Women Employees in BPO

Today women play a vital role in Indian BPO sector. According to survey out of 400 million of workforce in India, around 30-40 percent are females. They are one of the driving forces behind the success of call center industry in India.

The Indian BPO industry accounts for a revenue US$ 39.6 billion and has emerged as one of the largest private industry providing direct employment to 1.6 million professionals.

The participation of women in BPO industry has been seen as a critical enabling factor for continued growth of the industry. Today BPO companies are recognizing women on board at all levels and this helps the organization to make good business sense. Therefore BPO companies are trying to develop and involve women for higher roles and functions.

Most of the people talk about exploitation of women in call centers. Despite the physical stress, mundane nature of the job and low status of call center work, women constitute about 70 percent of the total workforce in BPO sector. According to an independent research it has been found out that women are satisfied and enjoy their work at call centers. A call center job gives them more freedom and autonomy.

Women especially in India have found out that, the wages that they earn through a BPO job help them to experience freedom and autonomy. In India the women mobility has always been controlled by men even in case of highly educated and independent women. According to a study carried on call center workers in India, it has been found that women are happy to learn new skills and have learnt to become more assertive.

The acquired call center skills ranging from soft skills like communication, interpersonal and listening skills to product knowledge and technical knowledge have given a sense of confidence in women. This helps them to deal with customers as well as society at large. However there are women who opt for call center career for short span of life while others continue to pursue their careers in call centers.

The interpersonal skills of women are now being recognized and valued in call centers. In most of the call centers, a premium is attached to women's voice and interpersonal skills. This is because the quality of customer care jobs ultimately helps a company to gain huge profits. The exact number of women working in Indian BPO's is not exactly known but the development of IT industry in India had a clear impact on emancipation of women.

According to the studies of village pay phones in Bangladesh, advancement of computer aided technologies and networking in India show that the household income has increased and women have a say and mobility in household matters. With introduction of communication technologies and new information the workload of every woman has increased. They have to do the unpaid household chores in addition to the paid work in the BPO industry.

There is no doubt that technology itself is gendered and is strongly shaped by the patriarchal yardstick of class and gender. Despite all these the most important issue is to restore and carry forward the empowered participation of women in the development of technology and enhance the participation of women through skills, education and creative knowledge. The Indian BPO industry has set high standards in gender inclusivity. Today women play a vital role as the part of the BPO workforce. It has been suggested that the professional skills of women needs to upgrade therefore a number of mentorship programs are being organized.

These programs help women working in BPO to have a definite career path and fulfill a certain criteria in the empowerment of women. India has the largest number of women working in BPO's than any other single country in the world. This can be partly attributed to the growth of BPO's in India.

Ivana Lewis has written a wide range of articles on business process outsourcing. Moat of her write-ups are about BPO, inbound customer service and inbound call center.

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Call Centers in India: Favorite Hot Spots of Outsourcing

Call centers in India need no introduction but a special mention, indeed. Organizations from all over the world have preferred to outsource call centers services to India than its competitive counterparts. India and its BPO industry has emerged as powerful contender and leader of outsourcing. No wonder, India has become an attractive option for outsourcing call center services.

Thanks to the wide array of services, favorable government policies and infrastructure and facilities to meet the international demands and varied range, types of business needs. There have been several reasons that count and work in favor of Indian outsourcing industry. Some of them are:

1) Educated and inexpensive workforce
Given the large numbers of highly qualified and IT savvy people who are skillful and English proficient as well, call centers in India are attracting huge work demands across the world. It is to be noted that India has the highest English-speaking population after the United States. The increasing numbers of college graduates and reputation of call center workers have also made outsourcing popular which accounts to never ending resources and facilities in India.

2) Specialized and Customized Call Center Outsourcing Services
Be it inbound call center services, telemarketing services, end to end software or application processing, email support services and chat support services or help-desk services, you name it and call centers in India have it. They have equally authority over inbound and outbound call center services. Offering expert solution based on international quality standards and technology framework, their operational expertise is unparalleled.

3) Time Zone
India has the classic advantage of ideal 12 hours gap that helps Indian BPOs to run 24/7 call center operations.

4) Policies of Indian Government
Indian government has shown extensive and friendly support to Indian outsourcing industry. The government has issued policies, such as tax exemption on IT export, duty free export of goods, and encourages establishments of software technology parks equipped with latest of telecom and IT technologies.

5) Cost-effective call center services
It can be termed as one of the major reasons for which organizations outsource to India. As per a survey, Indian outsource cut the operational costs by more than half and their round of clock services come as an added advantage.

Article Source: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/call-centers-in-india-favorite-hot-spots-of-outsourcing.html

Brief Overview on Outsourcing and Call Centers

The term Outsourcing is used when a company contracts with another person or company to do their business operations or functions. In today’s era, almost every other company outsources in one way or the other. Usually, the function that is to be outsourced is considered as non-core to the company who will be using outsourcing services. The functions or processes that were previously done or performed in –house are now contracted out of business to an outsourced organization or an external provider. Any two or may be more organizations may enter into a contract wherein exchange of payments and services takes place. Majority of the work is being outsourced to companies or providers outside the nation, which is a big concern and this is termed as offshore outsourcing services or also many times as off shoring. Both these are quite odd terms in the sense that if a company decides to do business with any other company, it does not necessarily mean that the parent company have to go offshore.

The word outsourcing has been in existence from the day work specialization is there but it is only that in the past 20 to 30 years that many companies have implemented or started to use this concept or model to perform various processes or functions to include, but not limited to data entry and processing, account receivables and accounts payable, billing, and telemarketing etc. The primary reason that the companies go for outsourced services is that these processes or functions can be performed more cost effectively and at the same time increases the efficiency when these same functions are performed by call centers or external providers who possess the necessary skills, tools, facilities, and well trained employees to carry out these tasks.

The whole process of hiring or employing any external company to handle/perform business activities for any other organization is termed as Business Process Outsourcing. Call Centers as they are often called are the companies that provide these outsourced services. Many a times they are also known as service providers. At present, the most common forms of these outsourced services are business process outsourcing services and information technology outsourcing services.

Those companies who are not so big and have limited resources and money usually go for both internal as well as service providers so as to bring timeliness in their business functions and speed up their work processes. These sort of companies tend to hire many service providers who takes care of and handles almost all the aspects of an existing or a new project and this include marketing, sales, product design, software coding as well as software testing.

A centralized office or a workplace which is utilized for receiving, producing, and transmitting a very large number of complaints, requests etc. via email or telephone is commonly known as a call center. A call center typically consists of workspace for employees with many workstations inclusive of computers that is a must for all the agents, a telecom headset with a telecom switch, and managers managing the work force. Most of them are operated independently but recently the trend of additional networked centers has also come up.

A majority of business primarily in the US and UK are utilizing call centers in order to interact with their customers and resolve their queries and address their issues and concerns. Call Center Services include telemarketing, customer helpdesk support, email support, chat support, debt collections, inbound support, outbound support, data processing, claims management etc. There are many companies, which service their internal functions also with the use of service providers.

Description: Call centers have been a boom in the past decade but as it is with every other booming industry, they do have their critics, majority of them argue about the work atmosphere, especially the odd timings and office environment.

Inbound and Outbound Call Centers

Call center business is one of the most highly valued businesses in this generation. Telemarketing business brings huge amount of profits. It has easy accessibility, wide scope, low costs, easy to outsource, and it requires the very basic verbal communication skills.

This kind of business is not as complicated compared to other businesses that involve constant analysis process and practical and technical skills. The primary medium of this business is the use of phones, either ordinary phones, or phone calls via the internet.

Although this business seems to look simple, however running this business is not as easy as you think. Interacting with people via phones calls is more risky than personal interactions. Communicating without seeing the real expressions and gestures of the people you are talking too, as well as without having eye contact is high risk to misinterpretations that is why call center agents require enormous trainings to learn proper ways of dealing with customers through phone calls.

This kind of business booms in marketing industry even though it requires enormous trainings. Telemarketing trainings are less challenging to those countries where citizens were trained to be proper communicators since they were still young. Telemarketing outsourcing evolved for the reason that many countries have potential to become efficient call center agents.

Telemarketing companies outsourced their services to countries that have high competency in using the English Language. Outsourcing to other countries also has low cost effectiveness.

There are two main types of telemarketing services. Inbound call center is the first one, where the call centre agents for a specific problem or need receive calls. For example, an individual need someone to teach him how to repair his television set. The client can ask telemarketing companies who are focusing in appliance repairs to ask for assistance.

Outbound call center is where a business is run for the purpose of promoting products and brands. These call center companies focus more on sales. They are using the strategies of telemarketing to advertise their products and brands in order to gain lots of customers. Outbound call center is an effective style of promotion because telemarketing could reach customers globally.

Outsourcing has affected business organizations all over the world with its many benefits. It has transformed the way we worked. Find out more about outsourcing by visiting us here. This article is written by Sher Torres who benefits from outsourcing herself.

Know about outsourcing as it Call Centers [http://www.cleaveglobal.com/services.html] as well as new updates about outsourcing.

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Call Center Quality

Quality is one of the pillars of success in call center services. Clients and customers are interested in quality work only. Competition in every business domain is so acute that there is very little room for error. Shabby work is detrimental for the brand reputation and BPO units are aware of that. Once you get a taint on your call center, you will find that business firms are not willing to touch you. To steer clear of such infamy, you will have to pull up the benchmark that measure performances at your call centers. Managers and supervisors have to particularly careful about quality checks and monitoring. It's not an easy task to monitor agents when they are handling hundreds of calls every day. But you have to carry on this labor to ensure that you are churning out only quality business process outsourcing work.
Adherence to stringent measures is necessary to keep the quality intact. Every step in the call center services should be measured against some set parameters. You have to keep the parameters higher than the average at BPO units. When you set the standards at a higher premium, your Transcription Service agents will be working harder to achieve those goals. A note of caution is necessary here. If your telemarketing goals are outlandish, the agents will give up before the projects starts rolling. Setting realistic targets is important for proper and positive motivation. Managers of telemarketing services can study the required standards from other projects in the same domain. You can always gather information from the Internet. Research is the key that sets off the project on the right track.
Monitoring of calls at the inbound call center and the outbound desk helps you learn from mistakes. There will be calls that do not yield results. There will be errors of telemarketing that come through clearly when you listen to the tapes of the conversation between agents and customers. But the call center managers have to do it in the right spirit. Your aim must be pick out the mistakes, not the agents responsible for those errors. When you start headhunting, agents get intimidated. Telemarketing services will suffer greatly when the agents are not free about their work. You can conduct training sessions to listen to the tapes. Make sure you praise a good job done while discussing these calls. A pat on the back inspires the whole team.
Manpower is the primary ingredient to guarantee quality in call center services. Hire the best available talent and make sure they are properly trained. No two-telemarketing project is exactly similar. Customize your training according to the campaign. Some added investment in training sessions will keep you in good stead to tackle complicated projects. Let the BPO agents pick things up instead of cramming them down their throats. No matter how skilled a customer service agent, unless that person is a team player, there is no room in telemarketing services. It's never a single player game. Get dedicated and focused employees. That will cut down your trouble by a large chunk.
We have the strictest quality checks on our Market Research services। Our BPO managers always work towards maintaining a higher standard of performance.
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