Cookie Preference Centre

Your Privacy
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Performance Cookies
Functional Cookies
Targeting Cookies

Your Privacy

When you visit any web site, it may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. This information might be about you, your preferences, your device or used to make the site work as you expect it to. The information does not usually identify you directly, but it can give you a more personalized web experience. You can choose not to allow some types of cookies. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings. However, you should know that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on the site and the services we are able to offer.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

These cookies are necessary for the website to function and cannot be switched off in our systems. They are usually only set in response to actions made by you which amount to a request for services, such as setting your privacy preferences, logging in or filling in forms. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site may not work then.

Cookies used

ContactCenterWorld.com

Performance Cookies

These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources, so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. They help us know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. If you do not allow these cookies, we will not know when you have visited our site.

Cookies used

Google Analytics

Functional Cookies

These cookies allow the provision of enhance functionality and personalization, such as videos and live chats. They may be set by us or by third party providers whose services we have added to our pages. If you do not allow these cookies, then some or all of these functionalities may not function properly.

Cookies used

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

Targeting Cookies

These cookies are set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant ads on other sites. They work by uniquely identifying your browser and device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will not experience our targeted advertising across different websites.

Cookies used

LinkedIn

This site uses cookies and other tracking technologies to assist with navigation and your ability to provide feedback, analyse your use of our products and services, assist with our promotional and marketing efforts, and provide content from third parties

OK
[HIDE]

Here are some suggested Connections for you! - Log in to start networking.

EXECUTIVE MEMBER
Ikhwal Sidiq
Assistant Manager Trade and Remittance Services
408
MEMBER
Athina Karahogiti
Global Deputy Chief Client Officer
2
MEMBER
Thamer Noori
Director of Industrial Security and Safety Dept.
13
EXECUTIVE MEMBER
Eric Young
President / Contact Centre & Business Optimization Consultant
30

Article : Training – The Secret Ingredient In The Recipe For BPO Success

Director Of International Marketing Communications
FIS Global
Add Contact

"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." Derek Bok

Cutting corners is a trick we learn early, one of the survival techniques of modern living that enable us to multi-task, to get things done fast, to meet the deadlines that loom daily in our busy schedules. As we strive to do things faster and cheaper, sometimes the price we pay is less attention to detail, more margin for error, some of the Is left undotted and the Ts uncrossed. Most of the time this necessary negligence does not have a critical impact on the success of our endeavours. However, there are some instances where cutting corners can spell disaster for a business and the consumers who rely on it.

In Business Process Outsourcing, the objective is both to save time and money. Alongside that, significant operational efficiencies can be achieved and the quality of customer service considerably enhanced. How? Because, somewhat paradoxically, time and cost savings are achieved not by cutting corners and skimping on

attention to detail but by investing time and effort to focus on achieving optimum performance. Coverage in the press would have us believe that outsourcing overseas is a mass-scale corner-cutting exercise – handing over customer contact centre activities to foreign agents who are cheap but incapable of being understood by clients, in a cynical attempt to boost shareholder earnings. That view is far from a truthful representation of the facts in most cases. When organisations take the decision to outsource, they have a desire to improve the way they do business. Yes, this entails faster performance and a lower cost base, however the underlying motivation is to give their customers better service and to make their operations more effective.

If that is the case, the sceptics may well ask, why do we get frequent examples of offshore projects that have obviously not achieved these objectives? Why are we constantly presented with cases where customers have been at best disappointed and at worst driven to take their custom elsewhere? The answer lies in a form of corner cutting which may not be deliberate, but attributable to the remarkably steep growth curve this industry has climbed over the last few years. The answer can often be found in one key area where, even if your ultimate goal is to save costs, time and expense should not be spared. That area is Training.

Inadequate Training Can Be Disastrous
Ignorance of very basic facts and skills can be the undoing of an outsourcing arrangement and will undoubtedly, to echo Derek Bok, be an expensive and fraught experience for all parties concerned. If a contact centre associate in India is unaware that people in the UK dislike being phoned at breakfast time on Sunday, he or she is likely to antagonise somebody before five minutes are up. Similarly, if the caller has a very strong accent that is difficult to understand, it is unlikely they will achieve the up-sell that was the objective of the call. And, if they have the mistaken belief that everyone in the US listens to opera all of the time, or that all men in Scotland wear kilts, they are heading for some very obvious misunderstandings.

In an industry where attrition is a very real problem, up to 50% per annum for some BPO companies according to the BBC, or where clients are pushing to get new projects up and running as soon as possible, corners are sometimes cut in the area of training in order to get sufficient live bodies onto the phones to staff the client's team. But it is not only haste that creates issues – as with all industries, there are some suppliers who are committed to extensive and productive training and personal development programmes for their employees and there are others who have less expertise in that area.

For an offshore arrangement to deliver the goals of the people paying for it, it has to have an element of education that ensures customers are not let down. Failure to pay attention to training would have serious consequences for a company's brand and reputation in their home market and those consequences will be magnified if the service is being provided offshore. Yet, despite almost every organisation having a substantial investment in recruitment, training and human resource management at home, when their business goes offshore some buyers fail to insist on people policies and practices that are adequate to support their needs, let alone conform to best practice.

Middle Management Is Key
The importance of training is not limited to those who have direct customer contact on a day-to-day basis. Ultimately it is middle managers who will affect whether or not a client receives simply acceptable or outstanding service. Yet when the topic of training comes up in the context of outsourcing, most people limit their considerations to the staff who will physically carry out the data entry process or wear a headset and speak to customers on the telephone.

The reality is that the BPO industry is new and still evolving. As it matures, many young people who have come up through the ranks are being promoted in rapid succession to be the new generation of leaders as fresh centres open and new competitors enter the market and start to recruit. Given that the industry is less than a decade old, when it comes to career experience, a seasoned professional in the BPO industry may only have been around for five or six years. That creates a very unique environment, where the majority of staff are recent graduates with one or two years' experience and the middle managers who have grown up with the industry are only a handful of years older and wiser.

The industry has addressed this problem to a degree by importing managers who have longer tenure in other service-related businesses, such as chartered accountancy or the hotel and leisure industry. By this route, it has successfully recruited individuals who have solid skills in managing people, providing excellent customer service or understanding process-driven environments. It takes a while, nevertheless, for those individuals, however competent, to develop an in-depth appreciation of the nuances of the BPO business.

So on the middle management front, on the one hand we have a generation of young managers who know the business well but have relatively little man management and customer facing experience and on the other hand is a pool of experienced managers who have to get up to speed with their new industry. BPO companies have their work cut out to develop a resource pool of competent and expert managers to satisfy the phenomenal industry growth rates we are witnessing. The customers keep coming to India, where there are now more than 400 BPO companies to draw from the pool of available experienced individuals.

It is imperative, therefore, when considering outsourcing, to evaluate the calibre of the middle management team and to ensure that their ongoing training and development needs are also being met. Often, the focus is on the shop floor rather than having formal programmes to improve management capabilities.

Framework For Training
The Training Team

The team responsible for training shoulders a heavy responsibility in the outsourcing industry. Often operating under time pressure to get new recruits up to scratch, the onus is on them to understand the customer requirements and impart the right knowledge to allow staff to do their job productively and effectively.

Any buyer doing due diligence would be well advised to meet the training team and ask searching questions about their qualifications and experience. Because English is the language of education and business in India, tutors are likely to be fluent. There are differences, however, between the language as it is spoken in India and the language as spoken in the US or the UK. These differences are in matters of pronunciation, grammar and usage. Indian English has its roots in the age of Empire and it has evolved along a different linguistic path. In some ways it is old-fashioned, using phrases and expressions that went out of date in England years ago. English young people in their twenties speak the language of the mobile phone and TV advertising, but Indian colloquialisms have not always kept pace.

Similarly, when it comes to grammar a British speaker will always say "shouldn't", "couldn't" or "haven't", using the contracted form of the negative, whereas an India is schooled to say "should not", "could not" and "have not". These very fundamental differences can make an Indian call centre agent very easy to spot. Likewise, when an Indian answers the telephone, he will automatically say "Tell me", which is not a habit you would encounter in an office in Manchester.

The training team has to be attuned to these nuances and have a programme to retrain the habits of a lifetime so that basic mistakes do not betray the offshore workforce as foreign. Even with a raft of higher degrees in English, if nobody on the training team has ever been to the UK or the US and heard the language spoken by native speakers, they may not fully appreciate the subtleties that instantly differentiate them from the audience they will be asked to target.

The role of the training team is also to digest information from the client about processes that are to be transitioned to India and make sure that the operations team is completely conversant with the details of that process. As such, they have to be capable of assimilating detailed process descriptions and converting them into documentation and reference manuals for their teams. Just as linguistic mistakes can be embarrassing, it is equally unacceptable if overseas workers are not totally comfortable with the terminology unique to the industry they are serving; for example it is impossible to effectively process insurance claims without an understanding of the insurance industry and all the steps involved in claims resolution.

Of course their role in training incumbent and future managers should not be neglected. After all, many of the managers will be responsible for dozens of direct reports, if not hundreds. Somebody on the training team should be conversant with training of current best practices in human resource management, operational planning, quality and customer service and all the other aspects that contribute to forming a fully rounded manager who is competent to supervise large numbers of staff and often business-critical processes, whilst being the senior face of the company for the client.

The Training Plan
The message then is that training is sacrosanct and should not be sacrificed under any circumstances to avoid risk to reputation and to prevent jeopardising the positive results that outsourcing can produce.

Before a contract is ever signed, the buying organisation needs to have agreed a training plan with its future supplier. That plan should be based on a thorough audit of how training for the process and job specification is currently carried out. The way to ensure that outsourcing staff are well trained is to put them through exactly the same training procedure that is currently used for in-house employees.

The training plan will also be inextricably linked to the ramp-up plan that articulates how many people will be used to operate the process, the recruitment timetable and the number of staff needed at all stages of the transition as the process becomes fully operational in its new environment.

Once the training plan is developed, adherence to the timetable will be a critical part of supplying a complete and properly prepared team.

Train The Trainer
The selected offshore provider should construct a comprehensive transition programme to migrate processes offshore. Part of that transition will be to bring the training team across to see the operation running in its current state and give them the opportunity to understand it and ask questions. The trainers will learn that process thoroughly, examine relevant existing training documentation and augment it if necessary. This first-hand experience of how the client trains its own staff to perform the job in question is invaluable and will allow them to return home and impart the process knowledge to the newly established offshore team.

In some circumstances, the client prefers to send its own trainers to India to train the provider's training team. Either approach can work and it can be beneficial to have somebody from the client side on hand to identify any immediate problems or shortcomings in the training and work with the local team to remedy them.

Summary
In the outsourcing industry, people are the raw materials from which a successful business is built. Without competent and motivated individuals there is no customer satisfaction for consumers, no hope of process improvement for the client organisation and no profitability for the outsourcer. Training is also one of the key ingredients that can help to stem the tide of attrition, by building a pool of motivated individuals who are personally challenged and constantly offered opportunities to expand their horizons.

Training has to be a solid pillar supporting an outsourcing provider's approach to doing business. It is a crucial investment to ensure the supplier organisation is at the leading edge of best practices in process management, quality and customer service. Spotting and developing leadership talent is as important as making sure that people are equipped to do the everyday process-based tasks that service customer accounts. Cutting corners when devising and implementing the training plan at all levels of the organisation is a recipe for customer disappointment. Above all, it is a disservice to those talented and eager individuals who join a company and, with nurturing, can develop into loyal and long-term associates and the leaders of the future.

In short – no train, no gain.


About FIS Global:
Company LogoBPO and ITO organization.
Company RSS Feed   Company Facebook   Company Twitter   Company Instagram   Company YouTube   Company LinkedIn   Company Profile Page

Today's Tip of the Day - Utilize Time & Money Saving Tools

Read today's tip or listen to it on podcast.

Published: Monday, February 7, 2005

Printer Friendly Version Printer friendly version

2024 Buyers Guide Customer Relationship Management

 
1.) 
Academy Call Center

Tele-Sales and International Call Center
With the KRK Academy Call Center, it is not just to answer your incoming calls;
Social media management
online help
WhatsApp reply
outbound call services
Voice response systems
Call center software solutions
Voip services
Social Media Ads, Google ADS Ads, SEO, Website setup
Reporting services for your company
You can do things like.

2.) 
Alycom Business Solutions

CRM Solutions, Digital Marketing, Business Management Consultancy, HubSpot CRM, SugarCRM, Goldmine CRM
Since 2000, we help businesses to grow and increase revenues. We are a certified CRM solutions provider and digital marketing agency that align and automate your marketing and sales efforts to connect with ideal customers and make customers for life.

We strive every day to learn, improve, and grow in our ability to bring practical, efficient, state of the art, and affordable solutions for our customers. We use latest technologies to improve your business's marketing, sales, and customer relationship management.

We are looking forward to serving you with our knowledge, expertise, and experience, so you and your team may benefit by closing more sales, providing exceptional service to and retaining customers for life.

3.) 
Cloudyflex

Zoho CRM Suite
Zoho CRM is a world leading cloud based customer relationship management suite covering all CRM functionalities a modern company needs :
- Multi Channel Lead Management
- Sales Force Automation
- Quotation & Order Management
- Full 'Lead to Order' process
- After Sales Services
- Social Media Management
- Mass E-mailing & Marketing Automation

& several other capabilities

4.) 
Commence Corporation

Commence CRM
Comprehensive solution for automating sales, marketing, customer service ticketing and project management.

5.) 
Comvendo

Inbound, Outbound, Backoffice

6.) 
FinCRM

FinCRM - CRM Software
FinCRM holds expertise in providing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and Full Stack Office Management solutions. The company possesses prowess in developing tailored CRM software solutions with integration of advanced features to empower your workforce and lead to the pathway of lucrative business opportunities. It also offers CRM integrated Office Management Software to streamline your internal operations, improve marketing proficiency, and upsurge productivity.

FinCRM is developed to serve several industries, including insurance, bank, NBFC, education, e-commerce, auto dealership, and more. The software is developed in such a way that any industry player can customize it...
(read more)

7.) 
MFE International

Creatio(formerly bpm'online) Process-driven unified CRM
Unified Marketing, Sales, Service CRM built on a business process management (BPM) platform. Award winning CRM .Recognised by Gartner, Forrester, OVUM, Nucleus research as leading marketing automation, sales automation, customer engagement, business process automation and dynamic case management software.
A new process-driven CRM and not the traditional CRM type.

8.) 
NetHunt CRM

NetHunt CRM
NetHunt CRM blends entirely with Gmail, placing the full-featured CRM right next to your emails. Everything you need is now available in Gmail inbox: customer profiles, deals and opportunities, data filters and views, team collaboration, email tracking, bulk email campaigns, and much more! Simple setup process, intuitive UI, and personal guidance of customer success allow quick integration.

Core Functionality:
- one-click lead capturing;
- pipeline and deals stage management;
- unmatched integration with G Suite apps;
- integration with Linkedin and other apps via Zapier;
- automated contact sync;
- bulk email campaigns, open and clicks tracking;
- dashboard, performance reporting, and tasks;
- full customisation.

9.) 
Noetica

Synthesys™
A complete contact centre technology offering including a flexible and highly configurable CRM solution which can be multi-tenanted, relational and visually configured. CRM entities are fully embedded in a sophisticated dynamic call scripting drag & drop solution which allows for complex process flows and integration to external systems for the delivery of an integrated intelligent agent desktop solution. The solution can be integrated to telephony for both inbound and outbound using the Noetica Voice Platform which is a fully featured contact centre telephony platform.

10.) 
Notoriety Group

Customer Relationship Management
We Offer a great service level to outsourcers, our teams are focus to provide an added value to end clients and our partners.
we provide services with excellence. Our customer centricity is our secret to always deliver a great customer experience.
NOTORIETY is your power to grow and thrive

11.) 
Pointel

Customer Relationship Management Solution
Pointel has a several years of experience in implementing Customer Relationship Management solution to maximize customer lifetime value and profitability. Pointel Specializes in Salesforce, Clarify, Oracle and SAP suites of products. Pointel has implemented CRM solutions for many industries including financial institutions, banks, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, insurance and telecom companies. Pointel's unique methodology guarantees 100% success. Customer Relationship Management solution improve the efficiency in managing the customer-facing business process from end-to-end. This includes Marketing, Sales, Customer Service and Support. The overall goal is to improve the customer experience and...
(read more)

12.) 
Vads

Customer Relationship Management enables you to focus on your organization’s relationships with individual people – whether those are customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers.

CRM is a hybrid business solution that can increase sales and marketing efficiency many other key customer relationship matters. CRM platform enables you to focus on your organization’s relationships with individual people – whether those are customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers.

Benefits :
- Help to see 360 degrees of customer view perspective
- Analysis to measure performance and gain new target and business insight
- Tracking and scheduling are centralized in one database
- Help to stay abreast and stay close each other, increase productivity.
 

About us - in 60 seconds!

Join Our Team

Industry Champion Award Leaderboard

Most active award (top 10) entrants in the past 48 hours! - Vote for Others / About Program
Submit Event

Upcoming Events

The 19th AMERICAS Annual Best Practices Conferences are here! Meeting Point for the World's Best Contact Center & CX Companies Read More...
 31753 
Showing 1 - 1 of 3 items

Newsletter Registration

Please check to agree to be placed on the eNewsletter mailing list.
both ids empty
session userid =
session UserTempID =
session adminlevel =
session blnTempHelpChatShow =
CMS =
session cookie set = True
session page-view-total = 1
session page-view-total = 1
applicaiton blnAwardsClosed =
session blnCompletedAwardInterestPopup =
session blnCheckNewsletterInterestPopup =
session blnCompletedNewsletterInterestPopup =