Customer Service Tip

Your voice can have a positive or negative effect on your interaction with a customer. Speak at a rate that is comfortable for your customer. A good rule of thumb is to speak at a rate of 160 to 180 words per minute.

Outsource brokers

When you outsource services or projects, you still need reliable managers to track progress and monitor results. Increasingly, there are third-party services that will manager your outsourcers for you. These brokers, exchanges and networks can recruit, interview and manage the services you need. For instance, ComputerRepair.com based in Boca Raton, Fla., runs a Web site that lets businesses across the country quickly find inexpensive PC support services. The company claims cost savings of 50% for IT service procurement.

BPO: The tendency of Indian workers to ‘‘over commit’’ (say yes to every request)

Despite widespread use of English, India and Europe have significant cultural differences that are showing up as concrete obstacles to offshore work.

In a study on European small and medium IT companies in India by Value Leadership Group Inc, all the companies surveyed specifically mentioned the tendency of Indian workers to ‘‘over commit’’ (say yes to every request) as a significant cultural issue.

“We saw several examples of missed deadlines and project failures that the companies attributed to this trait,” it states.


The study has been authored by Peter Schumacher and Eric Olsson. It says the the cultural differences work both ways, with many Indians uncomfortable with the bluntness of Germans.

Speaking to Business Standard at the ongoing Hannover Fair, Peter Schumacher, president & CEO, Value Leadership Group Inc, said India’s proposition of value for money, top talent and tremendous flexibility was not going unnoticed by small and medium European enterprises that had exhausted their options in Europe.

Source & Courtesy: Business Standard.

BPO Jobs Prospects in India

As per internet sources, as on March 31, 2003, the Indian BPO sector employed 171,000 professionals.

India has the largest number of English-speaking college graduates in the world, thanks to its 250-year stint being the crown jewel of the British Empire.

Contrary to popular belief in the West, the English language is the official language of commerce in metropolitan and corporate India and it is taught as a first language since kindergarten in most schools.

A large number of young and skilled Indian citizens between the age brackets of 21-27 work in the BPO industry catering to provide support services to foreign firms mainly from the United Kingdom and the United States.

Healthcare BPO / Medical Transcription Industry & Prospects...

A great opportunity awaits the Indian business process outsourcing industry in the healthcare sector.

While estimates show that the revenue of medical transcription industry in India is expected to drop from $38 million in 2002 to $26 million in 2006, a nine per cent loss per annum, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, by year 2005, the Indian BPO companies will be able to grab business worth $800 million from the US healthcare companies alone.

Healthcare BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) -- Questions for you!

1) Is patient information being stored in different places, on different types of media, creating large expenses to generate and manage?

2) Are paper records accumulating and absorbing revenue generating
space?

3) Are paper charts hindering your HIPAA compliance?

4) Accounting departments not having the completed chart information when they need it?

Transformational Outsourcing

Transformational outsourcing: is the term used to describe third generation outsourcing. If the first stage of outsourcing was about doing the work with the existing rules, then the second stage is about using outsourcing as the corporation is redefined. The 3rd stage is using outsourcing to redefine the business.

To survive today, organizations must transform themselves and their markets in an ever more daunting challenge to redefine the world before it redefines them. And outsourcing has, once again, emerged as the single most powerful tool available to executives seeking this level of business change. This new transformational outsourcing recognizes that the real power of outsourcing is in the innovations that outside specialists bring to their customers' businesses.

KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing)

KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing): involves processes that demand advanced research and analytical, technical and decision-making skills. Less mature than the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) industry, sample KPO work includes pharmaceutical R&D, data mining and patent research. The KPO industry is just beginning to gain acceptance in corporate America.

BPO / IT - Service Lvel Agreement (SLA)

A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between an IT services provider and a customer that specifies, usually in measurable terms, what services the vendor will furnish. Service levels are determined at the beginning of any outsourcing relationship and are used to measure and monitor a supplier's performance

BPO: Beware of frauds:

There are many companies / people hanging around projecting that they are authorized on behalf of a client to outsource a project. They may tell you that you need to set up a BPO unit with 25-30 seats and you will be given a data conversion project. They may demand upfront guarantee money to award the outsourcing contract.

Once you pay the upfront money, they will simply vanish. Or keep rejecting your work by saying that your quality is not up to the standard and they can not pay you. One operator even asked for bank guarantee and got it en-cashed in Singapore to show as if it is genuine and transferred money to Indian bank and went on rejecting the out put given by the suppliers. Finally he did the vanishing act.

Business Process Management (BPM)

Business Process Management or BPM, is the practice of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of any organization by automating the organization's business processes. BPM used to be also know as Business Process Reengineering (BPR).

Examples of BPM tasks that your organization performs that should be automated include:

Expense Reports Travel Requests
Purchase Orders Human Resource Management
New Accounts and Credit Authorizations Sales Orders
Project Management Software Change Management

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a process or methodology used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends.

CRM helps businesses use technology and human resources to gain insight into the behavior of customers and the value of those customers.

BPO: Most companies are now adjusted to manufacturing being done offshore.

Most companies are now adjusted to manufacturing being done offshore. What took place in manufacturing is now occurring in back-room processing and services. Ten years ago, if anyone had boldly predicted that by 2003 we would begin to see back-room service centers and call centers housed in India or the Philippines, they would have been laughed at. How could high-touch customer service agents who interact directly with customers work halfway around the world? The cost would be prohibitive given that monitoring the agents would be impossible and every call would be international.

What's a BPO Career all about?

A BPO career revolves around the core activity of delivering business process outsourcing services. This involves voice (telephone) and non-voice (email, chat) based customer interaction services, transaction processing, telemarketing, technical support or analyzing of customer specific data. It also involves back-end jobs such as claims processing and processing of Finance & Accounting transactions.

In a growing BPO organization, career opportunities exist across various facets of the business - extending from the core contact center to support functions like HR, legal, marketing, quality, administration etc. Opportunities in the contact center include customer support, telemarketing, technical support and multilingual support (which require people having knowledge of foreign languages like French, Spanish etc.). Opportunities also exist for experienced people from various backgrounds and industries. - like hospitality, services and the retail industry.

Now "RPO" - Refining Process Outsourcing in India

If the past decade saw the world getting Bangalored with BPO (business process outsourcing), it's the turn of Indian oil to sizzle abroad by ushering in the age of RPO - refining process outsourcing.

Several firms are setting up new refineries or ramping up existing capacities to keep motorists across the seven seas tanked up.

Leading the charge of India's oil brigade is Mukesh Ambani. His Reliance Petroleum is pumping $6 billion into a 29-million-tonne refinery being built next to parent RIL' existing 33-million-tonne unit at Jamnagar.

Desi (India) IT / BPO sector in trouble

If you have just quit your current job and want to move to another place, it might well be that you need not look further than your former employer.

As attrition rates go up with a mismatch in demand and supply, IT and BPO companies are now willing to rehire former employees and are even advertising for the same.

The companies are showcasing employees who have returned home in a bid to encourage others to follow.

While this trend of rehiring former employees has been prevalent, companies are now promoting this aspect to appear as an employer of choice. “More than reasons like demand and supply, we want to promote this trend to be good corporate citizens,” says Nipuna HR head Naresh Jhangiani.

BPO Deals & Hurdles

BPO Deals Increase, But Users Face Hurdles

More standardized processes will help accelerate the adoption of BPO services and make it easier for users to evaluate potential vendors

BPO / Outsourcing legal tips

Outsourcing involves a transfer of ownership of a function that may, in and of itself, cripple the Client if it is not executed properly, if the Vendor is lax in its delivery of the service or if the Vendor simply walks off the job.

This is very different from buying a service (i.e. “contracting out”) where the company retains control and ownership of the assets used to perform that function. If things don’t work out, the Client can usually substitute a new contractor quickly without great damage to the company. Consider the situation where the Client has outsourced its data centre from an on-site location using proprietary assets to an off-site facility (sometimes very far away) using Vendor-owned assets and Vendor-licensed software.

If the Client has made a mistake in its choice of Vendor, it will be very expensive to unwind the transaction – assuming the best case scenario of a solvent Vendor.

BPO Best Practices

The rise in business process outsourcing (BPO) means that more firms need to follow a nascent set of do's and don'ts for the success.

These best practices may be classified in the following two categories:

A) Startup planning
B) Ongoing management.