Outsourcing of BPO Services – Check List to Refer

In the last two decades, outsourcing Bpo services has turned out to be a global phenomenon and there are many companies in this category claiming the excellence. Also, there are many global BPO service providers offering BPO services in India alone. But still, the word outsourcing invokes a fear of losing competitive advantage and intellectual property. Before finding the right collaboration answer, take a look at the following questions for generating a well thought strategy:

Why are you outsourcing a particular task to Global BPO Service provider?
What kind of operations are you outsourcing?
Where and who will handle which process?
Are you collaborating with the right service partner?
How and where the process will get started?

Why are you outsourcing a particular task to global BPO service provider?
The companies shall not outsource the BPO service just because their competitors have adopted the trend. The organization must analyze whether your company really lack the technical advantage of delivering a particular solution or not. The management must also understand that how a BPO service in India or any other country is going to impact the business and finally the customer.

What kind of operations are you outsourcing?
There are many global BPO service providers offering BPO services in India alone pertaining to: research, development quality control, documentation, service, manufacturing, marketing and distribution. The decision makers must analyze that what is the risk involved in outsourcing a BPO service and is there a proper mitigation strategy available for averting the risks.

Where and who will handle which process?
It is a very important question, which arises while outsourcing the BPO service. The tasks of global BPO service providers must be clearly specified. The decision makers should be aware that who performs flawless roles of Product Manager, Architect and Quality Analyst among the global BPO service providers.

Are you collaborating with the right service partner?
Do not outsource the BPO service process until you know exactly that what problem is he going to solve and how effectively he will perform. Coordinate the issues in joint meetings and examine as many prototypes of processes, which they have developed.

How and where the process will get started?
Cultural issues also determine the working of your partner. The working culture of a BPO service in India will be much more different in UK or Japan. The organization must also anticipate the linguistic and cultural issues while finding the right global BPO service provider. Not only that, even the formalization of process must be done before one month while selecting the process. Additional time must be required for finding the right location dealing with travel and acquiring the work permits for starting BPO service in India. Conceptualize about the whole process and imagine that what kind of network compilers will be used and how much technical help will be rendered.
Companies across the world are in search of global BPO service providers for outsourcing the BPO services. It is always not necessary that you will only get the right solutions from the client and you will save huge money in the process. While operating as a Product Manager, one must answer these basic questions before outsourcing the BPO operations.

Sunil Kumar, Chief Executive Officer of Cleave Global e-Services. Pvt Ltd. has profound experience in global bpo services industry and expertise in projecting calls center campaigns in the ITES industry. He holds a Masters degree in Economics and with his extensive experience in outsourcing bpo services India. He is a Six Sigma (Green Belt) certified professional. He brings quality and process control in all operations.

Customer Service Dos That Work!

There are some dos that customer service agents have to keep in mind at all points. These cannot be called tips because these are cardinal to the working of a call center. You cannot work at a BPO without being careful and particular about these aspects of answering service. Let's take a look at some of these features that make a good inbound call center department:

• The primary function of the inbound call center agents is to answer calls. No matter what the call volume is or what kind of information you are looking to give out, your call center agents must make a conscious effort to handle and process all calls made to your business. You may never know what kind of opportunity you may miss out on when you are not taking up all your calls. Deploy agents in a way that your best employees are on the shift during the peak hours. Employees must be regulated so as to eradicate fatigue. No BPO agent must be overworked. Keep cycling them in a way that eases out the pressure over all those involved in the project.

• Telemarketing agents are often guilty of making promises that they don't keep. They may do that in the hope of pushing through a sale in lead generation campaigns. Outbound call center agents are known to distort some of the features in a minor way to cater to the demands of the consumer. This leaves the customers with a false sense of expectation. When they make the purchase, they are generally disappointed. That sets them into calling customer service with complaints. The call center must ensure that there is no disconnect between what is being sold verbally and what is actually on the table.

• A primary mistake that customer service agents commit is that they jump to solutions without hearing the caller out. This jumping the gun often results in the problem getting complicated. Telemarketing services are about the customers. They are the decision-makers. The business revolves around them and is about them. BPO agents have to listen to them. It's not just for the benefit of the customers. The call center services get enriched with the experience of talking to the customers. Their feedback can make a lot of difference. Telemarketing is about understanding the mind of the customer. Because you cannot see the person, you have to make calculated guesses to gauge the buyer's mind.

• Complaints are a part of customer services. Your inbound call center desk will be inundated with complaints. Many of them will be genuine, some would be fake and others just plain hysterical calls. Train your BPO agents to deal with those calls on an even basis. The call center agents must not lose their cool or get hyper about complaints that don't make sense to them. The telemarketing agents may know the features inside out, the customers don't! Your job is to help them out. Try not to take your callers and their complaints for granted. Indifferent customer care is bad for business.

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BPO's Impact on Service Quality

BPO (business process outsourcing) should not fundamentally alter the strategic quality management plan of an enterprise. BPO should be thought of, generically, as any outsourcing partner anywhere, not limited to the special case of India or other developing economies. BPO may fundamentally alter the structure of a firm and the lives of the people within it, but the strategy for delivering extraordinary quality experiences to clients should not be altered. Correlative to this, the tactics required to hold the strategy on point must be altered dramatically, in some cases. It is critical to understand this interplay of strategy and tactics around major BPO efforts to ensure that the client experience is maintained or enhanced.

Let's get on the same page by differentiating quality strategy from tactics to clarify the argument. A firm's "mission" identifies the goal or objective. For example, the mission might be "we're going to obtain a 5% share of the Chinese payment products marketplace over the next ten years." Naturally there are various business strategy statements that support this mission, but let's isolate the quality strategy component.

Broadly speaking there are only three alternative quality strategies (and hundreds of slight derivatives) that could be considered. First, "we're going to achieve the strongest client loyalty in our industry by delivering the best customer experience." Second, "we're going to achieve the highest customer satisfaction by reducing cycle times, eliminating waste, and minimizing process errors. Third, "we're going to minimize the costs of bad quality."

The first is suitable for a world-class brand appealing to the upper segments of the market. The second is appropriate for approaching a broad consumer segment with acceptable risk profiles. The third is perfect for a sub-prime lender maximizing profits by gouging high-risk segments with few alternatives.

Any of these three can achieve superior shareholder returns. The choice of quality strategy must match the company's culture and product/brand positioning, but it is primarily the match that is critical, not the approach. Many paths can be taken as long as you wear sensible shoes.
Here is the critical point relative to BPO: The BPO organization chosen must also match the quality strategy. Just as there are three broad quality strategies, there are three broad categories of BPO partners. Some BPO groups delivery extraordinary client experiences, some focus on efficient and effective processes and some crank through high volume service interactions for the lowest possible price. It is impossible for any one firm to deliver some measure of each strategy they can only do one well or all poorly. It's not a law of physics yet, but someday it will be.

You can never, never, never, raise a BPO company's quality outcomes beyond the upper limits of their current control charts within a determinant time period. Given unlimited time, of course, anything can change, but you won't have your job that long. If you need special considerations or abnormally stringent requirements then purchase from someone who is already doing it better than your own resources. Speaking from disastrous experience you cannot raise the bad to good or the good to better. Quality outcomes are impacted by the way people breathe, the way the restrooms are cleaned, the CEO's smile or frown as they walk past the desks. Nothing in your contract, no matter how lucrative, is going to alter those irreducible elements in the short term.
Once this strategic match has been established the tactical management approach must also be aligned.

Those brands and BPO partners that are targeting extraordinary customer experiences should be managed as if the BPO were an integral part of the host company. There should be no difference in the response to a customer's emergency situation at the BPO location or the host company's service center. Any differences highlight a lack of alignment on principles, values, and culture. These relationships take into account the total cost of quality but also include, albeit tacitly in most cases, the value of the brand over the long term. In many cases the BPO vendor is not chosen strictly on cost, but because of a unique capability that commands a value premium in the market.

Those companies (note the deliberate elimination of "brand" from this second tier) and their BPO vendors (note the deliberate use of vendors and not "partners"), aiming for high levels of satisfaction and efficient processes, are tightly integrated around service contracts and measured outcomes, but typically do not link at the level of principles, values, and culture. These relationships take into account the total cost of quality at the process level and attempt to optimize enterprise costs over the near term.

The low cost producers who have outsourced their service to a commodity BPO establish a tactical relationship primarily around price and complaints. The host company often manages complaints through various escalation mechanisms and the contractual relationship is the principle governing mechanism. The BPO's job is to reduce the cost of transaction processing irrespective of the total cost of quality. This is never stated explicitly because of the tacit assumption that there will not be an adverse impact on the cost of quality; however, this is rarely the case. These relationships still make good economic sense overall, but they are almost always calculated in a manner that optimizes the appearance of local savings versus considering the true enterprise-level savings.

By carefully aligning quality strategy and tactics with a BPO relationship that supports the company's market segmentation there is an attractive opportunity to gain flexibility, expansion capacity, and value-added capabilities. The risk premium associated with BPO, if done well, should be value neutral to the shareholders, worst case, and offer significant opportunities best case.Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steven_Grant

Call Center Offers Non-Voice Services - What Are They?

Most businesses take help of BPO vendors to gain a competitive edge and also to liberalize the ever- growing cost of the in-house services. Selecting to outsource help you to take leverage on the quality of work that these highly skilled, trained and proficient call center agents are known to offer to the business firms. These agents lay more emphasis on attaining 100 percent of customer satisfaction and customer retention. So let's discover the ins and outs of the business process outsourcing services.

A BPO offers a range of customer services and methods. Now a BPO mainly offers call center services, technical helpdesk support and the back office services. Furthermore, the call center services as offered by a BPO can also be categorized into two parts- non-voice services and the voice services. The voice services are divided into outbound services and inbound services, including a number of specialized service features falling under each category. On the other hand, the non-voice services are further divided into three parts. In this article, you find a brief discussion on the available non-voice services.
First of all, the non-voice services of a call center are segregated into Chat Support Services, Technical Helpdesk and the Back office support. Each of the three parts includes a range of other related service features.

The Chat Support:
This is one popular kind of non-voice service offered to your customers. It includes the live chat/talk facility on your business site, aimed at transforming your business goals into reality.

SMS Chat support:
It is through SMS chat support services that you will be able to reach out to your targeted and existing customers. Increased return on investment (ROI) and brand reinforcement with the improved text edition service features are also offered by a call center.

E-mail Support and Management Services:
It is one modern service that happens to make your business witness sales turnaround with well-detailed and finely designed email management support. Boost your business graphs by means of sending the strategically crafted product or service emails to a large number of prospective customers.

The Technical Helpdesk:
The technical support services help your business to reduce costs if any technical issues or anomalies take place. It is a 24/7 well-designed service that can easily be availed by telephone, chat or through e-mail.
Now the technical helpdesk services are usually available under different categories. These include:
•Application/Network technical Support
This non-voice call center service is especially based on offering technical assistance for any kind of application or on network arising in case of issues pertaining to the computer hardware and other software problems.

•Post-Sales and Pre-sales Technical support:
This is the service that helps customers to deal with any kind of technical query or problem, regarding the before sales or the after sales of any service or product.

Back Office Support:
One of the cost-effective and customer-centric customer care services is back office support. It also falls under the category of the well-accepted offshore services. These include services like document management, data entry, building accounts and database.
It can be rightly said that outsourcing of the BPO services are gradually developing into an integral part of the working procedures of each and every company. Their valuable contribution helps in ensuring operational success, work control, skills, cost and time factors and proper management. This is something that can never be denied.

To know more about BPO services and call center services you can log on to our website where you will get a wide array of necessary information on business process outsourcing and call centre services.

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Outbound Call Center Services in a BPO

Today, there are many companies offering outbound telemarketing services in the market. Most of them encompass an innovative call center setup meeting diverse needs and requirements. Many service providers come equipped with the advanced tools that enable them to create successful marketing calls for your services and products.

In any company, every outbound call gets recorded with an aim to ensure that the quality of calls made from an outbound call center does not get deteriorated. Outbound calls stand important as it generally refers to an on going conversation between one prospective customer and the agent.

The expertise and experience in handling the outbound call center services stands essential to accomplish every project successfully. Today, the BPO firms include well trained professionals who will be undertaking every project to accomplish their tasks well. Every project that is undertaken for sales and marketing of different services and products stands crucial to bring about the right solution in all respect.

The outbound call center services include a range of well-appointed services. These include product or service promotion, appointment scheduling, market research and survey, mortgage lead generation, email follow up, sales and marketing, voice broadcast and others.

Appointment setting or scheduling:

The appointment setting activities as offered as a part of the outbound services form to be the keystone of generating the new business avenues. It forms to be the most competent business to business communication channel that needs a complete administrative program to make sure that the appointments are rightly scheduled, by every field representative in a resourceful way possible.

Market Research and Survey :

All companies have a mission. The mission of firms offering outbound services is to offer its clients with the information that can be put into use as immediately as possible for making the organizational decisions and critical business. It is outstanding performance that matters in each campaign or project so as to ensure better customer support.

Product/ Service Promotion:

Putting in use the state of art infrastructure, most outbound call center companies aim to offer its clients with the information that can be well put into use as quickly as possible. It is through the use of advanced infrastructure that companies will be assured of getting solution based approach that meets e-commerce and telephonic needs, connected to any product campaign and also the following promotion.

Sales and Marketing :

Companies engaged in offered outbound call center services bring about all inclusive sales and marketing services that ensure generation of significant revenues for clients. Several strategies are used to undertake a particular marketing or sales campaign.

Voice Broadcast:

Voice broadcasting or voice broadcast stands for the delivery of the pre recorded voice messages to any live person or answering machine or sometimes both. This is by far, one of the most economical and cost effective ways for reaching out employees, prospects, customers and groups.

Email Follow Up:

The outbound call centers are generally specialized in improving and increasing the rates of business conversion, maximizing the campaign effectiveness and also building a strong customer relationships through the direct mail follow up.

To know more about BPO services and call center services you can log on to our website where you will get a wide array of necessary information on business process outsourcing and call center services.

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