Quality versus quantity – Investing in BPO talent

By Martin Conboy

The ability to attract, develop and retain talent within a constantly evolving environment is fundamental to the success of any outsourcing provider. Likewise, failure to invest in human resources will bring grave consequences.

Everybody knows that the three pillars of people, process and technology are fundamental to driving innovation and business transformation. It’s a given that all outsourcing relationships should be built on these three pillars. And the most important of these in driving value and competitive advantage is people.

However, as Phil Fersht President and Chief Executive Officer for HFS highlighted in a recent article, out of the three it’s talent that is often given the short end of the stick when it comes to establishing and managing outsourcing relationships.

The “Talent Paradox”

Both outsourcing providers and buyers fail to realise the importance of investing in the key driver of value creation – people – which has created what Fersht refers to as a “talent paradox.” As outsourcing moves from focusing on labour arbitrage to adding value through innovation, vendors and buyers need to make the necessary investments in the key driver of value creation – people.

“If outsourcing is to deliver on its full potential, buyers as well as providers need to invest in developing the skills and talent to capture the greater levels of value available from fourth and fifth generation BPO solutions,” said Mike Salvino, group chief executive, Business Process Outsourcing, Accenture.

The ability to attract, develop and retain talent within a constantly evolving environment is fundamental to the success of any outsourcing provider. The need for agents with specific yet transferrable skills is becoming more and more critical.

Talent management

Organisations are viewing customer care as a strategic differentiator, and employees have a tremendous impact on that. Employee competency and satisfaction will determine customer satisfaction and the experiences customers have with your organisation.

Courtney Ada, Customer Success Manager for OracleCMS, commented recently, “I think some of this change began during the GFC when companies were really challenged to do more with less. Improving your ability to recruit and retain talent is one way to deal with that.”

Read full story. http://www.theoutsourcing-guide.com/article/investing-bpo-talent/

Need a parking space? Divvy sets up in Melbourne

Divvy Parking allows people with spare parking spaces to hire those spaces out. Divvy handles the bookings, payments (taking a percentage for providing the service) and provides a money back guarantee on availability.

The concept behind Divvy Parking is that people lease out spare parking spaces at their homes or places of business.

Perhaps they live in a busy suburb where parking is restricted, and they are happy to let someone pay to park in their drive while they are at work. Or maybe their office space comes with an entitlement to four parking spots, and they and their employees only use three of them.

Divvy brings together people with spare parking spaces and those who need them, handles the payments (taking a slice of the action, naturally), and provides a money-back guarantee that the space will be available on the first day of the booking and matches its description.

To read more BPO news and updates visit http://www.theoutsourcing-guide.com/

Why I offshored myself to the Philippines

By Derek Stewart

“Offshoring” is a loaded word and controversial topic. To some it means corporate greed gone rampant, lost jobs, destroyed industries, wider economic and societal problems. To others it means embracing a globalised economy, uniquely benefitting developing nations by giving them a real chance to rise out of poverty, redistributing the wealth of the world and lower priced goods and services, for a win-win situation.

There is the often told story of someone losing their job because it was offshored or outsourced, but there’s the less publicised story of the new jobs created by offshoring. Every story has two sides, the rise of technology and automation has caused the loss of many jobs and ended long standing industries ever since the Industrial Revolution. However, it has also created jobs that never existed before, in researching, developing, implementing and improving that same technology and automation, creating industries that never existed until recently like mobile app development or SEO specialists.

This is why when I hear about jobs being lost in Australia to offshoring hubs such as the Philippines, I also look to the jobs that are being created by this change, and how this will affect Australian employees over the next 5-10 years. I see it as a reflection of the dynamic world we live in, where the only constant is change, and the shifts in the skills required in the marketplace are evolving in front of our eyes, faster than ever before. It also highlights to me the importance of being adaptable and forward looking, you can’t predict every change, you can only make yourself flexible and agile, knowing the changes will inevitably come, and handling them as they do.

Read full story about Offshoring. Visit theOutsourcing-guide.com

CPSU says Human Services call centre Outsourcing put on hold

The Community and Public Sector Union, according to Government News, has extracted a commitment from the Department of Human Services for a four week halt to what the union claims is a push to outsource government call centre work to Telstra.

In a bulletin to members, the CPSU said it had secured an agreement from DHS that the giant department will take “no further steps to outsource services or work to third party providers” for the next four weeks following a second round of talks over the dispute at the Fair Work Commission.

The union has been ardently opposing any co-location of Telstra staff within DHS call centres, fearing it is the start of an attempt to send government jobs across the private sector.

However telecommunications industry sources have indicated that Telstra’s work at DHS is more likely to be about coaching staff how to steer Centrelink and Medicare’s phone customers to much cheaper online or automated channels that avoid the use of human agents in call centres.

Should that be the case, it’s probable a shrinking inbound workload would ultimately require fewer DHS call centre positions for inbound work, thus allowing the department to either redeploy staff to other areas or potentially up the rotation of ‘customer facing’ staff across areas.

Telstra has already aggressively pursued the widespread automation of its own customer service front ends, including the use of natural speech recognition, to cut costs and speed up workflow and Chief Executive David Thodey this year predicted the carrier might not have any call (human staffed) centres in just five years.

However the CPSU is not relenting in its campaign to maintain grass roots community and workplace pressure to stop outsourcing, telling its members it had secured an agreement for DHS to “provide all relevant documentation and information on what the department’s needs are behind the proposal to contract services out to private companies.”

Read more: http://www.governmentnews.com.au/2014/10/cpsu-says-human-services-call-centre-outsourcing-put-hold/‘

For more news and BPO updates. visit theOutsourcing-guide.com

Customer Experience in the Digital Age

What is the digital age? The digital age embraces how we interconnect, how we shop, how we learn. Even in a traditional call centre, the digital age is all around us; even if someone calls via a traditional telephone, the agent uses a digital channel for research, for recording the conversation, for communicating with the consumer, etc.

Simply put, the digital age means information where, when and how the user wants it – anywhere at any time. It’s communication on the consumer’s terms

Today’s multichannel customers demand better experiences than they get from companies that provide under performing one-off touchpoints. Disruptive and converging digital technologies such as social media, mobility and real-time are reshaping the customer experience.

Many companies have moved beyond the cost reduction benefits of going digital to take on the more market-facing challenge of enhancing the customer experience. The burning question is: how can you make your business relevant to customers in this digital age and what is the role of BPO and outsourcing providers in supporting organisations to manage digital transformation?

In 2014 the term User Experience (UX), alternatively referred to as Digital Customer Experience, have become popular. “User experience” or “Digital Customer Experience” encompasses all aspects of an online customer’s interaction with a company, its services, and its products. How do firms provide an exceptional and seamless experience for their online customers?

Well the answer to some extent is quite simple: start with the customer and what they want. But what do they want? And is, what they want and expect today the same as it will be in one or two years time? How do organisations transform to keep connected with their ever evolving digital customer?

Earlier this year a report was released, Digital Transformation: Why and How Companies are Investing in New Business Models to Lead Digital Customer Experiences, by Brian Solis, with Charlene Li and Jaimy Szymanski of Altimeter Group. The report defines digital transformation as:

Social, mobile, real-time, and other disruptive technologies are aligning to necessitate bigger changes than initially anticipated. Digital transformation is a result of businesses seeking to adapt to this onslaught of disruptive technologies affecting customer and employee behaviour.

Challenged by an increasingly complex multifaceted ecosystem of websites, social media channels, mobile sites and apps, firms are aimingaspiring to align their investments and strategies to match customers’ most pressing needs and requirements. The most critical aspect to delivering an exceptional customer experience is not the systems themselves, but the architecture and processes behind the scenes. It’s the ability to leverage the technology to create ways to facilitate an optimal customer experience.

Mapping the customer journey

According to the Altimeter report, maping and understanding the customer experience or journey is becoming critical in guiding transformation efforts.

To read the full story. Visit theOutsoursing-guide.com

Allow me some choice!

By Jon Pratlett

Previous Neuro-Insights introduced you to a very powerful and practical motivational model CARER and the first letter of it – Certainty. The significant influence these 5 drives exert on people’s mindset and behaviour must not be underestimated.

Now to the second letter in the CARER model “A” for Autonomy. A degree of autonomy and control over one’s work, generates a reward state for the brain. Too much or too little autonomy creates a threat state.

‘Here’s three options, which would you prefer?’ will tend to elicit a better response than ‘Here’s what you should do!’

If you are in a leadership role, do you tend to “DICTATE” (too much control relative to your team members motivation, knowledge & skill), “ABDICATE” (Too little control/support), or do you get it “just right!” and “EMPOWER” (along the diagonal line in the picture)?

When you empower someone, you provide autonomy appropriate to the person’s knowledge, skill and motiviation, relative to the task at hand.

When assigning a task to someone, your clarity in terms of end result (purpose), time frame, budget, resources available and policy provide certainty and establish the boundaries within which the assignee is authorised to exercise their creativity and autonomy in:

• how to complete an assigned task.
• when to schedule it in.
• which of the available resources are most suitable to utilise.

Jon Pratlett is a neuroleadership expert, speaker, facilitator, high performance consultant and coach. His clients include many of Austalia’s leading companies, as well as the Australian Olympic Committee. He has represented Australia in 2000 and 2001 at the World Ironman Triathlon Championship in Kona, Hawaii and has lead the Bondi Running & Triathlon Club to 3 State Club titles. He is Sydney based and travels the globe.

To read more article like this visit http://www.theoutsourcing-guide.com

Business Process Modeling your recruitment practices

By Martin Conboy

For BPO service companies in today’s ultra competitive business environment, a focus on efficiency is more important than ever before. Cost management and business processes optimisation are essential considerations for company’s to support their bottom line.

Business Process Modeling (BPM) is the mapping out of a company’s processes with the goal of improving their efficiency. BPM is commonplace in operations management, however it’s value transcends into all areas of business operations.

Sophisticated outsourcing organisations are starting to understand their cost per hire (CPH) as a metric to manage costs in the recruitment process. Not counting the actual sometimes huge amounts of money spent on marketing and promotions to get people to actually apply for a position, the actual costs associated with screening and processing applicants is a daunting number. In the Philippines best practice is about US $5 per actual hire. In first world countries it’s considerably more.

Given the unbelievable wastage, on average only 3% of ICT/ BPO applicants actually get hired, managing the hiring costs is an important KPI. However it is not well understood in many organisations.

The Recruitment Process needs Recruitment Process Modeling

A company’s recruitment process is no different than any other business process in the sense that the steps can be mapped out and analysed for efficiency gains. Which leads us to: Recruitment Process Modeling.

A successful job applicant will move through a number of steps from the time they apply through to their on boarding and training. Any inefficiency in the recruitment process can have a negative impact on the company’s bottom line, while also wasting every body’s valuable time. Most organisations have a ‘hidden factory’ that sits underneath the real company and does all of the rework and duplication of effort that no body is paying for.

Many companies overlook the importance of a streamlined and efficient recruitment process, but savvy business executives and managers realize that this is no different than any other business process.

How Efficient is your Company?

Now is the time to answer one very important question: when was the last time you examined the efficiency of your company’s recruitment process and sheeted it home to a cost per hire?

Thanks to the use of human resource technology that leading players like Canadian software company VidCruiter have developed, companies of all sizes now have the means to apply Recruitment Process Modeling to the recruitment process.

This is beneficial for a number of reasons:

• Ability to map out the recruitment process in an easy to follow workflow system
• Automate tedious steps such as reference checks and phone interviews
• Find ways to do away with inefficient processes, such as by replacing phone interviews with asynchronous video interviews

For many years, companies of all sizes have been ignoring the fact that Business Process Modeling can improve the efficiency of the recruitment process. Now things have changed!

Once your model is in place then you can automate most of the steps in the recruitment cycle.

By automating the process, both interviewers and interviewees are endorsing the fact that efficiency and engagement is better than ever before.

Making changes to an automated recruitment process can help any company save considerable time and money, while eliminating inefficient tasks that often times weigh down all parties involved.

After all who can afford the cost of that hidden factory

Recruitment Process Automation is here to stay and it starts with Recruitment Process Modeling.

Low cost Outsourcing in the Philippines

Gain More – Outsource in the Philippines

Outsourcing ends up being every foreigner’s ideal resort in order for their businesses to survive amongst worldwide recession. It has also tested its huge contribution to the development of the Philippine economy.

The increasing quality of foreign employers looking for solutions in the Philippines simply proves how capable the Filipinos are in providing high-quality services almost equivalent to what employers get from their nearby employees, ONLY CHEAPER.

Check out more of what you can gain, and how you and your company can profit in outsourcing in the Philippines!

Outsourcing – What exactly is it?

Gather a brief meaning of what Outsourcing really is.

Outsourcing is the subcontracting of an overseas company to perform services for example customer service, back-office jobs like bookkeeping, tech support, encoding, virtual assistance etc.

In the current times, outsourcing is most commonly defined in instances where an IT company gives the technical and even customer service support to a third-party company to do the job. Then again the main objective why for example, a US company prefer outsourcing their customer support support department to offshore countries like India and Philippines is because of the Cost of services. The comparative quality compared to of what the local employees is able to offer, is of course a Big Plus!

Why Outsource?

Are you still in doubt on why you should outsource? Well, here’s exactly why…

Nowadays, the rate per hour for a highly-qualified US employee is $10. So for an 8-hour, 5-days per week work, you’d have to pay $400 a week just to get the weekly job done. Not to say, that this is just the minimal fee.

However, outsourcing allows you to extend your money and save a lot more. Instead of paying $10 minimum per hour, you can already get an employee offshore with an equal amount of work quality at a $5-6 per hour!

It is clearly the primary reason why many foreigners invest outsourcing in other countries, preferrably Asian.

In terms of customer satisfaction or top-class work, not a problem ! A lot of countries may belong in the 3rd world countries but they have a very good English language background, as well as in technical and back-office jobs. They have a quite impressive passion and determination for understanding and for working. So rest assured that you’re business is in good hands.

Reasons of Outsourcing

Organizations that outsource are seeking to realize benefits or address the following issues :

Cost effective – The lowering of the overall cost of the service to the business. This will involve reducing the scope, defining quality levels, re-pricing, re-negotiation, cost re-structuring. Access to lower cost economies through offshoring called “labor arbitrage” generated by the wage gap between industrialized and developing nations.

Focus on Core Business – Resources ( for example investment, people, infrastructure ) are focused on developing the core business. For example often organizations outsource their IT support to specialized IT services companies.

Cost restructuring – Operating leverage is a measure that compares fixed costs to variable costs. Outsourcing changes the balance of this ratio by offering a move from fixed to variable cost and also by making variable costs more predictable.

Improve quality – Achieve a step change in quality through contracting out the service with a new service level agreement.

Knowledge – Access to intellectual property and wider experience and knowledge.

Contract – Services will be provided to a legally binding contract with financial penalties and legal redress. This is not the case with internal services.

Operational expertise – Access to operational best practice that would be too difficult or time consuming to develop in-house.

Access to talent – Access to a larger talent pool and a sustainable source of skills, in particular in science and engineering.

Capacity management – An improved method of capacity management of services and technology where the risk in providing the excess capacity is borne by the supplier.

Catalyst for change – An organization can use an outsourcing agreement as a catalyst for major step change that can not be achieved alone. The outsourcer becomes a Change agent in the process.

Enhance capacity for innovation – Companies increasingly use external knowledge service providers to supplement limited in-house capacity for product innovation.

Reduce time to market – The acceleration of the development or production of a product through the additional capability brought by the supplier.

Commodification – The trend of standardizing business processes, IT Services, and application services which enable to buy at the right price, allows businesses access to services which were only available to large corporations.

Risk management – An approach to risk management for some types of risks is to partner with an outsourcer who is better able to provide the mitigation.

Venture Capital – Some countries match government funds venture capital with private venture capital for startups that start businesses in their country.

Tax Benefit – Countries offer tax incentives to move manufacturing operations to counter high corporate taxes within another country.

theOutsourcing-guide.com is the ultimate reference guide for the BPO and outsourcing industries and it will become the most comprehensive resource for organisations looking to engage BPO and outsourcing providers. As well as providing a range of eBooks, articles and whitepapers explaining the various aspects of BPO, theOutsourcing-guide.com provides an online directory of providers segmented by category and location.

theOutsourcing-guide.com is a vehicle for vendors and service providers to showcase their organisations and the outsourcing services they provide.

Customer Service Call Center – A Viewpoint

Customer service call center is a way to effectively eliminate the difficulties incurred by clients/customer with their products as well as services. Any business – whether big or small – should have a customer service call center to generate and assist people with customer support and efficient solutions. Lots of companies are benefiting from offshore outsourcing services – in this way ; they can concentrate on their core business and reduce overheads.

A lot of companies have actually streamlined their approach to associating with offshore outsourcing services . Companies should first decide on their needs before they opt for a customer service call center. Most companies search for budget solutions to suit their needs -this way they can easily resolve their customer’s needs and also take care of their expenses. Technical issues are consistently arising after the product-sale and the business itself can justify the services.

It is no secret that companies are searching for low-cost customer service solutions to produce a better customer services – because of offshore outsourcing services, this is possible.

Retaining customers is a must, and having a customer service call center is one way to do it. If companies fail to retain present customers, they will certainly suffer over time. Companies that are able to support their customers by taking advantage of offshore outsourcing services will win the hearts of their customers. Customer service call center might seem like a small activity but it can earn a huge applause and assure colossal returns. Customer service call center activities retain old customers and help develop future customers/clients.

Customer service call center representatives have to be very smart, talented, genuine and highly skilled in handling difficult clients ( every business has difficult customers ). A couple of offshore outsourcing services hire employees that are not only great at assisting customers, but are also very great at handling cantankerous customers also. Many offshore customer service call center solution also employ state of the art technology and sheer professionalism in order to create an environment which will meet the various demands of valued customers/clients. Another great quality of offshore customer services is their commitment of time and completion of tasks.

There are a variety of activities involved in a contact center service and all of these activities are dealt with equal efficiency through reputable offshore outsourcing services. As a matter of fact offshore outsourcing services have to work according to their client’s specifications – but of course, small variations and modifications are allowed.

The numerous contact center services offered to doctors and lawyers are usually appointment fixing, query answering, registration, appoint reconfirmation etc. Your company does not have to be gigantic in order to take advantage of offshore outsourcing solutions.

theOutsourcing-guide.com is the ultimate reference guide for the BPO and outsourcing industries and it will become the most comprehensive resource for organisations looking to engage BPO and outsourcing providers. As well as providing a range of eBooks, articles and whitepapers explaining the various aspects of BPO, theOutsourcing-guide.com provides an online directory of providers segmented by category and location.

theOutsourcing-guide.com is a vehicle for vendors and service providers to showcase their organisations and the outsourcing services they provide.