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‘Quality matters in BPO’

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CIOL Bureau
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HYDERABAD: As the world's leading companies continue move towards a more customer-centric approach to business, contact centers become increasingly critical for driving client retention and boosting market share. "This is a time for Indian BPO players to seriously look towards various quality and benchmarking issues involved with their line of business," said, Kiran Babu Cherukuri, Regional manager at HCL Comnet - Hyderabad.






As part of its effort to educate different BPO players within the country, HCL Comnet is organizing ‘Knowledge Series Seminar’. "We think that there is a strong need for the industry to know about BPO activities and its current scenario and this is what we intend to do by this series. After Hyderabad we are going to Kochi and then to Kolkata," he explained.





Consumers' expectations of service levels continue to grow as today's crowded marketplace forces companies to vie for each customer's business. The slowing economy, consumer empowerment and rising marketing costs make exceptional customer service critical for survival.





"As per our estimates there are about 600 active call centers and BPO focussed companies all over India. As of now the ITES industry is going through a consolidation mode and as a result of this small players are going to be integrated to big houses which are on the lookout for BPO initiative. So it is good for the industry as only the serious players are going to be there," Cherukuri explained.





Top companies retain discerning consumers through excellent call center management - even during market changes. "This involves a lot of issues such as - call center organizational structure, employee reward and recognition systems and call center representative evaluation and management practices," he informed.





Customer service is more important now than it ever was. As a number of small and medium sized players are entering into the Business Process Outsourcing arena, only those with best quality practices will survive. "As of now we have three big clients — ICICI OneSource, GE and HSBC in Hyderabad. We are engaged in talks with some other big players within this region and I am sure that soon we will have a lot of activity over here," Cherukuri added.














Benchmarking or quality assurance is simply a systematic way to track and analyze results. It includes metrics on sales and marketing efforts such as sources of leads, number and types of contacts, and time it takes to close a sale. It also includes customer analysis of customers, what they buy and how much they spend; and customer data such as school, district and state information and the decision-making timeline.





"We have a tool - Customer Experience Monitoring (CEM) system, which helps in monitoring a number of activities within a BPO or call center operation. In addition to this, we also have IPLC bandwidth optimization solution, which helps in bandwidth management," he added.





"Hyderabad is having an interesting phase, we foresee a lot of captive call centers like Dell or 24/7 coming down to set up their operations over here and this could act towards creating the much needed platform for the region to have world class quality players," he added.







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