Call Center Back Office BPO KPO LPO
• Call Center
A call centre or call center[1] is a centralised office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. A call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing, clientele, product services, and debt collection are also made. In addition to a call centre, collective handling of letters, faxes, live chat, and e-mails at one location is known as a contact centre.
A call centre is often operated through an extensive open workspace for call centre agents, with work stations that include a computer for each agent, a telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional centres, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes, microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI).
Most major businesses use call centres to interact with their customers. Examples include utility companies, mail order catalogue retailers, and customer support for computer hardware and software. Some businesses even service internal functions through call centres. Examples of this include help desks, retail financial support, and sales support.
A contact centre, also known as customer interaction center is a central point of any organization from which all customer contacts are managed. Through contact centers, valuable information about company are routed to appropriate people, contacts to be tracked and data to be gathered. It is generally a part of company’s customer relationship management (CRM). Today, customers contact companies by calling, emailing, chatting online, visiting websites, faxing, and even instant messaging.
• Back Office
A back office is a part of most corporations where tasks dedicated to running the company itself take place. The term comes from the building layout of early companies where the front office would contain the sales and other customer-facing staff and the back office would be those manufacturing or developing the products or involved in administration but without being seen by customers. Although the operations of a back office are usually not given a lot of consideration, they are a major contributor to a business.
Examples of back-office tasks include IT departments that keep the phones and computers running (operations architecture), accounting, and human resources. These tasks are often supported by back-office systems: secure e-commerce software that processes company information (e.g. a database). A back-office system will keep a record of the company’s sales and purchase transactions, and update the inventory as needed. Invoices, receipts, and reports can also be produced by the back-office system.
In banking, the back office includes a heavyweight IT processing system that handles position keeping, clearance, and settlement. In investment firms, the back office includes the administrative functions that support the trading of securities, including record keeping, trade confirmation, trade settlement, and regulatory compliance. If used in sales, the back office would include functions that fulfill customers’ orders and would usually include the duties involved in customer-support call centers.
Back offices may be somewhere other than the headquarters of a company. Much of the time they are in areas and countries with cheaper rent and lower labor costs. Back office functions can be outsourced to consultants and contractors in any country.
• BPO
Business process outsourcing (BPO) is a form of outsourcing that involves the contracting of the operations and responsibilities of specific business functions (or processes) to a third-party service provider. Originally, this was associated with manufacturing firms, such as Coca Cola that outsourced large segments of its supply chain.[1]. In the contemporary context, it is primarily used to refer to the outsourcing of services.
BPO is typically categorized into back office outsourcing - which includes internal business functions such as human resources or finance and accounting, and front office outsourcing - which includes customer-related services such as contact center services.
BPO that is contracted outside a company's country is called offshore outsourcing. BPO that is contracted to a company's neighboring (or nearby) country is called nearshore outsourcing.
Given the proximity of BPO to the information technology industry, it is also categorized as an information technology enabled service or ITES. Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) and legal process outsourcing (LPO) are some of the sub-segments of business process outsourcing industry.
• KPO
Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) is a form of outsourcing, in which knowledge-related and information-related work is carried out by workers in a different company or by a subsidiary of the same organization, which may be in the same country or in an offshore location to save cost. Unlike the outsourcing of manufacturing, this typically involves high-value work carried out by highly skilled staff. KPO firms, in addition to providing expertise in the processes themselves, often make many low level business decisions—typically those that are easily undone if they conflict with higher-level business plans.
• LPO
Legal Process Outsourcing, India (LPO India), provides a complete range of integrated legal support services to worldwide legal community and helps law firms and corporate legal departments receive value for money. In the areas of research, drafting, litigation support and administrative services, LPO India has good com mand in the legal arena. Outsourcing high-value and sophisticated core business processes to LPO India in India is a strategic move for forward-thinking organizations, as we consistently deliver superior value and achieve the highest standards. Most importantly, we serve as your virtual overseas partner, ensuring quality, confidentiality, integrity, and on-time execution for each project.
LEGAL PROCESS OUTSOURCING
Why outsource?
The legal industry across the globe is gradually turning towards outsourcing for gaining efficiencies and staying profitable in a highly competitive marketplace. Recognition of the fact that legal companies need to focus on their core competencies and leave back office processes to the hands of competent outsourcers is creating a compelling case for outsourcing out non-core processes. A further rationale for the outsourcing is to facilitate at the same time the in-house counsel of the foreign law firms to concentrate on core legal issues. The availability of outsourcing ventures with world-class resources and expertise is also boosting the growth of outsourcing by legal entities. Legal Process Outsourcing is a lucrative route to reduce cost and increase efficiency by outsourcing legal works to India.
The Realm of LPO
The LPO derives its roots from KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing). KPO refers to knowledge-intensive work that involves specialized domain expertise. High value processes that fall into this realm include: valuation research, investment research, patent filing and legal and insurance claim analysis. LPO in India started as a low-end work that mainly included transcription. But now LPO in India is a high-end knowledge intensive work. Presently everything from patent application drafting, legal research, pre-litigation documentation, advising clients, analyzing drafted documents, writing software licensing agreements to drafting distribution agreement is being outsourced to India. This potential growth took place to such an extent that today patent filing has its own separate existence different from LPO referred to as Patent Process Outsourcing (PPO).
India, a preferred location for outsourcing
The Indian Legal System is much like the UK, US, Canada, and a sizeable part of Europe -- the major source of outsourcing. The Indian litigation and dispute resolution methodologies are well founded on the classic Constitution of the biggest Democratic Republic in the world and are understood universally. Indian legal system is also one of the most researched and informed legislations to ensure a uniform yet practical interpretation of the legislation throughout the breadth and depth of this land of unique diversity.
There are several factors that favour Indian attorneys:
• The advantage of the time zone
• Availability of English speaking attorneys
• Familiarity with common law doctrines
• Indian attorneys with US/UK qualifications are in plenty
• Labour cost differential- It almost costs up to 80 percent less than the US firms
• The quality and speed of work done
• Most LPO outfits in India are reported to be staffed 24/7
• The Indian legal professionals are taught to analytically interpret the laws
• Regulations of the Land by generously drawing on the similar legislations of other similar legal systems and are exposed to Common English Laws.
Service Providers
None other than the U.S does the majority of legal outsourcing. Legal services, outsource-able from the US alone are pegged at 3-4 billion dollars comprises paralegal and research support, contract drafting and revising and contract management, library services, patent and trademark prosecution and litigation support. It also includes some other European countries. Other major countries providing legal services market include UK, France, Australia, South Korea, Japan and China.
The Growth Prospects
Industry (ASSOCHAM), more than 200 top US companies alone are looking for offshore locations towards achieving saving of 30-70 per cent. The Chamber says, "India is already known for its large and increasing pool of quality engineering graduates, many of who are being attracted to the patent services segment of legal BPO."
About one-third of the registered professionals currently provide patent services to European and American end clients, and this number is likely to double to 1,800-2,000 by 2010. India is set to achieve significant growth from its current share of 3-4 per cent to 6-7 per cent in the 250 billion dollar global market of Legal Process Outsourcing, by 2010.The global knowledge process outsourcing industry is expected to reach about USD 17 billion by 2010, of which USD 12 billion would be out sourced to India.
In addition, the India KPO sector is also expected to employ more than 250000 KPO professionals by 2010. Legal process outsourcing, as it is being called, has very high growth potential. It can fetch 79,000 jobs in India by 2015. While the LPO industry is rather nascent and has initially encountered many of the same struggles that early BPO outsourcing faced, it is poised to become a major sector of offshore outsourcing in coming years.
Offshore Outsourcing Services: BPO | KPO | LPO | Call Center | Back Office
Outsourcing of work processes is an action of transferring some part of an organizational process to a third party, whose specialization lies in the specific department. Offshore Outsourcing on the other hand, refers to this third party or the vendor, or provider being situated on a foreign land, which is considered to be a place away from the work location of the original organization.
Offshore Outsourcing has become a very feasible trend for Organizations that are expanding or just trying to reduce their overhead expenses.
Economically Offshore Outsourcing makes perfect sense when processed to a developing Offshore site situated in a developing nation. Developing countries like India and China have the capable Human Resources to conduct businesses, but they may lack the capital to set up huge infrastructures.
Such Offshore countries are usually willing to do business at a fraction of the cost, as they pay their employees less and also have an easier structure of tax payments. This profit carries on to the Outsourcing organizations.
Technically, the portion of the Business Outsourced for the process of Offshore Outsourcing which: might be in the department of sales, telemarketing, research or any other field; no longer remains the concern of the Outsourcing Organization.
The Offshore Organization hires its own experts and professionals. This creates an economically constructive division of labor that becomes fruitful to both the Outsourcing Organization and the Offshore vendor.
Offshore Outsourcing might be a way for an organization to lay roots in a foreign country where they may be thinking of expanding.
Therefore, a company might Outsource its business to a company in India or China in order to understand the prevailing considered market and to adjudge the customer in context.
This may be a ploy to sooner or later open a branch in these countries. Huge conglomerates that are perpetually expanding opt for Offshore Outsourcing as a survey method rather than as a method for garnering more business.
Some of the major countries or districts that provide Offshore Outsourcing services are:
1. India- Programming, Customer Support
2. China- Programming
3. Russia- Programming and R&D
4. Pakistan- Programming, Customer Support
5. Bangladesh- Programming and IT
6. Bulgaria- Programming and R&D
7. Ukraine- Programming and R&D
8. Belarus- Programming, R&D
9. Romania- Programming and IT
10. Philippines- Data Entry and Customer Support
11. Egypt- Customer Support and Programming
12. Malaysia- Customer Support and R&D
The highly technical use and availability of the internet has enabled service providers and small businesses to contract freelancers from all over the world to get projects done at a lower cost due to lower wages and property prices.
This trend runs in parallel with the tendency towards big corporations preferring Offshore Outsourcing, and may serve to strengthen small business capacity to compete with their bigger competitors capable of setting up Offshore locations or of arriving at major contracts with Offshore vendors.
There are considerably different of opinions on the impact on the various societies affected, which reflects the attitude of Protectionism versus Free Trade.
While experts view it as a potential threat to the domestic job market in the developed world and ask for government protective measures or at least closer scrutiny of existing trade practices, while others, including the countries who receive the work, see it as an opportunity.
Free-trade advocates suggest economies as a whole will obtain a net benefit from Offshore Outsourcing, but it is unclear if the displaced receive a net benefit.
