back office business process outsourcing

Making the most of back office business process outsourcing

Contact Center, or Call Center, work was an early driver of the movement that enabled the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry to find its way to the remotest corners of the world, along with a few heavyweight locations such as India and the Philippines which could provide suitable talent in large numbers.

What is call center work?

Call Center work mostly requires interacting with customers of the business of the client.

It is generally divided into two broad categories: Inbound In most cases, inbound call centers handle calls that have been initiated by customers of the business, or people who are prospective customers.

Calls could be initiated for a variety of reasons, such as:

• Query about their account
• Like to know more about a product or service
• Need help with the product of service

Inbound call centers are an important cog in the business’ wheel as they handle customers (or prospects).

No business would wish to rub their customers the wrong way.

Inbound call centers have an important role to play in ensuring customer satisfaction is high.

Outbound While outbound call centers are also going to call either existing or prospective customers, their conversations might be more difficult than those of inbound counterparts.

Some of the common types of outbound calling activity that happens could be:

• Calling borrowers to follow up on unpaid loan repayments
• Calling customers to get them to buy additional products
• Calling prospective customers to get them interested in buying this company’s products and services

It is not difficult to guess that these are mostly unwelcome calls.

Back office business process outsourcing

Call center work, that we just discussed, since it deals with customers and prospects, is known as front office BPO work.

Being client-facing, these functions can make or mar the reputation or the company and influence revenue realization.

As a result, these are considered to be sensitive roles.

By extension, then, BPO work that does not deal with customers can be christened as back office business process outsourcing.

Though these roles may not have the immediacy or urgency associated with customer-facing roles, they cannot be said to be devoid of any influence over customers or revenues.

It just so happens that the business has been divided such that the people in these roles do not have a need to interface directly with customers.

Other than that, they play an equally important role in ensuring that the customer’s journey is smooth and interactions pleasant.

The better the job performed by the back office support team, the greater the likelihood of front office personnel experiencing customer interactions that are pleasant.

And vice versa.

oWorkers specializes in back office BPO work and, despite being relatively new in the industry, is already identified amongst the top three in the world in data related BPO services, another name for back office work.

The team in between

There are actually some roles that fall in between.

These roles interact with customers, and hence, can influence revenues and the brand directly.

However, their interaction with customers, or prospective customers, is not ‘immediate’ or ‘online.’

What this means is that these roles have some breathing space between a customer query and their response.

What could these be?

These are typically jobs where the representative is not talking to a customer but interacting with her through some other media.

It could be an email. It could be an online chat, It could even be an interaction over social media.

The difference in these interactions is that the representative is not under pressure to respond immediately.

He can refer to available literature or seek help from supervisors, if he feels the need.

Hence, these interactions can be managed in a more secure environment.

However, for the purpose of classification, we classify them as front office work and explore the many other types of work that constitutes back office business process outsourcing.

With a management team that has over 20 years of hands-on industry experience, oWorkers navigates the back-office and the in-between spaces with aplomb.

Back office business process outsourcing and its many forms

The remit of back office BPO is wide. In fact, it is so wide that it covers almost every business activity.

Looked at from an industry perspective, back office BPO works for the insurance industry, just as well as it does for the shipping industry, or telecommunications, or retail, or manufacturing or education.

Looked at from a functional perspective, it can support HR services, data entry and its management, finance and accounting, legal services and many others like creative services.

One of the private jokes in BPO circles is that it presents itself as an expert in the industry or function to which it is pitching for business from.

It seems that there is nothing that it cannot do.

• It can do research and indexing.
• It can do analysis and reporting.
• It can pay bills and track outstanding payments.
• It can enter data and convert speech to text.
• It can do data annotation and image labelling.

It can do community management and comments moderation. It can even do legal and creative work.

Despite the constraints on account of the pandemic, oWorkers has continued supporting its clients without any significant disruption.

They were among the first to make it possible for their staff to operate seamlessly from home and office, depending on the situation any given day.

Popular back office business process outsourcing solutions

Notwithstanding the fact that it can do anything, there certain functions have gained popularity for outsourcers to seek vendors for.

We will discuss a few of these here.

Recruitment process outsourcing

In a competitive world, one of the headaches faced by many large corporations is the hiring and retention of able candidates.

Poaching from competitors as well as employee aspirations, keep gnawing away at the workforce, requiring a full-time engine to be operational for continuously hiring, training and onboarding new employees.

Though it could be a part of HRO, if outsourced, it is a popular back office BPO activity in its own right.

oWorkers has done a commendable job with its own employees.

Firstly, it operates through employees, and not freelancers and contractors like some of its competitors.

This gives the company greater control and flexibility and the employees loyalty and stickiness with the company.

It is no wonder that oWorkers continues to receive satisfaction scores in excess of 4.6, on a scale of 5, from present as well as past employees.

Finance & Accounting

Finance & Accounting is a quintessentially business function, tracking and chasing money for the business.

F&A is now widely accepted as a process that can create value, instead of merely recording and reporting, covering a variety of areas like Risk, Compliance, Payables, Receivables and Invoicing.

Outsourcing tends to introduce systems that insert predictability and measurability in the function.

Clients of oWorkers, especially those based in Western Europe and the US, routinely note savings of almost 80% in terms of cost.

They are also enamored by the unique pricing model of oWorkers that offers them a choice between input and output based pricing

AI enablement services

Dedicated enabling support from providers of back office business process outsourcing providers is one of the pillars based on which Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have made such rapid advancement.

They are the ones processing the large volumes of data for training the AI models to iron out their limitations before introduction.

Polygon annotation, LIDAR segmentation and keypoints annotation are some of the techniques used for annotation.

Data types are varied and include audio, video, text as well as images from industries ranging from healthcare to automobiles to telecommunications to insurance to agriculture to robotics.

As a recent entrant, oWorkers does not carry baggage of historical processes and has hit the ground running in adoption of current requirements of clients like data annotation.

With its strong partnerships with technology companies, oWorkers accesses the most advanced technologies for deployment in client projects.

Human Resource Outsourcing (HRO)

Managing human resources is a huge responsibility.

People need to be dealt with sensitively and professionally.

While ensuring compliance with applicable laws.

Being a specialist job, many companies, especially mid-sized ones, unable to keep pace with the marketplace and regulations, are increasingly outsourcing it to partners.

As a preferred employer, oWorkers has attracted a consistent inflow of candidates interested in working for it, in all its delivery locations.

Not only does it give access to a deep pool of talent, it also keeps hiring costs low which eventually gets passed back to clients through the pricing arrangement.

With a stable HR management, oWorkers is able to impart a similar sense of stability to the clients for whom it undertakes HRO activity.

Content moderation

The openness and freedom of speech unleashed by the combination of the internet and social media platforms, has resulted in the mushrooming of control measures being put in place in order to avoid stepping over the unacceptability line and dragging the associated brands down with it.

It has given rise to the need for moderating the content that is finding its way onto social media and other platforms.

Content moderation is a need not only of platforms themselves, but also of companies that leverage spaces offered by these platforms for their commercial use.

These commercial entities that are creating communities in order to generate conversations for promoting their brands and products also need to moderate these conversations, for similar reasons.

oWorkers is actively engaged in moderating content on the internet and managing communities on social platforms in order to protect the interest of the sponsoring company.

Since offensive content can emanate from anywhere, anytime, its ability to provide support 24/7 in 20+ languages makes it an ideal partner.

Data entry

While new data in manual form does get generated even today, necessitating conversion, the road to complete digitization passes through conversion of legacy data that is held on non-digital media.

That has been one of the drivers of data entry across industries and functions.

Whether court judgments or customer orders, or civil records they will all need to be converted to a digital format to facilitate all future processing.

Some forms like audio do not lend themselves to interpretation by computers and hence need to be converted.

While the bulk of the work may be done by automated tools like Natural Language Processing (NLP), manual intervention is still needed since accuracy is limited.

oWorkers has been supporting clients with simple data entry and enrichment processes for over 8 years.

We consistently deliver accuracy rates in excess of 99%, measures across varying client scales as well as complexity of projects.

Supply Chain Management (SCM)

The flow of goods and services, covering the steps and processes that lead to transformation of products is covered by SCM.

A key objective of SCM is to streamline the supply processes that releases efficiencies and gives the company a competitive advantage.

With the rise of ecommerce activity in the last few years, the application of SCM processes is now deeply embedded in our day-to-day lives.

As business goes global, the complexity of supply chains increases manifold.

SCM has established itself as a key back office business process outsourcing solution that seeks to manage inventories, production processes, distribution, sales and vendor supplies, in order to deliver faster and eliminate unnecessary costs.

oWorkers is well placed to cater to unexpected peaks in client business volumes that SCM processes can sometimes experience.

With our ability to hire almost a hundred resources extra in 48 hours, we deliver a huge cost saving to clients who would, otherwise, need to hire and retain idle resources.

Sourcing and Procurement

For manufacturing industries in particular, procurement is a key activity.

Since the attention, usually, is on the activities that contribute directly to the bottom line, procurement gets pushed down the food chain.

Outsourcing it to a provider gets for it the status of a business getting it attention and management time.

Providers often add value to the client’s business by bringing in the weight of their networks, developed through their specialization, to bear on the arrangement, through which the client can often get better pricing and terms.

The vendor is also well positioned to negotiate better terms as they have the strength of volumes from multiple clients.

Apart from being GDPR compliant, oWorkers offers the comfort of operating from super secure, ISO (27001:2013 & 9001:2015) certified facilities.