Cutting Edge BPO

David Schatsky | November 23, 2005, 10:49 AM

I chatted recently with Jeroen Tas, Vice Chairman and President of MPhasis, an offshore development, consulting and business process outsourcing (BPO) firm.

Jeroen told me the firm is currently running about 60 large-scale processes for clients, mostly in sales & service, which employ some 4500 people and will generate about $70 million in revenue this year (about one third of their total revenue).

He described the company's approach toward managing and improving the processes that they take on for clients. It's an approach that seems to be to be pretty advanced and worth further evaluation.

For many years companies have managed large industrial and information system-based processes via the use of exceptions, alerts and dashboards. This allows operators to track the performance of a system at a high level and focus solely on the components or subprocesses that are not performing as expected. For example, in a nuclear reactor, if the temperator in the core rises above a certain threshhold, an alarm might sound.

Mphasis is applying this approach to managing human-intensive processes such as contact centers.

For example, the goals of a contact center might include certain targets for cross selling services. A dashboard for managing the call contact center process would include measures that track cross-sell success. If one of the teams is falling below the target benchmark, it would trigger an alert to be investigated. Possible causes: network slowdown, a few agents are under performing, an ineffective script?

This alerts-based approach allows the company to analyze the performance of complex mult-tier proceses and and drill down on the areas that need performance.

Mphasis credits this approach with performance improvements such as data entry accuracy, customer satisfaction and referrals and conversions in a variety of the processes they've taken over for clients.