while also reducing extra service issues. Together, these efforts improve workflows and continuously increase the value of the service.
Step 3: Organizing Employee Empowerment and Training
Your employees are the ones executing all the processes you are trying to improve. Thus, it’s important to keep them updated about your product and teach them how to deal with various issues.
One way of doing this is creating cross-functional process teams. Continuous learning is also a must, so you might want to add training modules to simulate customer scenarios to build empathy and problem-solving skills. Lastly, giving support agents some decision-making autonomy won’t hurt either. Most consumer-oriented businesses have already found that allowing agents to resolve issues without escalation can largely reduce handling time and increase satisfaction.
Step 4: Setting up Continuous Improvement Mechanisms
Finally, to make sure your business never stays behind, it’s important to set up a self-sustained system that constantly improves.
To do this, think about establishing closed-loop feedback systems, integrating customer insights into BPI cycles:
- Collect post-interaction feedback via primary communication channels;
- Use AI tools to scan calls/chats for frustration patterns.
Additionally, don’t forget to leverage advanced analytics to virtually test process changes and flag at-risk workflows before any issues occur.
Your Customers are the Key to Business Growth & Improvement
Summing up, businesses looking to maximize process efficiency and productivity don’t need to look far. The most valuable asset is already within reach — your customers. And establishing a proactive, well-organized customer support function is the most effective way to gather the insights and data needed to drive real business growth.
Of course, doing this right takes time, focus, and consistency, which is exactly why many companies opt for outsourcing customer service. With the right outsourcing partner, you will be able to conduct thorough feedback analysis, pinpoint workflow inefficiencies, and analyze support metrics without sacrificing your core processes. So if you’re serious about improving how your business runs, start by listening to the people it runs for. Your customers already have the answers, and all you need is just the right platform to hear them.
