Managing Business Process Outsourcing NMIMS Solution June 2024

Description

NMIMS Global Access
School for Continuing Education (NGA-SCE)
Course: Managing Business Process Outsourcing
Internal Assignment Applicable for April 2024 Examination
Assignment Marks: 30
Instructions:
 All Questions carry equal marks.
 All Questions are compulsory
 All answers to be explained in not more than 1000 words for question 1 and 2 and for
question 3 in not more than 500 words for each subsection. Use relevant examples,
illustrations as far as possible.
 All answers to be written individually. Discussion and group work is not advisable.
 Students are free to refer to any books/reference material/website/internet for
attempting their assignments, but are not allowed to copy the matter as it is from the
source of reference.
 Students should write the assignment in their own words. Copying of assignments from
other students is not allowed
 Students should follow the following parameter for answering the assignment questions
1. Too often, once a project is completed, management attention goes elsewhere and
things revert to the way they were. Often the anticipated benefits are not realized or
even audited to see if the goals were reached. If there were benefits, they are often
not applied throughout the organization. Many pitfalls can happen when process
improvement is attempted one process at a time. It is difficult to tell which
processes contribute the most to achieving the business objectives or which process
is the critical process to improve.
Can business process portfolio management help in such situations and how?
(10 Marks)

2. India has been a preferred destination for outsourcing industry, thereby providing a
boost to the economic growth of India in the last two decades. Companies from
across the globe look up to the Indian BPO industry for reliable service for their
business requirements. It has contributed to the service sector development as well
as infrastructure improvements in non-metro location in India. The BPO industry,
despite its impressive growth and global advantage, is facing several challenges
and risks. These risks have a potential to slow down the Indian growth story. The
cost advantage has been reducing due to increase in wage parity and other global
destinations such as China, Philippines, Malaysia, Brazil etc. growing in reputation
as low cost service delivery. BPO industry in India also faces, challenges with the
high attrition rates, increasing use of Artificial Intelligence, process automation
technologies, volatility of the Indian currency and global economic slowdown. The
Indian BPO industry must mitigate the risks and challenges in order to realize its
true potential.
In view of the current scenario, categorize the above risks into the people risks,
technology risk and process risks. What would be your suggestions to mitigate the
risks facing Indian BPOs. (10 Marks)

3. AL-RIFAT Call Center, a leading healthcare BPO company based out of Gulf
approached HumaraBPO with a requirement to improve their BPO process. The customer’s
BPO division handles over a million customer calls every month, but their customer
satisfaction levels were plummeting downwards. Even their CSAT was as low as 47%.
Since the customer was a part of the healthcare industry, it was unacceptable for the
company to find a low level of satisfaction from their customers. HumaraBPO’s role was
to nail down the causes for the low CSAT levels and then to provide a customized BPO
solution that would help the company’s performance to soar.
At the onset of the project, the BPO team at HumaraBPO decided to dissect the problem
and get to the root cause. Through a detailed analysis, they identified some of the critical
issues in the process that were affecting the customer’s BPO’s performance. The following
were the requirements of the customer:

 There was a linguistic and cultural mismatch between the BPO’s personnel and the
client’s customers. The client’s customer base was native Arabs while the BPO
employees of the customer (5 male agents and 5 female agents) were not native
Arabic speakers. This language barrier made it difficult for the employees to
effectively address the culture-specific requirements of the customers
 There was a critical need to align the BPO support team with the standard
processes that govern BPO functioning. The BPO team also required intensive
training in BPO platform management
 The BPO’s turnaround time lagged over a period of 7 days in contacting their
customers after discharge
 The support BPO team worked only 5 days a week (Monday to Friday) and only
between 9 am to 5 pm. This posed a serious limitation for the customers who
wanted to contact our client
 The customers wanted to make sure that they were talking to an Arab agent and
would ask the BPO employees for their last name
 Female patients of our client would submit contact numbers of the male members
of their family instead of their own
 The customer reach percentage was less than 2%

After identifying the unique problems that were affecting our client’s BPO, they deployed
one their best teams to implement a customized BPO platform. Humara BPO’s skilled BPO
team refurbished the entire BPO process of the customer by adopting the following
measures:
1. BPO Service Timings: they increased the support time span by a period of 4 hours.
Next, they made the support center available from 7 AM to 7 PM. To match the working
week of UAE, they decided to change the work days of the BPO to Sunday to Thursday
instead of Monday to Friday. Multiple shifts was also introduced to meet the time demand
with WFM.
2. Local BPO Agents: they hired a team of native speaking Arabs to eliminate the cultural
gaps.

3. Support Infrastructure: they enhanced the infrastructure for the customer’s BPO center
and included best-of-breed voice, email and internet facilities. This helped in substantially
reducing the turnaround time of the BPO team.

4. Value Added Support Services: they also offered a host of value added services, such as
the following:
 they extended the 24 hour call support for excess processing requirements during
peak hours
 The BPO agents were given customized ‘Last Names’ to suit the caller’s country
 The DID number was masked based on the caller’s country
 The BPO agents were given 20% hand-outs
 Culture specific provisions were specially created to record rebuttals from the
objections raised by the male family members of female patients
 The BPO process of the customer was continuously improvised and enhanced
based on Lean and Six Sigma methods
 The database of the customer was always kept up-to-date
 The BPO application was rectified periodically

a. What were the cultural challenges faced by AL-RIFAT call center and how were these
specific cultural challenges met by AL-RIFAT call center. (5 Marks)

b. What are the advantages of outsourcing call center operations of a hospital to a BPO
like AL-RIFAT call center? (5 Marks)

*********************************************************************************************