CERTIFICATION: Another Hat in the Ring

India has the highest number of SEI CMM level 5 companies in the world–53 out of 74 to be exact. This penchant for quality certification has permeated deep into the BPO sector as more and more Indian BPO set-ups hanker for standards. 

What drives these companies? Some term it as a pure marketing-oriented exercise: “It makes another good slide on a power point, and is one strength that is tangible to show.” However, it will be rather inane to assume that this alone makes companies put in so much management time and effort. 

Industry executives state two major objectives behind certifications. One, a company can measure itself against the best players in the industry and get access to the accumulated knowledge of an entire industry. Two, it can build a process framework that has been tested to be thorough and robust. 

It is the first objective that drives companies. In fact, so much interest did the standard generated in India that the chairman of CPOC, Cliff Moore, took it upon himself to take care of this market. Today, India has more than half a dozen
COPC-certified companies while an equal number of companies are in the process of getting it. 

Is There Room for eSCM?

And here comes eSCM, a framework of practices developed by the Carnegie Mellon University for forming, managing and expanding sourcing relationships. In short, another quality model. But with COPC so entrenched in the minds of chief quality officers in contact center/BPO companies, does eSCM stand a chance? 

“Standards like COPC have been around for more than seven years now,” Umesh Vyas, head (COPC certification), QAI, says. “However, the Carnegie Mellon name is popular among software companies. So we may see the software companies foraying into BPO having a tilt towards eSCM. Reflecting that is the faith reposed by Nipuna, the Satyam BPO subsidiary, in this model. Nipuna has announced that it will go for eSCM. However, others like HCL Technologies BPO Services and Hughes BPO Services have approached COPC for certification.

Will they try a new standard? Well, while the opinions are divided, companies are not closed to a new standard, if it offers significant advantages. 

More about the standard Version 1.1 of the model can be downloaded at http://itsqc.cs.cmu.edu/escm/eSCM_Model_1.1.pdf Training information at http://itsqc.cs.cmu.edu/escm/escm_schedule.html Current evaluators and lead evaluators for the model at http://itsqc.cs.cmu.edu/escm/escm_news.html  Information on the developing model for clients at http://itsqc.cs.cmu.edu/escm/clients/index.htmlÂ

“The BPO industry is growing extremely fast and I think we would be truly remiss and close-minded if we refuse to explore new and proven standards as they address new fronts,” Christine Gambacorta, V-P (quality and process engineering), Global Vision, says. 

That must be music to the ears of eSCM proponents. 

But two words of caution!One, awareness on eSCM is lacking severely. (If the chiefs of quality do not know about the new quality standard, who would?)

And two, they are in no mood to abandon the existing models. 

Taking the Complimentary Route

The key to the success of a new standard now is to compliment existing standards. “There is no point in recreating the wheel. What is really required is the expansion and further development of existing standards to suit the ever changing needs of the organization,” Diana Christian, director (quality and training), Infowavz. Infowavz says that she has found the ISO platform to be ideal for her company’s end-to-end BPO services. At the same time, Infowavz is working on incorporating new models onto the ISO platform and has found COPC to be a good fit.

Annaswamy Gopal, director (business development), ISRI, Carnegie Mellon, who is responsible for marketing this standard outside the US, confirms this. He insists that eSCM is complimentary and not exactly competitive to existing quality models. So if an organization has been evaluated for certain processes, it need not be assessed for those again. In other words, for a company that is already COPC certified, getting eSCM certification is an incremental effort, and not one that begins things from the scratch. 

But that’s a tactical feature, not a strategic one. In the long run, if it has to succeed, it has to offer something that is not there in the existing standards. So while more than one standard may coexist, they should not just be compatible with each other, but should, more importantly, deliver complementary values. 

It is in that context that we need to examine whether they could exist. 

COPC is a customer interaction-centric standard. And so complete it is in that aspect that it measures not just the processes, but also the end-result in terms of client and end-user (receiver or the maker of call who is the customer of the client) satisfaction. A mere process excellence standard can never replace that. It is a complete customer interaction standard, for an outsourced as well as a captive center. Many companies that have gone for COPC have taken to Six Sigma to improve internal processes and problem solving.

On the contrary, eSCM is actually developed as a process outsourcing standard. “It includes all the critical issues in a sourcing relationship, right from the pre-contract phases of a relationship like requirement management and contracting to service transitioning that involves coordination of people and technology, and the post-contract phases of reverse-transition and handover,” Prabhu Sinha, Satyam, who has been appointed as one of the lead assessors of eSCM, explains. 

Raju Taneja, director (process excellence), EXL, agrees, “eSCM is a more complete standard for the BPO industry. While I have not got into the details of the standard, I am aware of the contents and it seems to be a much more complete standard.” 

Taneja is also of the opinion that there should not be too many standards. “All standards fundamentally drive the same basic issues in different ways. However, the more industry-specific a standard, the more it helps to build specific capabilities,” he points out. EXL, incidentally, is ISO certified and is going for
COPC. 

Christian of Infowavz says, “As the BPO industry expands rapidly globally, there is a strong requirement for industry benchmarks, especially in non-voice BPO. Being a relatively young industry and at the same time being incredibly complex and diverse, the challenges of establishing standards are even more difficult here.” 

Probably eSCM can be of help. 

Where does that leave ISO. Many BPO organizations have also gone for ISO, but as quality consultant Charanjiv Singh says, “That’s because it is a little cheaper and probably easier.” Singh, who was with Daksh as the chief quality officer till recently had even undertaken a benchmarking exercise for Daksh with help of BenchmarkingPortal, promoted by benchmarking guru Jon Anton. 

The good news for eSCM is that companies are receptive. However, the challenge before Carnegie Mellon would be to build the awareness faster. A few companies like Accenture, Satyam, IBM Global, EDS, and STQC have signed as evaluators. (just notice, two out of six are Indian). 

But the clients are yet to show up. They would certainly like to know much more before making a move. 

Balaka Baruah Aggarwal

India Comes out on Top, Again...

And this time, it is not the US hype, but the British sensibility that confirms this.According to new research carried out by independent consultancy Kinetic, sponsored by UK telecom and call center company, THUS Plc, it is only a matter of time before the overall standard of Indian outsourcers is comparable or better than that of their Western counterparts. 

Here are the key findings of the research:

n Indian outsourcers were rated almost as highly as UK call center operations in terms of their call handling abilities, covering empathy, listening skills, voice, accent and clarity 

n Indian outsourcers are almost as effective as the UK operations in achieving the desired result, whether it is an inbound or outbound call

n The highest team leader to agent ratio identified was 1:18, with many of the Indian outsourcers reviewed having ratios far better than many UK
operations 

n Quality management ratings are equally strong in India. This is due to the availability of quality assurance resources and the role that the team leader plays in managing their team 

n Offshore operations have spent a large amount of time, effort and money developing client-transitioning processes resulting in a set of practices much as one would expect to see in the UK 

n Although training in India and the UK can be said to be good in the main, only 7 percent of the Indian outsourcers achieved a rating of very good compared to 32 percent of the UK operations. 

n Up to 50 percent of the time spent in induction training in India is spent on a variety of accent neutralization programs, comprehension training and the development of other communication skills 

n Client management ratings for the Indian outsourcers were better than for the UK operations with 71 percent of them achieving a rating of good - very good compared with 61 percent in the UK 

n E-learning is more extensively used in India with 77 percent of the outsourcers stating that they have deployed an e-learning solution compared with 23 percent of UK call centre operations 

n The Indian outsourcers have invested a significant amount of time and effort into developing their quality management
systems and management information systems. In the main, Kinetic found the level of investment to be less in the UK 

Kinetic carried out a benchmark study of 14 of the top Indian outsourcers and compared them against best practice in UK contact center operations. The study is based on information gathered during onsite assessments carried out in Feb 2003.