Industry news

This year represents a pivotal period for outsourced contact centres, with financial pressures, technological advances, compliance issues and consolidation all driving deep and lasting change within the industry.

One of the key trends will see contact centres increasingly recognised as a strategic asset rather than a tactical operation. There’s little doubt that customer service is seen as a key battleground in competitive markets, and many organisations are prioritising initiatives that will improve customer acquisition, advocacy and loyalty. Outsourced contact centres that can demonstrate how they will contribute to such business-building efforts will certainly be favoured.

At the same time, budgetary constraints mean that cost control remains paramount, so contact centres that can offer savings will have a significant competitive advantage.

Clearly, aligning these two apparently conflicting demands is a difficult proposition, but it’s one that will accentuate the importance of new technology. MATS (Multi Application Tracker System), for example, is a highly flexible and comparatively low-cost web-based solution that helps manage communications with customers and third parties by generating automated progress update messages.

These messages, through multiple channels such as SMS text or email, can be sent at key stages of almost any particular process, whether an enquiry, application or complaint. The objective is to keep customers proactively informed in a timely manner without placing further demands on staff. On the contrary, this solution has been shown to reduce incoming ‘chaser’ calls by up to 60 per cent, which in turn reduces the need to recruit vast banks of call handlers – a feature of the offshoring movement which is now being reversed.

Adoption of such solutions gives outsourced call centres a significant value-added proposition that will not only improve the service levels delivered to customers but simultaneously reduce fixed costs in order to present a better deal overall.

This approach also assists measurability. Since the system inherently logs and tracks progress on a case-by-case basis, real-time performance reports can be generated which calculate aggregate statistics about case completions. Such data can prove invaluable to both the call centre service supplier and its client.

Another advantage of this approach is that it supports the evolution of unified communications. The key is to achieve consistency across the many channels through which customers can be reached – particularly on mobile devices via SMS text, email or even personalised web pages.

The emergence of unified communication represents an opportunity for call centres, but the practical demands of delivery will necessitate increasing adoption of supportive technology, such as the MATS solution.

These types of offerings will not only increase the attractiveness of outsourced providers but also the traction they can gain within the client organisation, which will help cement long-term relationships.

This is true at all levels of the market, but particularly for mid-tier call centre providers, which will require agility, scalability and innovation to compete with the larger players, including some of the major BPO organisations which are continuing to grow through acquisition.

Comments from Martin Scovell, CEO of MatsSoft, the provider of a web-based managed service that combines workflow, communication and reporting tools to support integrated processes and improve both the efficiency and the effectiveness of customer relations. Users of the system include some of the UK’s largest financial institutions, as well as clients in the public sector.

Outsourcing Governance: 4 things to ask yourself

In this series of blogs, Paul Hart, IBM, shares his observations and thoughts on outsourcing governance to consider during your next governance meeting.

The trap of too many meetings is one I come across frequently. I was once on a project, where I was struck by the negative attitude the management team had towards governance. It was so obviously a chore, a never ending cycle of meetings for which they had little enthusiasm or derived any benefit other than the satisfaction of getting through a purportedly burdensome task unscathed.

I have myself experienced the frustrations of meeting overload from the provider side. I once worked on a project where I was told that I couldn’t have a meeting with a group of managers for many weeks to discuss a governance issue. I was told that “everyone is too busy in back to back meetings all day, every day”.

So, forgive me for singing the familiar tune of ‘back to basics’ but if you find yourself stuck in a series of perpetual meetings, my advice to you is to remind yourself of what you’re actually trying to achieve. There isn’t an ‘off the shelf’ answer to that, but based on my many years of experience here are a few questions which can help you gain that perspective and make your governance process operate more effectively.

1 Administration – who is responsible for all governance related administration? Are all inputs, minutes and outputs lodged centrally? Are your meetings locked down in your calendar months ahead? Is the meeting calendar published and are the logistics planned and updated regularly? Re-scheduling of meetings wreaks havoc for maintaining a focused agenda with the right attendees.

2 Preparation – Are you always briefed well before meetings? Ideally the meeting agenda and supporting information should be with you a couple of days beforehand as a pre-read providing you with the opportunity to absorb the salient facts and prepare any groundwork. A healthy approach can also be for client and service provider to reach agreement on what options are to be discussed, before a meeting.

3 Agenda & Attendees – Does the meeting agenda reflect business priorities? Are all outstanding actions and decisions clearly identified? Is the right information readily available and in the right format to enable clear decisions? Are options on the table? One of my peers recently remarked to me that his latest governance session had been, “a slow death by presentation material”. Are the right people attending the meetings? Roles, responsibilities and decision making rights should be clearly defined to ensure appropriate empowerment of individuals and their counterparts.

4 Meeting discipline – Do people turn up on time, or at all? Are meetings conducted in an orderly and productive manner? Are jointly agreed minutes taken and subsequently published? Are decisions and agreed actions directed at those who need to know?

Addressing these points will help any team move forward and make governance meetings more productive and powerful.

CCI BPO is the largest outsourcer in South Africa and is sponsoring the EOA Awards and NOA Conference. sourcingfocus.com caught up with Jamel Ziani, CCI BPO Managing Director, to discuss sourcing trends and what makes CCI BPO differant.

Can you define your business and your specialities?

Our Delivery Centre in Durban, South Africa is the home to 4000 Full Time Employees dedicated to serve our Clients across multiple verticals and industries. CCI BPO specialise in supporting our Clients who wish to outsource their Order to Cash Back office functions: From Credit Vetting to Payment Allocations, we offer to support the entire customer life cycle for our Clients with a team of fully trained Customer Representatives, Highly skilled Order to Cash Managers and dedicated Order to Cash Expert Lab® Executives

• Durban is the most culturally aligned South African city to the UK due to the high ex-pat population

• Located in the fastest growing commercial and residential growth markets in the country

• Largest skilled workforce pool in South Africa, which dramatically reduces recruitment and training lead times

• Accent Neutral area of South Africa which assists in optimal service delivery for international projects supporting our Clients in the UK, Ireland, USA and Australia

• 4000 agents serving our Clients in our unique state of the art Delivery Centre in Durban

• Expert teams dedicated to training and mentoring on site

• Order to Cash Expert Lab ® onsite delivering Innovation and Transformation to our Clients’ teams onsite but also within their retained organisations onshore

• 4 Order to Cash SMART Centres to support Delivery Excellence and Cost Optimisation

• Team Management solely sourced from the UK, Continental Europe, USA and Australia to meet Clients’ needs in terms of governance

Order to Cash is the end-to-end process that begins with managing customer credit worthiness and customers’ sales & services orders and ends with the collection and application of customer payments. These processes are focused on customer contact and collaboration, transaction processing and analytics.

Order to Cash encompasses the majority of activities typically referred to as “Accounts Receivables”. Success is measured by improved cash flow, fewer disputes, reduced bad debt and revenue leakage, increased customer satisfaction and enhanced process visibility and control. The Order to Cash process focuses on Collections and

Process Improvement to improve past due debt.

How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?

At CCI BPO for Order to Cash, our main focus is to support our Clients’ Operations with four critical BPO Business Outcomes:

1. Working Capital Optimisation

2. Operating Cost Reduction

3. Revenue Maximisation

4. Customer Experience Improvement

At CCI BPO for Order to Cash, we offer more than ‘lift and shift’ engagements where savings are made from onshore labour pools being shifted offshore which provides the Clients with a one-time only cost savings lever on their P&L. Once we have done that for our Clients, our ability for further productivity gains and new business value is demonstrated through continuous process improvements, increased quality of technology delivery and innovative methods of service delivery.

We are dedicated to our Clients and their customers’ satisfaction this is why our Order to Cash Sales Executives our Clients meet during the introduction meetings and contracting process are also fully responsible for the delivery of the service for the whole duration of our partnership:

• We are easy to do business with at all levels of our Organisation

• We are dedicated to our Clients and strive to meet their needs

• We can adapt to our Clients’ business changes and scale up and down our delivery model very quietly to meet changes

• We deliver on our targets and always try to outperform to support our Client Growth

• We continuously offer Innovation to support productivity improvements and better business outcomes

In your opinion – what are the top 3 outsourcing hot topics / trends at the moment?

• Business outcomes outsourcing to support Client business growth instead of just cost to serve and offshoring

• Specialised outsourcing with expertise instead of generalists who can only offer offshoring and labour arbitrage cost reduction

• Change in contracting towards price per transaction instead of rigid FTE based contracting

NHS Wales have awarded a five-year contract to SME Software Europe to provide expenses management across Welsh NHS facilities, which is expected to deliver £750,000 in cost-savings.

The contract will cover the delivery of an online staff expenses system, designed to remove manual processing and paper administration. The new system will provide services for around 194,000 claimants.

Paul Thomas, assistant director of employment services at NHS Wales Shared Services, said: "We expect the system to help us provide a quicker reimbursement of travel expenses incurred by NHS staff.”

Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire councils have launched a shared services program designed to save £675,000 per year from back office expenses.

The partnership between the authorities within the two councils, known as ‘Go Shared Services’, will provide services in finance, procurement, and HR. While the service was expected to bring high-cost savings, the partnership was expected to result in job losses in roles to be shared.

Cotswold DC councillor Barry Dare, who is in charge of GO Shared Services at Cotswold, said: "We can now do more with less and, in many instances, do it better because we are bringing together a pool of expertise and experience."

Statoil, the Norwegian oil giant, plans to invest £18 billion in U.K North Sea oil fields. The move would see the creation of 300 jobs.

The move comes after Statoil previously announced the creation of 700 jobs from a £6 billion investment. The investment would last the lifetime of the North Sea fields with the potential to provide 800 million barrels of oil.

David Cameron commented after meeting with the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, on creating closer energy links between the two countries, that the move represented "a big investment into North Sea production."

Vodafone has taken a controlling stake of Vouchercloud, a mobile based savings firm, with 57 percent ownership.

Vouchercloud who has just entered the Irish market, provide discounts and vouchers to a wide range of UK shops, restaurants and leisure providers. The service is tied to a GPS service which provides the location of the closest offers.

The move comes as Vodafone looks to deliver on mobile commerce. Vodafone commercial development director Tobin Ireland said: “Mobile couponing is set to grow rapidly across Vodafone's businesses as cost-conscious consumers increasingly turn to their smartphones to hunt for bargains and collect loyalty points."

A new £2m supercomputer which will help scientists study the universe has got the go-ahead after funding was awarded to the University of Leicester.

It will be used by academics to help them understand the formation of stars and planets.

The university has been selected as one of four sites to host national high performance computing (HPC) facilities.

Dr Mark Wilkinson from the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the University of Leicester is the principal scientist for the project. He said: “This is incredibly exciting news. We will now be able to carry out the largest and most detailed simulations of planets, stars and galaxies that have ever been performed and answer questions that we could not even have asked just a few years ago.”

Mobile giant operators Vodafone and Telefonica have announced plans to combine network infrastructures in order to deliver 4G services.

The companies expect that the plans to create one shared grid will increase the coverage of the current 4G network while speeding up the deployment of super-fast 4G services. The cooperative sharing of network resources will enable the companies to deliver 4G mobile services by 2015.

Ovum predict that Vodafone and Telefonica cooperation is the future

Vodafone UK chief executive, Guy Laurence, commented: "This partnership will close the digital divide for millions of people across the country and power the next phase of the smartphone revolution."

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle said in a webcast this week, that the company was ready to deliver "the most comprehensive cloud on the planet Earth."

Oracles Public Cloud which will feature per-month and per-user pricing, will allow customers to choose bespoke models that fit personal needs, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach which has been the approach offered by other major cloud suppliers.

Oracle has been in direct competition with Salesforce.com with both companies acquiring social media service capabilities in recent months in order to extend their market dominance. Ellison spoke out against other cloud services lack of security in comparison to Oracles Public Cloud, saying, "It's a big difference between our cloud and others on the market."