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The speed and nature of demographic, technological, and social change are fast exceeding the capabilities of the traditional contact center to effectively service customers.
On one hand, heightened expectations for personalized service are continuously being set and reset by new customer engagement innovations. On the other, social media communications is impacting an organization's ability to directly shape customer attitudes and perceptions.
Like never before, information regarding products, services, and experiences is now exchanged faster, more extensively, and more dynamically.
Transgressing from the Traditional
Non-voice processes such as email, chat, SMS, and social media are becoming more relevant, as consumers use multiple modes of communication. Also, an important component, especially in the telecom sector, and to a great extent in BPOs is the uptake of videos in mass. BPOs are providing video services in addition to traditional voice and back-office data operations.
With video based interaction, tighter integration to non-voice channels would be the much sought-after customer experience, which organizations would be looking for in the coming quarters. Hence telecom companies need to gear up with a higher bandwidth to meet their network demands at reduced costs. CIOs face a series of challenges in making sure that network investments keep pace with the rising expectations.
Pain Points
Overall network-wise, traffic is growing at a record pace, thanks to SaaS, VoIP, video, and emerging cloud based computing architectures. A gigabyte of network traffic will quickly grow to 10 GbE in less than 5 years, and requirements are outpacing the standard network refresh time. This will have organizations aggressively moving to 10 GbE in the data center to keep up with traffic demands.
Today's IT executives are struggling to stay at the top of escalating network operations. A substantial amount of time is spent on basic infrastructure life-cycle management, whereas IT managers would rather see their network teams working on application-related issues or more proactive network design.
The need to upgrade networks is exacerbated by the fact that many BPOs still struggle with the sheer magnitude of traffic growth and upgrade challenges. Moving forward, a network upgrade does not mean just building bigger pipes. In short, bandwidth is necessary but not sufficient. Instead, high-performance networks that minimize latency, decrease packet loss, and prioritize mission-critical traffic are required. The primary driver will be the explosion in SaaS, the convergence of voice and video communication, IP based storage, and a much heavier reliance on other real-time web and network traffic.
Furthermore, any implementation needs to factor in the RoI that it provides. A similar case in point would be cloud computing. While cloud has been making sufficient inroads and offers flexibility, disruptive advantages, and operational efficiencies, it yet needs to establish the case for RoI and security, which is a key to the BPO industry.
Telecom being the backbone for all connectivity and in turn to BPO industry, hence plays a key role in the growth of industry. Today even if there are multiple telecom providers, industry is still struggling to meet business demands of high availability of telecommunication links.
Local land infrastructure and regulatory controls make it tougher for telecom companies to provide a scalable and resilient infrastructure for customers. Few telecom providers even share the core backbone connectivity, which in turn reduces the resiliency and defeats the purpose of having redundant service providers.
Emerging Faces of Outsourcing
Indian BPOs face a huge challenge to increase per employee profitability while at the same time remain competitive in the service provider market. A new set of countries like China, Latin America, and South Africa are emerging as outsourcing destinations, especially for the international buyers.
One of the ongoing challenges that the BPO industry faces is the application of technology that can help in business transformation and help streamline the next wave of changes while having segregated IT environments. For instance, while desktop virtualization helps in centralizing applications and can aid in efficient use of resources, it needs to be further customized within a third-party BPO, given the segregated IT environments.
Pain Relievers
There is a need for scalable and optimized multiple global delivery centers for voice and non-voice processes that would need integration and the right set of tools and technologies with open architectures and industry standard protocols to achieve them.
The industry needs virtualization with tighter integration of non-voice channels with a differentiated customer experience.
Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) is emerging to be a BPO game-changer, reminiscent of Software as a Service (SaaS) a decade ago. This delivery model provides advantages that go beyond cost savings and hence will find widespread acceptability. This model offers tangible business advantages especially for capital-starved firms.
Today BPOs are fast shifting and religiously following technologies such as Business Process as a Service (BPaaS), virtualization, and cloud computing in order to provide cost-effective, highly-scalable, and quick-to-market solutions, products, and platforms for clients. This effort is helping BPOs to target new markets such as mid-size organizations while also providing technology for the company's Smart Enterprise Process (SEPSM) offering.
IT & Communication set-up is a business enabler. Having seen significant growth in the last many years and having made huge investments in ICT set-ups, the CIOs' priority now is to sweat the assets. Consolidation, virtualization, centralized management, etc, are some of the ways to do so.
CIOs are now looking at ways and means of leveraging technology to render better experience to their employees, customers, partners, and suppliers. It has increasingly becoming important for CIOs to align ICT investment to CEOs' business priorities and furthermore deliver business outcomes against these investments. Efficient and effective ICT environment is a competitive advantage.
With growing business demands and dynamic requirements, IT infrastructure services have been in tremendous pressure of delivery of services for business. There have been a shift in IT spend from capital expenditure to pay-per-use facility to enable end clients to keep cost low as they have shorter business contracts. This facility has helped lot of booming business to benefit from BPO industry by outsourcing processes at a cheaper cost and skilled services.
To meet industry requirements, telecom companies and OEMs will need to collaborate with each other to provide an end-to-end service delivery model at a cheaper cost. Additionally, product manufacturing companies would need to enhance products to act as a single system for end-to-end business requirements.
Growing business demands to expand operations in rural areas of domestic market have made BPO industries to work on deploying a centralized system architecture with strong BCP/DR deployment. Telecom companies have been spreading their reach in rural areas and tier-2 and -3 cities to provide connectivity for expanding BPO operating companies. This has helped the BPO industry to speed up deployment in rural areas as the dependency has now reduced only on providing telecommunications infrastructure in remote locations.