Tips for Reducing The Cost in Call Centers

It is a continuous thought priority to all call centers to know how they can save money in their contact centers and throughout their operations.

Few tips which is step by step to go for the cost reducing

Make a Team: Make a team which will do the review. Because call centers efforts are heading for at customer service, process improvement and potential cost reduction, form a team that can bring different disciplines to the process. Also include general training and quality training, human resources, center scheduling, telecom traffic, IT, marketing, and returns and replacement if all of these areas are within responsibilities.

Take the opinions and input of all of team members. Challenge them to assess how things could be done differently, and make them answer the question, “How can costs are reduced without lowering the standard of customer service?” These meeting we can keep in the starting of the year to set up the target.

Marks the Achievements: By marking your achievement, it will be indicator to know the performance measures up against set standards and plans. The major achievements include contacts per hour; service level; abandon rate; attrition/turnover rate; call-handle time; talk time; after-call work time; contact-to-order ratio; transaction volumes for Internet, phone and mail; non-phone volumes and others.

Review: Labor’s cost, quality and availability is becoming an issue for many call centers, particularly in seasonal businesses where the selling curve is more compressed. Review advertising media costs and results, and exchange information with other human resource departments. Review pre-hiring testing, employee selection criteria and practices. By review process we can know the possible improvements and cost reductions for the process. It will help us to know more about a place for temporary agencies rather than relying completely on in-house hiring.

Revenue Generation: As part of their mission, many contact centers are charged with becoming revenue centers in addition to taking orders and providing customer service. By revenue generation reports we can show about success with cross-selling, up-selling, outbound selling and increasing the company’s average orders. It will be really help full for the cost saving in call centers.

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ERP gets easier for SMB

Good news for the small medium business (SMB) for which you must be waiting from long time. Now the ERP gets easier for the SMB. A few years back the Enterprise resource planning (ERP) was a self-important expression with expensive software to match. ERP is helpful for the managers to do their responsibilities more efficiently, boost sales and reduce costs. ERP is business management system that gives a support to the mangers of the companies to command of data and workflows to get the clear report of each factors of the business.

The essential part of the business like planning, manufacturing, sales and marketing are also cover with ERP. It also covers activities like inventory control, order tracking, customer service, finance and human resources. For example, ERP software can automatically indicate to the managers when it notices that stocks have gone down in a sales depot. Dealing with the suppliers is sometimes very difficult for the managers but with ERP it will be easier for a company manager to deal with suppliers.

ERP software is now available in much cheaper rate for small business also because now a day’s number of computer users is increasing day by day. A large group of people are using various kind of software to manage all the official details. ERP software, once a privilege for the global multinational, is available on much cheaper rates.

SaaS (Software as a Service) – It is refer to renting of software over the Internet, much like Web based e-mail. SaaS is also contributing to software becoming cheaper and easier to use. Industry officials say the emergence of SaaS and cheaper ERP software has dramatically lowered the barrier for users. Top ERP solution providers are now targeting just about every company, size no bar Consider the case of SAP, the global leader in ERP software, which once was associated largely with multinational giants.

On November 21, 2007 SAP India announced record-breaking quarterly growth for the third quarter of 2007 with the addition of more than 714 new customers till September 2007, translating to more than two new customers per work day in 2007. "A growing SMB (small and medium business) market, opportunistic investors, and middleware technologies converge to make the SMB market for ERP applications one of the most competitive environments for market growth and product innovation within enterprise applications," ---- Says Gopakumar Sivanandan of SAP India.

A spokeswoman for rival Oracle India spokesperson agrees. "Mid-sized companies are driving India's GDP growth today," she says. Microsoft recently launched Microsoft Dynamics NAV designed specifically for medium sized companies.

“Dynamics NAV delivers integrated functionality to support solutions for financial management, supply chain management, CRM and E-Business." According to Sushant Dwivedy from Microsoft India,

For small and medium enterprises sometimes it was very hard to pay the cost at one time.
Earlier it was required Rs 10 to 15 lakhs can be done at a fraction of the price for ERP software. Though it must be that renting out software involves a recurring cost every month. The onetime cost of an ERP package needs returning costs in training and support and to that extent, renting the ERP software over the Web could be a lot better Consider.

The cost of the ERP for SMB is available for three users at Rs 25,000 a month, for five users at Rs 35,000 a month and 10 users at Rs 60,000 a month. No hardware, no personnel, no software cost is required in addition to this. Oracle and SAP have attractive pricing that make affordability a huge attraction. Oracle starts at as low as Rs 2,800 per user license, though it calls for implementation and support cost Much cheaper versions are also available from the Open Source movement, which uses operating systems based on free, modifiable platforms like Linux. Source – HT Times

According to market researcher Gartner, revenues from business platforms in India grow from $12.1 million in 2005 to $16.4 million in 2006, with all leading vendors posting double-digit growth. The Indian ERP market is expected to see a CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) of 25.2 per cent over the next five years. The market was $83 million in 2004, and is projected to be over $250 million in 2009.

Is your turnover rate unacceptably high?

Some companies are realizing that their call center staffing processes are not only inefficient, they are also very costly. Many are seeking an alternative and are turning to RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) as an option. Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is a growing trend in which companies outsource all or part of their hiring functions to find better-quality people to staff your call center. RPO can be used successfully to fulfill a range of hiring needs for organizations; and is particularly well suited to call centers. Specifically, RPO delivers benefits for call center operations that include sourcing higher-quality candidates, improving fill ratios and “show rates”, decreasing turn-over, and reducing hiring costs.


Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) when an employer outsourcers or transfers all or part of the staffing process to an external service provider.

An RPO engagement can be structured in one of three ways depending on the needs of the company: Enterprise, Selective or Project RPO.

In Enterprise RPO, the partner manages the entire process across all skill categories and all locations. Selective RPO involves managing a subset of locations or a subset of recruiting processes, such as sourcing, screening, interview scheduling or offer letters.
In Project RPO, the RPO provider delivers hires for a one-time hiring project.

In all three scenarios, a dedicated RPO team works directly with the hiring manager to create a tailored program to meet the call center’s specific needs. The team can work on-site at the client’s locations, off-site in its own facility or a combination of the RPO Benefits

Organisations that partner with RPO specialists can realize a range of significant and sustained business benefits, all of which can be measured.

These benefits include:

Securing the best talent: Competition for the most talented individuals is increasing. Organizations need to secure the best people quickly and efficiently to help them build competitive capability.

Cutting recruitment costs: By transforming processes, utilizing best practice, and replacing a fixed cost base with a variable charging structure, RPO can significantly reduce the cost of recruitment.

Removing the administrative burden: RPO providers take on the burden of operational recruitment activities, making organizations free to focus on value-creating and strategic activities.

Delivering higher quality services: There are many stakeholders in a recruitment process; through improving processes and measuring experience and outcome, RPO providers can demonstrate highest quality services.

Mitigating operational risks: Risks come in many forms, and the expert knowledge of an RPO specialist can help organizations mitigate the risks associated with an inability to scale their business operationally to meet changing market demands, and the risks of non-compliance to legislative and regulatory change.

The more sophisticated and experienced RPO providers will also have a system of “forward-looking” analytics to ensure that hiring goals will be met for each “hiring class.” This predictive process analyzes how many candidates are in the pipeline.

How to hire an RPO provider

If you think an RPO partner could measurably improve the quality of your call center hires while containing costs, research several firms and choose carefully. The field is expanding quickly but there is a wide range of experience, knowledge and track record of success/failure. Specifically, you may want to ask potential providers some key questions, including:

How many RPO clients do you have?
How many hires do you support annually?
What experience do you have with call centers? And what types of call centers?
What percentage of your clients is reference able?
Are your recruiters dedicated to one client or do they work on multiple clients at the same time?
Do you have the flexibility to scale up and down as my needs change?
What is your client renewal rate?

As call center recruiting, hiring and retention remains a challenge for many companies, RPO is emerging as an important option. With turnover down. Significantly decreasing costs -- an increasing number of call center and human resources professionals have embraced RPO as an innovative strategy and a smart business decision.

Is your turnover rate unacceptably high?

Some companies are realizing that their call center staffing processes are not only inefficient, they are also very costly. Many are seeking an alternative and are turning to RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) as an option. Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) is a growing trend in which companies outsource all or part of their hiring functions to find better-quality people to staff your call center. RPO can be used successfully to fulfill a range of hiring needs for organizations; and is particularly well suited to call centers. Specifically, RPO delivers benefits for call center operations that include sourcing higher-quality candidates, improving fill ratios and “show rates”, decreasing turn-over, and reducing hiring costs.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) when an employer outsourcers or transfers all or part of the staffing process to an external service provider.

An RPO engagement can be structured in one of three ways depending on the needs of the company: Enterprise, Selective or Project RPO.

In Enterprise RPO, the partner manages the entire process across all skill categories and all locations. Selective RPO involves managing a subset of locations or a subset of recruiting processes, such as sourcing, screening, interview scheduling or offer letters.
In Project RPO, the RPO provider delivers hires for a one-time hiring project.

In all three scenarios, a dedicated RPO team works directly with the hiring manager to create a tailored program to meet the call center’s specific needs. The team can work on-site at the client’s locations, off-site in its own facility or a combination of the RPO Benefits

Organisations that partner with RPO specialists can realize a range of significant and sustained business benefits, all of which can be measured.

These benefits include:

Securing the best talent: Competition for the most talented individuals is increasing. Organizations need to secure the best people quickly and efficiently to help them build competitive capability.

Cutting recruitment costs: By transforming processes, utilizing best practice, and replacing a fixed cost base with a variable charging structure, RPO can significantly reduce the cost of recruitment.

Removing the administrative burden: RPO providers take on the burden of operational recruitment activities, making organizations free to focus on value-creating and strategic activities.

Delivering higher quality services: There are many stakeholders in a recruitment process; through improving processes and measuring experience and outcome, RPO providers can demonstrate highest quality services.

Mitigating operational risks:
Risks come in many forms, and the expert knowledge of an RPO specialist can help organizations mitigate the risks associated with an inability to scale their business operationally to meet changing market demands, and the risks of non-compliance to legislative and regulatory change.

The more sophisticated and experienced RPO providers will also have a system of “forward-looking” analytics to ensure that hiring goals will be met for each “hiring class.” This predictive process analyzes how many candidates are in the pipeline.

How to hire an RPO provider: If you think an RPO partner could measurably improve the quality of your call center hires while containing costs, research several firms and choose carefully. The field is expanding quickly but there is a wide range of experience, knowledge and track record of success/failure. Specifically, you may want to ask potential providers some key questions, including:

How many RPO clients do you have?

How many hires do you support annually?

What experience do you have with call centers? And what types of call centers?

What percentage of your clients is reference able?

Are your recruiters dedicated to one client or do they work on multiple clients at the same time?

Do you have the flexibility to scale up and down as my needs change?
What is your client renewal rate?

As call center recruiting, hiring and retention remains a challenge for many companies, RPO is emerging as an important option. With turnover down. Significantly decreasing costs -- an increasing number of call center and human resources professionals have embraced RPO as an innovative strategy and a smart business decision.

India Ahead of China

India is growing in the BPO sector at present India is unquestionably the BPO superpower of the world. But it is also true that the competition is always on. There are other strong competitors of India who might ruin India's BPO. There are lot of countries and one which on top is China.

China is one such country which can eat into the BPO share market of India. But for the time being India is well ahead of China because of some inherent advantages. India is currently booming in the BPO arena and has scored over China to emerge as the top offshore destination for Global businesses. In the 2004 offshore index, India remains the star performer. It has once again captured the top spot in outsourcing by a comfortable margin due to its strong mix of low costs and noteworthy depth in human resources. This fact was brought out in a study conducted by AT Kearney, an international consultancy agency.

India has a very important advantage, their command of the English language. There are lots more Indians with good English skills than Chinese. Forrester also endorses the view that scalability of resources (talent pool) is the major factor that makes India an attractive offshore location. “The cost of operations in India can be 20-30% higher than places like Vietnam or lower than places like Brazil. But part of the challenge for these countries is the lack of skills. There is a very limited set of low-end work that companies like GE are looking at and lack of quality resources makes it hard for these countries to get started. The work going offshore today is geometrically more complex than the Y2K work that India got started on with,’’ says Mr McCarthy.

India proved better than China on account of several factors. The study pointed out that China lags behind India in terms experience and other important factors like IT and management education, language skills, concerns about intellectual property and overall country risk.

According to the study, although India and China are the market leaders in this sector, there are huge opportunities present in the market to give ample space to other countries like Philippines, Vietnam, Romania, Kenya, Sri Lanka and North America market to grow.

The study also said although it is unlikely that India would be able to retain its number one slot with China aggressively trying to outstrip it in the business, it would still be able to get a decent share of the pie.

Why BPO Employees Quit Their Jobs

It is true that now day’s employees are not working for salary because they want to relaxation in job. Most youngsters do not like joining the business process outsourcing (BPO) due to stress and health issue. BPO employees are quitting BPO job’s to get rid of the stress and strain at work place. Employees do not quit due to salary issues alone. They are least bother about the salary. All the companies are giving good salary.

Now companies are providing good services to fresher and experienced employees with openings with good salary. But preference of the employees now goes to the office where they should have some fun and entrainment for getting relaxation.In fact, stress and health weren’t even among the ‘top three’ factors for leaving a company.

Union Health Minister A Ramadoss recently called for a “health policy for the tech sector”, stating: “(BPO employees) have a sedentary lifestyle. They smoke, go for late-night parties, and even take drugs. Some get heart attacks in their mid-20s”
Employees are facing stress problem in BPO due to that their health is down. If customers are not getting comfort and the full relaxation in BPO companies then they quit the company. The good part is that if the industry is aware to checking indoor air quality to testing food in labs then it will be really.

Employees of Indian BPO firms, on the other hand, were overall content with their jobs in 2007, states the survey. They were satisfied with the job content, work culture, training, and appraisal.

However, it added that they were not satisfied with the image they were stuck with, and least satisfied with their salaries. The average salary hike in the BPO industry grew by 14.8 per cent only in 2007 as compared to an increase of 17.2 per cent last year.

The direct outcome of the fall in salary hike is the increase in attrition rates. The attrition rate went up to 20 per cent from 18 per cent in 2006.

Hyderabad-based Brigade, for instance, appointed a chief fun officer to look into ways of ensuring low employee stress levels and keeping them highly motivated.
The survey also revealed that while large firms ranked better in parameters like work culture and image, niche companies were better in terms of salary and job content.
Now days all call center are providing the best service to employee to give them comfort and the satisfaction in job. The stress level is really sometimes very high but the companies are also focusing to reduce the stress on employees.

CRM - Customer Relationship Management

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. CRM is a methodology and it is used by companies to manage their relationships with customers. Company’s can learn more about internal process for customer’s needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them by using the CRM.

CRM helps businesses use technology and human resources to gain insight into the behavior of customers and the value of those customers.

The three aspects of CRM are as follows.

1. Operational
2. Collaborative
3. Analytical

Operational aspect of CRM: Operational CRM provides support to "front office" business processes, including sales, marketing and service. Each interaction with a customer is generally added to a customer's contact history, and staff can retrieve information on customers from the database when necessary.

One of the main benefits of this contact history is that customers can interact with different people or different contact channels in a company over time without having to describe the history of their interaction each time. As a result, many call centers use some kind of CRM software to support their call center agents.

By using the Operational CRM process call centers can easily keep the track of all customers and easily managing Campaigns. It is helpful for enterprise marketing automation and for sales automation.

Collaborative aspect of CRM: The objectives of collaborative CRM can be broad, including cost reduction and service improvements. Collaborative CRM covers the direct interaction with customers, for a variety of different purposes, including feedback and issue-reporting. Interaction can be through a variety of channels, such as web pages, email, automated phone or SMS.

Analytical aspect of CRM: Analytical CRM will help call centers to know more analyzes customer data for a variety of purposes. Analytical aspect will also give view of the customer behavior to aid product and service decision making. Analytical CRM generally makes heavy use of predictive analytics.

A full featured CRM software application that performs virtually all of the functions required of a customer response call center.

By using CRM in call centers the sales conversion can be improve. You can expect to achieve this magnitude of increases to your bottom line as well when you follow these proven customer service call center techniques.

Help Desk Services: In Demand Now

According to one job portal site, the Demand for entry-level helpdesk positions has increased by 45 percent compared to the same period last year. The priority of the business is always to cost-cutting and to improve their bottom lines methods. Help Desk Services are giving this favor to companies.

To fulfill the customers needs and expectation now a days small and home based businesses are taking support from the help desk services. Due to less number of the employee or the financially challenging organization prefer to go for the help desk services. These services will give the support to give the best service to the clients on time. Accuracy and on time delivery of the project is two major factor for other client and the organization to get the more projects in future. Help desk service is suitable for the companies and processes which is huge and the client wanted the delivery in less time. Help desk services provided by the offshore contact centers 24/7x365 days.

A small company or even large company can save the money by taking the support from the helpdesk outsourcing. They don’t need to pay the outsourcing company a contracted amount and are not responsible for personnel expenses such as payroll taxes, worker’s compensation insurance and employee benefits for the employees of the call center that provide their sales, service and support functions. Another benefit of the helpdesk outsourcing is to save the cost of equipment, software and ongoing maintenance expenses.

We can entrust on the Help Desk service provider with their service and support functions which directly impact their customer’s level of satisfaction and relatively, the company's reputation. As a result, the quality of service can reduce making outsourcing more of a burden than a benefit.

Take your decision to outsource help desk activities by doing an analysis of help desk support processes, expected service levels, customer expectations and costs of outsourcing. Training systems should be developed to ensure that your company's expectations in regard to service quality, policies and procedures are clearly conveyed to the outsource provider. Ongoing monitoring of customer satisfaction is also necessary so that you can determine whether or not the outsource provider you have selected is meeting the needs of your customers in line with their expectations and your quality service standards.

The huge benefit of help desk outsourcing is that it removes the complication in work station support and makes it easy and flexible. By employing well-prepared who work for both effective and quick in completing their tasks.

Golden Opportunity in Call Centers (based on survey)

Careers in BPO and call centers are no longer a passionate choice for urban youth, reveals a survey conducted by ASSOCHAM. The BPO sector, which is already encountering an attrition rate of 25 to 30 per cent, may face a tough challenge of managing with a 30 to 40 per cent shortage in trained manpower in the next two years, a survey says. According to the survey, the apathy is mainly due to uncertainties in job security, coupled with stringent working conditions and the increasing number of people switching over to newer and promising areas of work, namely aviation, hospitality and retail.

Aviation, hospitality and retail sectors are also currently experiencing shortage in workforce to an extent of 25-30 per cent. This phenomenon has created abundant opportunities for urban youth in the above mentioned sectors.

“A majority of 12th Standard pass outs, who were earlier seeking opportunities for livelihood in BPOs and call centers, are now curious to join other leisurely yet attractive areas of work like animation, journalism, designing, and entertainment, besides aviation, hospitality and retail,” the survey reveals.

Factors influencing youngsters to explore their rising career graph in above mentioned areas comprise attractive pay package with more incentives than those offered in call centres and BPOs. Secondly, working conditions and lifestyle seem to be more regulated in sectors like aviation, hospitality, retail, and animation, the survey notes.

The survey reveals that institutes running various call center courses are facing the warmth and are witnessing a shortfall of 15-20 per cent of student fall-outs in their academic sessions. Moreover, call centers and BPOs are cutting their costs to reduce their operating revenue margin; this is influencing the employees’ salary packages and facilities.