BPO AND KPO MANAGEMENT

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Section A:
Part One:

1. Manpower can be retained by which of the following technique:

a. Comfort and Care
b. Problem-Solving technique
c. Attention
d. Proper Training

2. Which of the following is not a challenge to the BPO Industry?

a. Data Security
b. Poor Infrastructure
c. Attrition
d. Lack of Identity

3. Pricing technique where a customer pays a flat rate for services is_________.

a. Variable Pricing
b. Unit Pricing
c. Fixed Pricing
d. Risk/Reward sharing

4. A MIS report that deals in compliance related to quality and timeliness is_________.

a. Cash Tracker Report
b. Senior Management Report
c. SLA Compliance Report
d. Production Report


5. Off – Shoring means __________.

6. Size, quality, labor cost etc. are categorized into which form of ITES to be outsourced:

a. People Attractiveness
b. Labor Attractiveness
c. Location Attractiveness
d. Quality Attractiveness

7. The risk that include errors in estimating overall time for mitigating is a________.

a. Data Security Risk
b. Transition Risk
c. Transactional Risk
d. Loss of Control Risk

8. Mitigating of Risk means_____________

9. Which of the following is not a benefit derived from BPO?

a. Improved Accountability
b. Operational Cost Control
c. Improved HR
d. IPR Protection

10. The service that comprises of areas related to the functional operations is_______

a. Vertical Service
b. Horizontal Service
c. Diagonal Service
d. Service Focused Service

Part Two:

1. Define the term “Emotional Intelligence”.

2. Differentiate between BPO and KPO.

3. Discuss in brief the Web – based Market Research process in the KPO’s.

4. Write a short note on “Change Management”.

5. Discuss in brief the problems faced by BPO‟s.

Section B: Caselets

Caselet 1

With the mission that reads “To add value to our client‟s business by providing cost – effective premium – quality customer management services and be the preferred vendor for off shored outsourced BPO services”, Intelenet Global definitely is set to go places. A joint venture between the mighty TATA Consultancy services (TCS) and the strong Housing development Finance Corporation (HDFC), Intelenet aims to deliver business processes outsourcing (BPO)solutions to organizations in the US, UK and Canada. Intelenet‟s parentage enables it to deliver scale, infrastructure and business continuity due to its deep financial strength. TCS brings to Intelenet a vast and rich experience in executing and maintaining mission – critical projects. TCS‟ prowess in technology implementation is unchallenged. And its knowhow in domain capabilities and a strong project management is invaluable. HDFC is a complete financial conglomerate in itself with proven competencies in banking, insurance, mutual funds, asset management and, of course, its core strengths, mortgage and properties. It brings to Intelenet its experience in customer management process, back office operations and property management.

Together TCS and HDFC provide Intelenet the tools and resources necessary or effective customer service in the respective business domains. “Over and above all this, we get to learn and implement the best practices in the areas of migrating expertise, deploying technology to improve the efficiency of any project and last but not the least, operational expertise in handling a process,” says Sushil kumar, the proud CEO of Intelenet. “Also, the goodwill TCS has created outside India, domain expertise (finance) from HDFC, and of course no anxieties about funding requirements etc, are some other advantages of belonging to such strong parents. Ours is a domain-led organization, thanks to our strong parents, that allows us to stand apart,” he adds. “Intelenet‟s ability to offer an end-to-end service – from a basic service to complex task that involves decision making in its main marketing pitch.”

Contract Centre Operation

The contract centre is the most vital part of the company with almost 70 percent of the staff engaged in this activity. Intelenet caters to several clients from the UK and the USA. Currently, call centre operations are in the areas of banking & finance, insurance, telecommunications, hospitality, retail and travel. The 4,000 – odd people take almost 5,00,000 to 5,50,,000 calls a day on average making it close to 20 to 180 calls per person per day. A simple order call can take anything between 165 and 240 seconds while a technical process call takes as high as 10 minutes, while a service level agreement call takes around 9 minutes, according to Shyam Krishnan, Head of Operations. It is important to perform equally well in each call; since each call is broadly of the same nature, monotony creeps into the job and the fact the CSAs are constantly bombarded with calls one after the other makes the job highly stressful. Intelenet‟s infrastructure, employee appreciation programme, rewards and certificates signed by CEO himself, Hall of fame nomination for deserving employees etc are some of the activities conducted regularly to de-stress CSAs and keep their motivation level high. Intelenet has implemented process re-engineering tools and techniques for high efficiency. The advantages are two- fold: one, the CSA gets a breather for a second that can be used to sip water etc and, two; the CSA does not have to repeat the greeting to everybody thus reducing some of the monotony of the job. This has been a formidable achievement for Intelenet.

Training

Training is the most important part of a call centre operation, and given the scale, attrition and ramp-up plans most of the companies have there are 600 to 650 people under training at any given point in time, says Sheldon D‟Souza, head of Training at Intelenet. Training is usually a 45- day programme with some minor variations due to nature of process-based training. Training begins with a strong focus on interpersonal and English-language skills, i.e., the science of language. Trainees are taught to „think in English and then speak in English” as most Indians are used to thinking in their native language and then speaking in English. This creates some obvious problems, which have to be addressed in the first part of the training programme.

The next level is customer service training, which mostly involves culture training, rules of courtesy, politeness and friendliness, sensitization programme – to culture, to individualism, need for privacy etc. Intelenet believes that history, geography and economy effect culture and hence has introduced a session called „Cause and Effect Analysis Culture‟ in all its training programmes. This is absolutely unique in the BPO industry. This is followed by a programme called „Com feel America‟. This consists of an introduction to the basic culture, heritage, mannerisms, style of talking, compulsions, religious affiliations and sentiments etc of Americans from the East Coast, the West Coast and Central America. The second level lasts 120 hours.

Level three is process-based training that focuses on the actual process that the trainees will handle after completion, like insurance, credit cards, and telecom etc. Simulation techniques, actual customer calls for testing etc. are some of the tools used for this level of training. How long this takes depends on the depth of the process – i.e., a simple outbound process can take up to five days while an inbound transaction – oriented process can require up to 20 days of training.

Then starts the on-the-job training (OJT), which is exposure to actual work. They listen to live calls and then start taking calls themselves. OJT involves low quantity but high supervision. The OJT programme is also used to plot the learning curve of the trainee and hence the success, flaws, issues with the training programme. At every stage of the OJT, there is detailed feedback about the training programme – i.e., what are the improvement areas, where changes are required etc. Correlation studies are conducted between the high scores in training versus high scores in operations. All of this is to improve upon the training system. Throughout the training programme, teamwork is emphasized and a culture for working in teams is instilled into the trainees. A salary is paid throughout the training programme at Intelenet. Trainees, on the successful completion of OJT, join as Customer Service Associates.

Human Resource Management

Human Resource Management is the backbone of any company, especially of a BPO unit due to the youthful profile of its employees. And to top of it, the nature of work is highly stressful – not just the job itself, which involves handling customers diligently and caringly, but the erratic hours of work can also take its toll on the motivation of employees. Employees need to know that they are important for the organization and Intelenet‟s „people first‟ policy focuses on just that. An example of this policy is the commissioning of gallops agency to conduct a free and fair survey of Intelenet‟s employees – the problems they face and the issues that bothered them across 12 questions. The recommendations of the gallops survey were translated into an action plan.

„Work hard, Play Hard‟ is the motto and programmes are arranged to create the fun element that not only destresses CSAs but motivates them. In the second week of January (2004) Intelenet organized „Employee Appreciation Week‟. Employee appreciation is a core value building process. The activities included in the week-long programme were: indoor fun cricket matches, a „Mr. and Ms. Intelenet‟ awards night, daily themes and many other interactive sessions, including a raffle to support a charity of Intelenet‟s choice. The various motivational programs include „Best Employee Award‟, Hall of Fame nomination, on-the-spot prizes etc.

Trends and Future

The benefits of outsourcing are so immense and the companies are already realizing the cost benefits without any compromise on quality or time. This makes this wave unstoppable. Resistance from managers dies down the moment they are convinced of the potential benefits of outsourcing. This makes future bright and an opportunity to have a long-term career prospects for aspirants in this industry.

 Questions:

1. Discuss about the various training programmes offered by Intelenet Global Company.

2. Write a short note on:

·         Contract Centre Operation

·         Human Resource Management

Caselet 2

Introduction

Hinduja TMT (HTMT) is the flagship company of the multibillion-dollar Hinduja group with offices in the US and UK and delivery centres in India and the Philippines. HTMT is a SEI CMM level 4 company and is ranked at no. 8among the 400-odd BPO providers in India (Source: Nasscom) HTMT has also been ranked the no.2 healthcare BPO provider in India for employee satisfaction (Source: Dataquest). HTMT claims to be the country‟s first convergence corporation; its vision is to become a „scale player‟ and leader in its core information technology business by leveraging the strength of its customer base, breadth and depth of its service lines and management bandwidth. The Hinduja Group provides a wide range of products and services in over 50 countries and has over 25000 people working for them worldwide.

The group‟s activities are divided into three core areas:

·         International trading

·         Investment banking

·         Global investment

With interests in technology, media and telecom, HTMT has the capacity to offer high-quality, costeffective, end-to-end solutions or breadth of experience across multiply technology platforms and verticals to enhance the business of its customer worldwide. This is because of the remarkable advances it has achieved in modularity through subsidiaries in media and telecommunications, which are designed to function independently and yet to work together as a whole, coalescing technology.

BPO Arm HTMT

HTMT is a one-stop outsourcing company that can provide IT services and BPO/contact centre services to customer all under one roof. HTMT‟s IT services provides application development & maintenance, legacy migration services, engineering design services and SAP implementation services. These services are complemented by HTMT‟s BPO services in the area of back office processing – claims processing, technical help desk support, contact centre services, payroll processing, accounts receivable and accounts payable services. HTMT offers BPO services for the following domains: insurance, banking & finance, manufacturing, telecom, FMGC and customer durables.

Disaster Recovery Centre

HTMT has three centers spread over multiply locations in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Philippines to ensure business continuity. “We realized that India and Philippines can complement each other‟s strengths – India for its non-voice based capability and the Philippines for its voice-based capability. We entered into a marketing tie-up with a company in the Philippines to get a foothold there and later decided to acquire the company,” says R. Mohan, president & CEO of HTMT‟s IT Division. HTMT has exhaustive documentation defining the processes and procedures to be adopted in case of relocation due to a disaster or business interruption. This documentation is part of the quality manual designed by KPMG for ISO 9001:2000. Being an ISO 9000:2000 certified company; the same can be shared with the client on request.

Activities

Insurance Claiming Process

Outsourcing of insurance claims processing to India and other low- cost destinations is a rapidly growing segment. Some large insurance companies have started captive centers in India to take advantage of the cost containment option that India offers while some have preferred to outsource the work to a third-party BPO service provider. HTMT is by far the largest player in the area of insurance claims processing in India and is currently working for two Fortune 250 American insurance companies. More than 1,000 people are working in this activity and it is likely to scale up and double the current strength in the near future.

Currently HTMT processes claims in the following areas:

·         Traditional dental & medical

·         Health maintenance organization (HMO)

·         Coordination of Benefits (COB).

·         Claim resolution processing (CRP)

·         Over payment recovery (OPR)

·         Paper referral processing (PRP)

·         Private provider organization (PPO)

·         Claims audit

·         Worker‟s compensation

·         Automobiles

·         Property

·         Liability

More than 85,000 claims are processed in a single day. The process involves eight stages and the training programme lasts for almost one year.

Contact Centre Operation

HTMT‟s contact centre activity began in 1996 and since then it is growing from strength to strength. Currently working with US/UK customers in the telecom, consumer durables, financial services and FMCG areas, it provides services like customer care, provisioning, marketing, technical testing, order administration, telemarketing, product recall and directory enquiries. With about 1,400 plus agents, this activity is likely to double in the near future. Future Plans

HTMT‟s future plans for the IT business are:

·         Leverage strong domain expertise in insurance and telecom to grow the existing BPO and call centre business.

·         Enter the European market for BPO Business.

·         Focus on continuous high-quality execution of current contracts for higher ramp-ups.

·         Move up the value chain in the BPO business by tapping synergistic opportunities like highend call centre business from the same client.

·         Enter new markets and leverage strong discrete manufacturing expertise for software development and maintenance business.

·         Graduate from conventional and collaborative outsourcing to transformational outsourcing.

·         Inorganic growth in IT services/IT- enabled services will also be a key growth strategy in the future.

Questions:

1. Discuss about the various activities performed by Hinduja TMT.

2. Write a short note on:

·         Disaster Recovery Centre

·         BPO Arm in Hinduja TMT

Section C: Applied Theory

1. Discuss the different strategies that are adopted by the BPO’s to control their Attrition.

2. What are the Pros and Cons of BPO?

3. Write a note on the SWOT Analysis of Indian BPO Industry.