Managing Business Process Outsourcing | NMIMS Assignment Help June 2023 Questions
1. Too often, once a project is completed, management attention goes elsewhere and things revert to the way they were. Often the anticipated benefits are not realized or even audited to see if the goals were reached. If there were benefits, they are often not applied throughout the organization. Many pitfalls can happen when process improvement is attempted one process at a time. It is difficult to tell which processes contribute the most to achieving the business objectives or which process is the critical process to improve. Can business process portfolio management help in such situations and how?
2. India has been a preferred destination for outsourcing industry, thereby providing a boost to the economic growth of India in the last two decades. Companies from across the globe look up to the Indian BPO industry for reliable service for their business requirements. It has contributed to the service sector development as well as infrastructure improvements in non-metro location in India. The BPO industry, despite its impressive growth and global advantage, is facing several challenges and risks. These risks have a potential to slow down the Indian growth story. The cost advantage has been reducing due to increase in wage parity and other global destinations such as China, Philippines, Malaysia, Brazil etc. growing in reputation as low cost service delivery. BPO industry in India also faces, challenges with the high attrition rates, increasing use of Artificial Intelligence, process automation technologies, volatility of the Indian currency and global economic slowdown. The Indian BPO industry must mitigate the risks and challenges in order to realize its true potential.
In view of the current scenario, categorize the above risks into the people risks, technology risk and process risks. What would be your suggestions to mitigate the risks facing Indian BPOs.
3. AL-RIFAT Call Center, a leading healthcare BPO company based out of Gulf approached HumaraBPO with a requirement to improve their BPO process. The customer’s BPO division handles over a million customer calls every month, but their customer satisfaction levels were plummeting downwards. Even their CSAT was as low as 47%. Since the customer was a part of the healthcare industry, it was unacceptable for the company to find a low level of satisfaction from their customers. HumaraBPO’s role was to nail down the causes for the low CSAT levels and then to provide a customized BPO solution that would help the company’s performance to soar.
At the onset of the project, the BPO team at HumaraBPO decided to dissect the problem and get to the root cause. Through a detailed analysis, they identified some of the critical issues in the process that were affecting the customer’s BPO’s performance. The following were the requirements of the customer:
There was a linguistic and cultural mismatch between the BPO’s personnel and the client’s customers. The client’s customer base was native Arabs while the BPO employees of the customer (5 male agents and 5 female agents) were not native Arabic speakers. This language barrier made it difficult for the employees to effectively address the culture-specific requirements of the customers
There was a critical need to align the BPO support team with the standard processes that govern BPO functioning. The BPO team also required intensive training in BPO platform management
The BPO’s turnaround time lagged over a period of 7 days in contacting their customers after discharge
The support BPO team worked only 5 days a week (Monday to Friday) and only between 9 am to 5 pm. This posed a serious limitation for the customers who wanted to contact our client
The customers wanted to make sure that they were talking to an Arab agent and would ask the BPO employees for their last name
Female patients of our client would submit contact numbers of the male members of their family instead of their own
The customer reach percentage was less than 2%
After identifying the unique problems that were affecting our client’s BPO, they deployed one their best teams to implement a customized BPO platform. HumaraBPO’s skilled BPO team refurbished the entire BPO process of the customer by adopting the following measures:
1. BPO Service Timings: they increased the support time span by a period of 4 hours. Next, they made the support center available from 7 AM to 7 PM. To match the working week of UAE, they decided to change the work days of the BPO to Sunday to Thursday instead of Monday to Friday. Multiple shifts was also introduced to meet the time demand with WFM.
2. Local BPO Agents: they hired a team of native speaking Arabs to eliminate the cultural gaps.
3. Support Infrastructure: they enhanced the infrastructure for the customer’s BPO center and included best-of-breed voice, email and internet facilities. This helped in substantially reducing the turnaround time of the BPO team.
4. Value Added Support Services: they also offered a host of value added services, such as the following:
they extended the 24 hour call support for excess processing requirements during peak hours
The BPO agents were given customized ‘Last Names’ to suit the caller’s country
The DID number was masked based on the caller’s country
The BPO agents were given 20% hand-outs
Culture specific provisions were specially created to record rebuttals from the objections raised by the male family members of female patients
The BPO process of the customer was continuously improvised and enhanced based on Lean and Six Sigma methods
The database of the customer was always kept up-to-date
The BPO application was rectified periodically
Within a short time span of just 2 months, they were able to present the following results to our customer. From an unsatisfactory 47% the CSAT galloped to a whopping 85% – 87%.
The turnaround time was improved by 24%.
a. What were the cultural challenges faced by AL-RIFAT call center and how were these specific cultural challenges met by AL-RIFAT call center. (5 Marks)
b. What are the advantages of outsourcing call center operations of a hospital to a BPO like AL-RIFAT call center?