High-Growth Outsourcing, Strategic Partnerships & Cutting Edge Tech – with Megan Bassler of OP360

Megan Bassler, OP360’s VP of Strategic Partnerships, joined Derek Gallimore on the 500th episode of the Outsource Accelerator Podcast.

They discussed OP360’s growth, strategic partnerships, and utilizing AI for an efficient customer experience.

About OP360

OP360 (OfficePartners360) is a US-based BPO firm “specializing in the customer experience and customer support space,” as well as “providing a lot of back office support for existing clients.”

As of this writing, OP360 has “over about 5000 global employees.”

Megan described the company’s structure: “All of our agents and operations are offshore. We have quite a few different sites throughout the Philippines as well as a nearshore presence in Colombia. We have in total about 10 nearshore and offshore locations today.

We support about 12 different industries, have over 50 globally recognized clients, and have been around since 2006. But [OP360] has really just gone through exponential growth over the last couple of years.”

Strategic partnerships with Megan Bassler

OP360’s strategic partnerships program “leverages and builds relationships with various tech providers within the CX space for the longest time.”

According to Megan, the company is “tech agnostic” and “doesn’t have a specific technology offering.”

Since the topic of tech and AI are “not going away anytime soon,” OP360 “recognizes [that] there was a real opportunity to take those relationships with these partners to the next level.”

She added, “[We] started embedding some of these [tech] solutions into our offerings and made sure that our clients and prospects have access to some of the best solutions within the space.”

Megan believes that this strategy adds “a ton of extra value” to clients. 

“What we recognized was clients and prospects don’t always have the bandwidth to vet all of these new AI and technology companies. It’s like every year, there’s a ton of new products that come out.

We feel like it’s really on us to notice what technology is really going to help our clients still drive that quality while keeping the pricing down”

Further, OP360’s VP of Strategic Partnerships added, “One area that we’ve recognized is a lot of our clients have already bought some software packages, but they’re really underutilizing them.

So we provide them with a solution on how to truly extract all of the value that they’re already investing in, whether that’s QA or workforce management.

We’re now more of a trusted partner because we’re helping maximize their value.”

Using AI to power call center agents

Megan is quick to clarify that OP360 is not using AI to replace call center agents.

“We’re using AI to really power our agents. I think, especially in the world of BPO, we need to understand how to use AI in the context of what is going to be beneficial to the customer.”

OP360 is optimistic that their clients and technology partners “create a very, very powerful combination.”

Megan stated, “We believe that as AI can transform some of the less complex work, our teams will be required to perform the more complex and nuanced work types, which we absolutely welcome.”

“In order to stay relevant in the space, we need to truly utilize and leverage AI partner with AI companies, which is what we’re doing today.”

The podcast guest mentioned that as a BPO firm, they get questions like, “Are you worried that as AI continues to grow, it is going to remove the need for the physical humans and agents?”

Megan answers these types of concerns with, “We’re very optimistic that that’ll never, really become the case at the end of the day. I think it still is so important to have that human aspect. Data is data. Data doesn’t have the emotions, the feelings, the indicators.

So still having that level of human interaction to provide that layer of soft logic, the emotional intelligence, the empathy, we’re still very confident that clients are going to see the necessary need for that with their customer interactions.”

To learn more about OP360, visit their website or connect with Megan via LinkedIn.