Mobility solutions for BPO offshoring vendors- helping with cost reduction and increased efficiency   

Mobility solutions as the panacea for the BPO industry

Rising competition and inflated salaries are mandating the BPO industry to become extremely cost and process efficient.

Booming economy has created multitude of opportunities for the employees and has affected the attrition rate in the BPOs.

BPO industry today is passing through one of the most exciting times. At one end, there is a pressure on these companies to become cost and process efficient and on the other end there are tremendous growth opportunities for the leaders in the industry.

BPOs which will adopt best people and technology practices will race head of others and will define the industry leadership.

Some BPOs have already taken a lead in using emerging communication technologies to make their processes more cost effective and efficient.

Roster Management / Employee Logistics

Providing home pick up and drop facility to employees has become a norm in BPO industry.
Typically, the scheduling of cabs is managed by a roster management system.

The roster management system intimates the employees about their cab time based on the requests of pick-up/drop of other employees and the optimal route algorithm.

Once the cab timing is decided, it is flashed at key places in the office, the employees miss it frequently.
If an agent decides to take a day-off, he/she has no mechanism to intimate this to the logistics department.

This results in a sub-optimum utilization of the cab, fuel wastage and low employee attendance.

This is how some of the BPOs have deployed messaging services to get rid of this problem:-

• Push of cab pick-up time and delay notice to the employees
• Pull of cab pick-up and drop information
• Request fixing up drop/pick-up by employees using messaging services

Process Management

Stringent SLAs of the business processes necessitates BPOs addressing problems as soon as they occur.

A lot of times the service engineers attending to the problems are not on their desk and there is a delay in resolution of the problem which affects the SLAs of the BPOs.

This is how messaging services are being deployed by some of the BPOs to achieve the RTO (Return time Objective) of the processes:-

• Automated critical failure alerts on triggering of process failure which can be configured based on specified business rules
• Push updates about the process recovery
• Periodic MIS to the stakeholders on process performance
• Proactive alerts to process owner based on pre-configured rules about the process performance
• Escalation of the messages to higher level if not attended by the assigned service engineer.

Human Resources Management

Frequent employee incentive and promotion schemes are common in BPOs to attract and retain the entry level employees.

In many cases, these entry level employees do not have access to the email due to security and cost considerations.

Therefore, HR normally puts up the notices at some key locations in the office campus.
This communication mechanism is not able to generate high employee involvement as the notice is missed for multiple reasons.

Another issue which HR faces in BPOs is a high demand to manage candidate pipeline (shortlist to offer letter) for recruitment and consequently they end up spending lot of their quality time making phone calls to fix and co-ordinate interviews and intimate the offers.

Here is how some of the BPOs are innovatively using messaging services to increase employee involvement and become more efficient:

• Employees are intimated about
  1. Referral schemes
  2. Account transfers
  3. Incentives
• Scheduling interviews and sending offers to prospective employees

By using the messaging services the employee involvement has increased which has positively contributed to the employee satisfaction.

Conclusion

Mobile messaging is capable of contributing to the cost efficiency and process efficiency in the BPOs due to instant access to information and optimum utilization of resources.

Improved efficiency in the BPO contribute to greater employee satisfaction as it reduces the stress levels in the organization and efficient deployment of resources lead to better employee welfare.

So is the BPO industry prepared for OE integration of messaging services?

Are the BPOs thinking to provide value added messaging services to their client?

About the Author:

For further information on how BPOs can leverage the mobile messaging technology and solutions to enhance their competitiveness, please feel free to write to Nimesh Bhandari, VP- Mobility Solutions, ValueFirst Messaging, at nimesh.bhandari@vfirst.com and get a free copy of the White Paper on Messaging service for BPOs or visit http://www.vfirst.com