Valdar's Blog

Indian BPO outfits use IT for everything from VoIP to forecasting when their best agents need to be at their desks to handle workload peaks says Abhinav Singh

A California businessman calls the airline to find out if his morning flight to Washington DC is on time. Behind the scenes his call is routed thousands of miles away to a BPO company’s call centre agent in India who has the real-time flight information available on his PC and is able to update the customer.

This scenario would not be possible but for the power of Information Technology (IT) that has emerged as one of the key drivers in the ongoing BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) success story. There was a time when no one had thought that strategic processes would be outsourced to BPO companies in India. IT has helped foreign organisations outsource their processes to BPO companies in India without worrying about security. Using IT, BPO companies have been able to offer continuous uptime to their customers by adopting advanced networking capabilities and thereby meeting their Service Level Agreements (SLAs). With their innovative IT infrastructure BPO companies have successfully adhered to international regulations winning customer’s hearts and increasing their confidence to outsource more strategic processes to India. The use of IT has also brought in added operational efficiency and transparency in BPO companies.

Whenever any international customer wants to outsource its processes to India the first thing which goes on in the customer’s mind is the level of IT infrastructure available in India. MS Rangaraj, chief technology officer, Nirvana Business Solutions Pvt Ltd says, “For customers sitting thousands of miles away it is important to ensure that they are able to proactively manage the environment in which their processes are running. This will increase the confidence level of customers as they will have full control of their processes even [though the BPO outfit they are outsourcing to lies] thousands of miles away.”

Nirvana Business Solutions (NBS) has invested in a ‘Call Logging System’ from Witness Systems which lets them capture one hundred percent of any and all calls made by its agents on behalf of a client. This helps bring transparency to its operations. Rangaraj explains, “The operations manager at the customer site abroad can log into the system and get first hand information of all the calls made to and from the call centre agent by his customers.

In case of any issue that a customer may have with a transaction, we are in a better position to resolve it.”

Managing calls with IP Telephony BPO companies in India swear by the power of IP Telephony as it is user-friendly and helps them perform multiple functions using one common infrastructure. Aditya Menon, group chief information officer, MphasiS says, “In IP telephony one doesn’t require any multiplexers as it facilitates automatic call distribution which is simplified by software. It provide a single channel for voice and data. With IP Telephony one has less equipment to deploy and manage. We are deploying IP Telephony in every new centre that we are opening as it is easier to implement and manage a hub and spoke model facilitated by this technology.”

IP Telephony has also helped Indian companies keep the bulk of their systems in India rather than maintaining equipment abroad. Mohit Jain, chief information officer, 24/7 Customer, explains, “By using IP Telephony we have been successful in locating the complete voice logging system in India rather than on site at locations abroad. Tremendous cost savings have resulted and managing performance has become very smooth as digital voice files can be played back and it is possible to listen to specific parts of a recorded call without having to go through the entire conversation.”

Fine-tuning operations

IT has completely transformed the way operations are handled by Indian BPO companies. These outfits use IT to monitor their peak transaction periods and place their most efficient agents to handle these. For instance 24/7 customer is using a call management and a workforce management system to streamline its operations in just this manner. Jain of 24/7 Customer explains, “Using call and workforce management systems has helped us reduce staffing and transportation costs by 10 percent.”

Similarly MphasiS makes use of a tool called ‘Blue Pumpkin’ to forecast a call centre’s agent requirements. Based on call patterns, the tool helps analyse peak volumes and the fluctuations at any point of time during the day. Based upon reports generated by the tool, the transportation department at MphasiS chalks out pickup and drop schedules for its agents.

NOCs—secure and reliable

As security and reliability are major concerns for customers outsourcing processes to Indian BPO companies, they expect foolproof measures to be taken. Take the case of ICICI OneSource that has a Network Operations Centre (NOC) in Mumbai which monitors every single device across its call centre operations. Sanjiv Dalal, chief technology officer, ICICI OneSource says, “There is a central monitoring system in place at the NOC, which helps securely manage the networks upon which the customer’s business critical processes are running. In case a link fails, even at the customer’s site, it is able to sound an alert so that the error can be rectified

and uptime maintained.” Interestingly the company is also using cellphone censors and detectors in areas where the customer’s sensitive data resides. Besides ICICI OneSource, BPO companies such as 24/7 Customer and MphasiS have set up NOCs to monitor their total IT infrastructure to provide greater reliability and assured security to their clients.

We expect BPO companies to deploy more IT systems as they attempt to bring the service industry on par with manufacturing’s position many years ago when industrial processes began to be outsourcing to distant locations.