In this article, we will briefly discuss Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).
Any business has specific processes to do its day to day tasks. These processes are defined to move forward business to productive output with minimal cost effective input. Some of these processes are not a core business processes, such as payroll. Payroll does not work to enhance current business output, but it is essential to keep organization’s staff happy with timely salary so they can focus on their day to day work to enhance business output.
Handling such processes outside organizations has formed new industry and term called as Business Process Outsourcing. Most of the time, cost is the reason to outsource any business process. Other reasons could be expertise in that field and it could be taking avantage of that geographic location presence.
Based on location of outsourcing, it is called as onshore outsourcing, where BPO is contracted to other company in the same country. It is called as nearshore outsourcing, where BPO is cotracted to company in a neighboring coutry. It is called as offshore outsourcing, where BPO is contracted to other company in the different country. India gained popularity in BPO industry when USA organizations started outsourcing their business processes.
Business Processes that are found cost effectively being outsourced are –
HR services – Hiring & Exit of employees, payroll, healthcare of employees
Finance & Accounting services – Customer billing services, account payables, account receivables
IT/Software – Application development, application testing, application maintenance
Backoffice – warehouse managment, logistics, procurement
Customer Care – helpdesk, customer support via call and email
Almost all industries are spawning BPOs – Banking, IT, Pharma, Airlines and even Governments too.
A call centre business is one kind of BPO where activity is to make calls to potential customers or receive calls from customers.
If centre’s primary task is to make outgoing calls to potential customers, it is called as outbound call centre.
If centre’s primary task is to receive incoming calls from customers, it is called as inbound call centre.
Inbound call centre is used as customer care centre where customers calls are landed and their queries are handled on phone by customer care agents.
Outbound call centre is used for sales activity where agent makes outgoing calls to potential customers, explains them products and tries to sell products on phone.
A good CRM system (customer relationship management) is required for any call centre. Also a telephone facility/setup needs to be in place. CRM helps to keep track of customer interactions in organized way. It also can be integrated with other systems (say, billing) for efficient operations.
For telephone setup, organizations go for IVR (Interactive Voice Response) where customer interacts with company’s system via telephone dialpad. This reduces human interactions in handling some key queries from customer, thus reducing overall cost. If needed, customer can connect and speak to customer care agent. In telephone facility, sometimes, it also gives a live-call monitoring feature for training and tracking purposes.
For starting a new BPO setup, apart from staffing, key decision is made on CRM being used and telephone facility to be setup.
We, at Butterfly Themes, are happy to help you to outsource your business processes to us. We have a BPO setup and adequate staff to do so.
In this article, we briefly discussed about Business Process Outsourcing.