Call Center Outsourcing Services

It is a continuous thought priority to all call centers to know how they can save money in their contact centers and throughout their operations.

Few tips which is step by step to go for the cost reducing

Make a Team: Make a team which will do the review. Because call centers efforts are heading for at customer service, process improvement and potential cost reduction, form a team that can bring different disciplines to the process. Also include general training and quality training, human resources, center scheduling, telecom traffic, IT, marketing, and returns and replacement if all of these areas are within responsibilities.

Take the opinions and input of all of team members. Challenge them to assess how things could be done differently, and make them answer the question, “How can costs are reduced without lowering the standard of customer service?” These meeting we can keep in the starting of the year to set up the target.

Marks the Achievements: By marking your achievement, it will be indicator to know the performance measures up against set standards and plans. The major achievements include contacts per hour; service level; abandon rate; attrition/turnover rate; call-handle time; talk time; after-call work time; contact-to-order ratio; transaction volumes for Internet, phone and mail; non-phone volumes and others.

Review: Labor’s cost, quality and availability is becoming an issue for many call centers, particularly in seasonal businesses where the selling curve is more compressed. Review advertising media costs and results, and exchange information with other human resource departments. Review pre-hiring testing, employee selection criteria and practices. By review process we can know the possible improvements and cost reductions for the process. It will help us to know more about a place for temporary agencies rather than relying completely on in-house hiring.

Revenue Generation: As part of their mission, many contact centers are charged with becoming revenue centers in addition to taking orders and providing customer service. By revenue generation reports we can show about success with cross-selling, up-selling, outbound selling and increasing the company’s average orders. It will be really help full for the cost saving in call centers.

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Some companies are realizing that their call center staffing processes are not only inefficient, they are also very costly. Many are seeking an alternative and are turning to RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) as an option. Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is a growing trend in which companies outsource all or part of their hiring functions to find better-quality people to staff your call center. RPO can be used successfully to fulfill a range of hiring needs for organizations; and is particularly well suited to call centers. Specifically, RPO delivers benefits for call center operations that include sourcing higher-quality candidates, improving fill ratios and “show rates”, decreasing turn-over, and reducing hiring costs.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) when an employer outsourcers or transfers all or part of the staffing process to an external service provider.

An RPO engagement can be structured in one of three ways depending on the needs of the company: Enterprise, Selective or Project RPO.

In Enterprise RPO, the partner manages the entire process across all skill categories and all locations. Selective RPO involves managing a subset of locations or a subset of recruiting processes, such as sourcing, screening, interview scheduling or offer letters.
In Project RPO, the RPO provider delivers hires for a one-time hiring project.

In all three scenarios, a dedicated RPO team works directly with the hiring manager to create a tailored program to meet the call center’s specific needs. The team can work on-site at the client’s locations, off-site in its own facility or a combination of the RPO Benefits

Organisations that partner with RPO specialists can realize a range of significant and sustained business benefits, all of which can be measured.

These benefits include--

Securing the best talent: Competition for the most talented individuals is increasing. Organizations need to secure the best people quickly and efficiently to help them build competitive capability.

Cutting recruitment costs: By transforming processes, utilizing best practice, and replacing a fixed cost base with a variable charging structure, RPO can significantly reduce the cost of recruitment.

Removing the administrative burden:RPO providers take on the burden of operational recruitment activities, making organizations free to focus on value-creating and strategic activities.

Delivering higher quality services:There are many stakeholders in a recruitment process; through improving processes and measuring experience and outcome, RPO providers can demonstrate highest quality services.

Mitigating operational risks:Risks come in many forms, and the expert knowledge of an RPO specialist can help organizations mitigate the risks associated with an inability to scale their business operationally to meet changing market demands, and the risks of non-compliance to legislative and regulatory change.

The more sophisticated and experienced RPO providers will also have a system of “forward-looking” analytics to ensure that hiring goals will be met for each “hiring class.” This predictive process analyzes how many candidates are in the pipeline.

How to hire an RPO provider

If you think an RPO partner could measurably improve the quality of your call center hires while containing costs, research several firms and choose carefully. The field is expanding quickly but there is a wide range of experience, knowledge and track record of success/failure. Specifically, you may want to ask potential providers some key questions, including--

How many RPO clients do you have?
How many hires do you support annually?
What experience do you have with call centers? And what types of call centers?
What percentage of your clients is reference able?
Are your recruiters dedicated to one client or do they work on multiple clients at the same time?
Do you have the flexibility to scale up and down as my needs change?
What is your client renewal rate?

As call center recruiting, hiring and retention remains a challenge for many companies, RPO is emerging as an important option. With turnover down. Significantly decreasing costs -- an increasing number of call center and human resources professionals have embraced RPO as an innovative strategy and a smart business decision.

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India is growing in the BPO sector at present India is unquestionably the BPO superpower of the world. But it is also true that the competition is always on. There are other strong competitors of India who might ruin India's BPO. There are lot of countries and one which on top is China.

China is one such country which can eat into the BPO share market of India. But for the time being India is well ahead of China because of some inherent advantages. India is currently booming in the BPO arena and has scored over China to emerge as the top offshore destination for Global businesses. In the 2004 offshore index, India remains the star performer. It has once again captured the top spot in outsourcing by a comfortable margin due to its strong mix of low costs and noteworthy depth in human resources. This fact was brought out in a study conducted by AT Kearney, an international consultancy agency.

India has a very important advantage, their command of the English language. There are lots more Indians with good English skills than Chinese. Forrester also endorses the view that scalability of resources (talent pool) is the major factor that makes India an attractive offshore location. “The cost of operations in India can be 20-30% higher than places like Vietnam or lower than places like Brazil. But part of the challenge for these countries is the lack of skills. There is a very limited set of low-end work that companies like GE are looking at and lack of quality resources makes it hard for these countries to get started. The work going offshore today is geometrically more complex than the Y2K work that India got started on with,’’ says Mr McCarthy.

India proved better than China on account of several factors. The study pointed out that China lags behind India in terms experience and other important factors like IT and management education, language skills, concerns about intellectual property and overall country risk.

According to the study, although India and China are the market leaders in this sector, there are huge opportunities present in the market to give ample space to other countries like Philippines, Vietnam, Romania, Kenya, Sri Lanka and North America market to grow.

The study also said although it is unlikely that India would be able to retain its number one slot with China aggressively trying to outstrip it in the business, it would still be able to get a decent share of the pie.

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It is true that now day’s employees are not working for salary because they want to relaxation in job. Most youngsters do not like joining the business process outsourcing (BPO) due to stress and health issue. BPO employees are quitting BPO job’s to get rid of the stress and strain at work place. Employees do not quit due to salary issues alone. They are least bother about the salary. All the companies are giving good salary.

Now companies are providing good services to fresher and experienced employees with openings with good salary. But preference of the employees now goes to the office where they should have some fun and entrainment for getting relaxation.

In fact, stress and health weren’t even among the ‘top three’ factors for leaving a company.Union Health Minister A Ramadoss recently called for a “health policy for the tech sector”, stating: “(BPO employees) have a sedentary lifestyle. They smoke, go for late-night parties, and even take drugs. Some get heart attacks in their mid-20s”.

Employees are facing stress problem in BPO due to that their health is down. If customers are not getting comfort and the full relaxation in BPO companies then they quit the company. The good part is that if the industry is aware to checking indoor air quality to testing food in labs then it will be really.
Employees of Indian BPO firms, on the other hand, were overall content with their jobs in 2007, states the survey. They were satisfied with the job content, work culture, training, and appraisal.

However, it added that they were not satisfied with the image they were stuck with, and least satisfied with their salaries. The average salary hike in the BPO industry grew by 14.8 per cent only in 2007 as compared to an increase of 17.2 per cent last year.

The direct outcome of the fall in salary hike is the increase in attrition rates. The attrition rate went up to 20 per cent from 18 per cent in 2006.
Hyderabad-based Brigade, for instance, appointed a chief fun officer to look into ways of ensuring low employee stress levels and keeping them highly motivated.
The survey also revealed that while large firms ranked better in parameters like work culture and image, niche companies were better in terms of salary and job content.

Now days all call center are providing the best service to employee to give them comfort and the satisfaction in job. The stress level is really sometimes very high but the companies are also focusing to reduce the stress on employees.

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It is true that now day’s employees are not working for salary because they want to relaxation in job. Most youngsters do not like joining the business process outsourcing (BPO) due to stress and health issue. BPO employees are quitting BPO job’s to get rid of the stress and strain at work place. Employees do not quit due to salary issues alone. They are least bother about the salary. All the companies are giving good salary.

Now companies are providing good services to fresher and experienced employees with openings with good salary. But preference of the employees now goes to the office where they should have some fun and entrainment for getting relaxation.

In fact, stress and health weren’t even among the ‘top three’ factors for leaving a company.Union Health Minister A Ramadoss recently called for a “health policy for the tech sector”, stating: “(BPO employees) have a sedentary lifestyle. They smoke, go for late-night parties, and even take drugs. Some get heart attacks in their mid-20s”.

Employees are facing stress problem in BPO due to that their health is down. If customers are not getting comfort and the full relaxation in BPO companies then they quit the company. The good part is that if the industry is aware to checking indoor air quality to testing food in labs then it will be really.
Employees of Indian BPO firms, on the other hand, were overall content with their jobs in 2007, states the survey. They were satisfied with the job content, work culture, training, and appraisal.

However, it added that they were not satisfied with the image they were stuck with, and least satisfied with their salaries. The average salary hike in the BPO industry grew by 14.8 per cent only in 2007 as compared to an increase of 17.2 per cent last year.

The direct outcome of the fall in salary hike is the increase in attrition rates. The attrition rate went up to 20 per cent from 18 per cent in 2006.
Hyderabad-based Brigade, for instance, appointed a chief fun officer to look into ways of ensuring low employee stress levels and keeping them highly motivated.
The survey also revealed that while large firms ranked better in parameters like work culture and image, niche companies were better in terms of salary and job content.

Now days all call center are providing the best service to employee to give them comfort and the satisfaction in job. The stress level is really sometimes very high but the companies are also focusing to reduce the stress on employees.

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The compaction between the companies is very high. At this movement it is very important to take care of each thing at the company. Workers spending too much time on social networking websites such as Facebook are costing employers a staggering £130m a day according to the findings of one recent survey, and the problem looks set to become much worse if businesses fail to take action, and fast. Facebook shows 125% growth year over year.

The findings from the survey show that some 233 million hours are lost every month to employees surfing the net, with social networking websites causing the greatest concern. It is a fact that these particular websites are very addictive and can often result in users remaining on the sites for hours rather than minutes. Whilst this is worrying news for employers, help is now at hand thanks to a powerful and effective range of software packages available to small to medium sized businesses.

To know about the details of the system there is software which effectively monitors and records everything employees do on their computer and the internet, providing employers with the perfect low-cost solution for monitoring employees. You can use of the software packages significantly prevents, reduces or eliminates the problems associated with abuse. In doing so employers have successfully stamped out inappropriate activity, reduced security breaches and prevented 'Insider' theft.

May be it happened that employee will not feel happy to know that someone is monitoring their work. But as a employer of the company it is very important to have this kind of software a your work place. You will get lot of protection from the improper activities like opening the social networking site at work time or any shopping site etc.

Many employers have been happy for their workers to use the internet for personal use as long as ultimately they do their job and reach their targets. However, this is now proving to be a somewhat costly decision for many businesses as loss of productivity and lack of concentration has proven to significantly hinder their overall performance.

You can choose the latest software packages to monitor the system of your work place. With this you can also stop the cause of the social networking problem.

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Work-from-home customer service reps are a rapidly growing trend, with the number of such workers predicted to rise 375% by 2012

The trend for call centre workers to be based from home is set to increase rapidly over the next five years as businesses look to cut customer service costs. Analyst Datamonitor claims the use of outsourced home agents is now becoming a mainstream option for businesses. There are currently around 47,000 home-based outsourced call centre workers working 20 hours per week or more globally - predominantly in the US - and Datamonitor predicts this will rise to almost 224,000 by 2012.

Peter Ryan, Datamonitor senior analyst for contact centre outsourcing and offshoring, said in a statement: "It is clear home agents are no longer a passing fancy, and are rapidly becoming mainstream." The different demographic profile of home-based agents is one of the reasons companies are going down this route. They tend to be older and have more work experience than typical call centre workers, have higher customer satisfaction levels and lower attrition rates, according to vendors of home-based agent services.

There are security concerns about the safety of customer data with this model but the report found home agent providers use thorough background checks on prospective recruits and use real-time monitoring analytics. The main industry sectors embracing the home call-centre agent model are healthcare, insurance, technology, tourism and travel. In the UK the AA is a big user of home-working call centre agents, although it employs these workers itself rather than using a third-party.

The AA has almost 300 home-based call centre agents across its roadside breakdown and insurance businesses taking calls from motorists and dealing with insurance quotes. Trevor Didcock, who has just left the AA as IT director, said: "People will be in their homes with a dedicated workstation that is plugged into the automatic call distribution [system]."

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Many firms rush through the important organizational stages of call center technology selection projects and chaotically leap into analyzing products based only on the functionality that's needed -- or worse, they start the selection process with a specific vendor already in mind, Brian Hinton warned a roomful of ACCE attendees.

Selecting effective call center technology is a matter of following a highly defined process and identifying the risks associated with each product being considered.


"How are you going to sort through all of the options?" said Hinton, a senior consultant with Strategic Contact, who boasts 10 years of call center consulting experience. "The way to find the right [software] is to apply a structured process to analyze your options."

First you need to decide the call center and organizations goals. Hinton suggest a series of tips for approaching the vendor selection process with an open mind.



• Call center technology selection: Things to avoid
• Be open-minded for selection of call center vendor.
• DON'T consider products before thoroughly defining your requirements.
• DON'T think solely about functionality.
• Do not let the vendors control the process.
• Do not make cost a top priority.
• Never ignore the RFP.



Other factors to consider during the initial stages of a call center technology selection project include whether to go with a hosted or on-premise provider, a niche offering, or a software suite to handle call center processes.
Involve a cross-functional team in the decision-making process
Including on the selection team someone from IT and from the telephony group, in addition to call center representatives, will help ensure that the needs of all departments are considered during the call center technology selection process.

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