BPO has been one of the fastest growing sectors in the Indian industry for while now, and with the increasing number of companies trying to capitalize on this area existing players are finding that they’re margins are being squeezed. Boosting margins and not loosing business as a result of high costs are right at the top of any corporates “To-do list “, one way of accomplishing this is to use low skilled individuals at a low cost to boost margins. The biggest disadvantage of this as every knows is the that the quality of the work suffers a great deal which could very easily lead to loosing clients.
So how do you increase your profit margins and still keep quality high? The most logical way would be to improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of your agents on the floor and Knowledge Management provides a method of doing just that.
Having scoured the web for information around the benefits of implementing a KM tool within a BPO organization the points below seem to stand out the most.
Efficiency
- Decreasing average handle time
- Minimizing talk time
Effectiveness
- Increasing first call resolution
- Decreasing call escalation percentages
- Reducing repeat calls
- Reducing agent training time
- Provide consistent, accurate answers
Innovation
- Creating opportunities to cross-sell
- Increasing customer satisfaction
- Decrease employee turnover
Knowing which areas to improve performance is the first step to establish a KM framework that could tackle these issues.
The biggest disadvantage BPO’s face is that a large number of them deal with highly confidential client information that is so safely guarded that most processes work as separate entities within the BPO. There isn’t any information sharing outside this area, however capturing ideas like best practices and replicating them across the organization and in every client process would display an immediate improvement, an approach most BPO’s do not follow in a structured manner.