Fusionbpo Blog

In the recent years, the customer service functions have greatly undergone some heavy changes. In order to save money and time, some of the call center firms have been shifted offshore. The self service sites permits the users to deal with some of the mundane tasks like that of checking statements, paying bills and ordering. So where lies the importance of crowd engineering is what you may be wondering now.

Well, crowd engineering believes in the importance of the social web in bringing about a new wave to the way consumers attain help. The crowd force platform of today is designed to help out the telecommunication companies, thereby offering crowd source assistance at real value. Today, it is quite obvious that when most people experience any kind of problem, they simply turn to Google or to their friends or to the online communities to seek for ready solutions. This offers a great opportunity for the companies to stretch out so as to connect with their prospective customers and thereby proactively solve the problems in these web platforms.

What’s unique about the approach of crowd engineering is that it mainly invites the community members and the existing consumers to support the other customer for the rewards. It is the crowd force platform technology that facilitates the support all across the diverse services and sites like that of MSN, Face book, Skype, Email, SMS and also the integration into the backend commercial processes of the company. All the community members will then be rewarded with points for the participation.

Montgomery County gets a state of art call center to assist residents in emergency. This new customer service center will remain equipped to meet the needs of the local residents all throughout the year. According to the county officials, this new customer care centre is a part of the modernization efforts taken by the County Council. It is said that in times of emergency, the residents of the Montgomery County are told to call their County Council members for help. This was the main process going on all these years. In order to meet the growing concerns of the people, the County Council has decided to take some constructive measures to solve the problems of the residents.

Today, the new call center that has been established stands to be the part of the $80 million modernization effort that the county officials have taken. County officials hope that the opening of the new customer service center will be able to make the county government much more responsive to the needs of the residents. Reports say that the snowstorms of last month had created a lot of difficulties for people living in this county. With the opening of this center, the residents will be allowed to call at one number -311 and attain aid with a great variety of requirements. Hence, instead of making calls to individual agencies, this new center will be able to meet up all needs at one place. This center took 2 years to start its operations and is all set to release officially in this month. However, it is in use and this is what is known to be the soft launch as said by the Assistant Chief Administrative Office, Mr. Tom Street. He also added that the center is trying hard to improve upon its expertise and acknowledge to all of the residents’ queries.

We all know how call center services have benefitted diverse business sectors. Business firms of today whether small or big always consider taking customer support service as offered in a call centre. Its time now to know a bit of the history of call centres from a professional who has been closely associated with this industry for years. He is none other than Bob Furniss who is a well known face in the popular world of call centers. Bob Furniss has spent almost 30 long years in customer service focusing on the improvement of customer experiences. Today, Bob heads the Touch point Association, an organization engaged in offering leadership workshops and strategic consulting services in order to support companies to bring into line the employee focus and culture.

Bob started working in a call center much before when it was actually called a call center. Describing his first job, Bob says that his first job was in a so called “phone room”. In this phone room, there were about 10 key brown telephones including headsets hanging from one side. Adding more, he also said that the ACD in use was just one blinking light that use to indicate that calls from customers was on hold. From the words of Bob, it’s much more evident that the phone rooms of earlier days have come a long way today. These phone rooms have developed into a full service call center unit ensuring and adding efficiency to business units with best customer support features and services.

Aiming the quality participation of professionals in its $7.2 billion business process outsourcing industry, the Business Processing Association of Philippines (BPA/P) has started with the National competency test to first screen the right candidates. The National Competency Test of BPA/P serves to be an assessment program for the BPO aspirants. For Oscar Sanez, the President and the Chief Executive of the Business Process Association of the Philippines, this program will be an ideal step towards the generation of the industry ready individuals to serve the IT-BPO industry.

Philippines get more than 450,000 graduates each year. Now this exam will actually target the potential college graduates to enter the IT/BPO industry. In the words of Jamea Garcia who is the executive director for the talent development, this exam is just a doorway not only for the graduates but also for the career shifters. On the other hand, Sanez pointed out that the BPA/P association is searching out for ways to ensure better results. In this regard, they have taken their first step towards improving the hiring procedure. The hiring efficiency of the business process outsourcing firms will ensure that all BPO companies will be having the first screen of the college aspirants so as to determine the level of competencies and acceptance. The National Competency Test of the BPA/P is a computer aided exam that will continue for more than 2 hours. It will be including some of the vital test components including the adeptness in English, learning capability of the applicant, computer literacy and lastly the service orientation.

In January last year (2009), as per the industrial estimates, it was reported that the BPO services in the health care sector will be reaching $5.3 million by the year 2012. Such is the growth rate of business process outsourcing services in the United States healthcare sector that the estimated figure is expected to achieve the actual figure within the given timeframe as predicted by the IDC.

IDC ranks as one of the well known technology research firms and this was the face behind this given estimation of US BPO healthcare services. IDC has been conducting a research for long. Last year, the firm came up with a final report indicating the growth rate of the US BPO health care services. According to the industry reports, the firm expects that the US business process outsourcing services in the field of health care activities will be reaching out the figure of $5.3 billion. As per the industry insiders, there is nothing wrong in this estimation.

With an annual compound growth rate close to 14.6 percent recording from the year 2007 the estimated figure is nothing unreal at this time. The healthcare spending in the US is estimated to reach $2.5 trillion. Calculating in percent, the United States health care spending is close to 17.6 percent of the economy of the country. This figure also roughly equals to the total of the total gross domestic product (GDP) of the country, France.

Nurses in BPO industries, doesn’t it sound quite weird? Since both the terms belong to entirely different domains, it becomes difficult to establish a quick link between them. The demand for outsourcing services is increasing with each new day as many other industries are also resorting to the call center services. With more and more healthcare industries seeking assistance of the outsourcing firms, many of their functions are being performed by the call center companies. For this reason, the BPO firms are employing nurses who specialize in the life science and healthcare related tasks. This is a new exception in the industry that has been initiated in the past few months. The call center firms are offering back to back services to the US industries in various sectors such as, pharmaceuticals, health care and medical devices.

The employment opportunity for the nurses is no more restricted to the hospitals, nursing homes or other health care institutes. The outsourcing companies that serve the insurers are also recruiting nurses on their clients’ behalf so as to manage the medical facilities of the elder citizens. The nurses visit these citizens to prepare a medical assessment based on their lifestyle. These assessments are transferred to the nurses at the respective BPO, in the form of printed documents. These nurses then go though the documents and put down the information according to the instructions of their client. The market of healthcare outsourcing is estimated to enhance by ten percent in the following 2 to 3 years. Current reports indicate that the revenue generated by the industry from healthcare outsourcing has reached around thirty billion dollars.

CATI or “computer aided telephone interviewing” is the name of a new software included in the advanced telephone centers. This software stands perfect enabling rapid and automated predictive dialing systems. The efficiency and productivity of this system is about four times than that of the traditional dialing systems. This has proved to be an effective tool in the business process outsourcing industry in order to collect reliable and accurate data for research. This technology helps the call center employees in effective management of the customer calls. With the help of CATI technology, the call center agents capture the experience of each and every customer that calls them up.

The software is characterized by several innovative features that help in taking your business a long way. They provide you with flexible and measurable IP solutions back-to-back. The “Cisco Voice” feature of the CATI enables the BPO agents to provide inbound voice-based solutions. Pointed guidance, chat services and whisper coaching are the other functions performed by the software. CATI has enabled flawless transfer of data and voice to the 3rd parties at the time of call transfer. Calls of customers from across the world can be accessed with the help of this software. Data mining has thus, become an easy task for the call center agencies. The employees are able to analyze the market situation on the basis of intelligent tagging of their customer calls.

The new generation students, who are tech savvy by nature, find more interest in browsing the pages of the internet than that of the book. This has encouraged the rapid growth of online tutorial services, which will soon become a trend for the students. This has made education a fun filled activity for students and they enjoy it thoroughly. Use of high-end devices like whiteboards and digital pens has made communication very easy between students and their online tutors despite the great geographical distances between them. Technological advancements have rendered the online learning process more instant and convenient as well. Online tutoring is another aspect of the BPO industry and it employs trained personnel for such purposes.

The call center agents offer tutorial services to the students on a variety of topics and subjects; which is quite more than the number of subjects taught by personal tutors. The BPO services not only teach the students but also enable them to analyze their academic performances. The call center agencies provide the students with homework assignments on their websites for the students to work them out. The BPO companies act as a perfect tutorial by providing the students with all that they need in getting academically enriched. Be it entrance tests, homework, assignments, course materials or examinations, they have everything in store for you. Online tutorials are a cost effective means for the students to get perfectly educated. Besides, the entire attention of the tutor remains focused on the student which is not possible in a classroom of forty. The students need not follow any strict schedule or travel to the tutorial, which in a way saves their time and energy.

Businesses in the developed countries such as, United Kingdom, Scandinavia and Netherlands are opting for the call center services on a large scale. They are outsourcing their business operations to the BPO companies of the third world countries, especially India. These countries are aware of the quality of service that they are about to get from the call centre industry of the developing nations. Even the European countries are not far behind the American nations in terms of business process outsourcing. The trend of outsourcing in Europe can be traced back to the year 2005, when they felt the need of outsourcing for the first time.

Outsourcing is getting popular in the European countries like France, Germany and Spain. The tough competition between the business organizations in the European and American nations has resulted in rapid growth of outsourcing in the European nations. More and more BPO firms are employing people who can speak Greek, Russian, Italian, Spanish or any other European language for serving the clients and customers from these countries. Most BPO companies in India are facing demands for German speakers from their present customer contacts. The huge population that the developing nations possess belongs to diverse cultures and thus, they are able to speak different languages. For example, a greater section of the people in Goa can speak Portuguese which acts as a resource for the Indian BPO industry. People from different states of the country can speak in different languages, which is an added advantage for acquiring outsourcers from other foreign countries like Europe.

The availability of various kinds of services and products is increasing with business enterprises cropping up every now and then. These businesses revolve around the sale of their services or products, for which they require customers. But people can get to know about these products only when they are informed about it. The business owners cannot always devote themselves to the introduction of their products or services to the customers, since they have many other important activities to stress on. That is why; the businesses are resorting to the call center services. These services offer the best possible help in terms of making the customers familiar with your services or products.

The BPO firms provide excellent customer support services by interacting with them over the phone. The customers call up to clear their doubts or questions regarding any particular product. The customer support representatives not only answer their queries but also provide information about their clients’ business services or products. They give accurate details of the products of their clients and try to convince the customers without reflecting it in their voice. This skill of the call center employees is what that makes their services so popular.

In today’s competitive world, no business enterprise has spare time to focus on these aspects of its business in detail. Thus, it is better to entrust a BPO company with the work of guiding the customers. The customer support agencies have the right kind of infrastructure and expertise that can manage the customers’ requests for information on the services or products.