I Want to Grow My Outsourcing Business – But I Don’t Want More People

The notion in everyone’s mind is that growth in business means a definite increase in the workforce and unless that happens no business can grow. Some would say that they don’t think that way, and probably this is no longer a thought process, and it is old school, but if you ask me – this thought process still exists.

Now, me being from the Outsourcing industry and having been here for the last 9 years, I have seen things happen – seen growth and I am reluctant to say that overall business growth is equally proportionate to organic growth. In simple words, I can say that an easy way to grow is by acquisition and subsequently organic growth. Sounds very easy, isn’t it?

But like every coin, this one has a flip side too. We do get growth when done organically but it comes with many issues related to human resource management, and infrastructure management and this also leads to an increase in operational costs pertaining to infrastructure and people management.

So how can I be a business process outsourcing services provider to grow? There could be a number of answers for this or just one.

What drives any business – good end customer experience whether it is a B2C or B2B environment? If being a bpo services provider, I can assure good end customer service for my clients’ customer base then I am sure to get more business from them and other prospects too. This means growth in the purest term.

So, if you ask me, a bpo services provider should focus on two things – People and Process.

Unless the people of my organization are in sync with the plan to improve customer experience, we cannot achieve any target. We certainly need to work, to improve the employee experience which would act as a means to create an exceptional customer experience. We need to have a mechanism to connect CX with EX. CX plans should have plans to quantify the efforts of employees and tie them with the organization’s revenue. If the efforts of employees lead to higher revenues, then the appreciation should reflect back in the form of performance incentives and salary increments. Here Analytics comes into action to understand the tone of their conversation and this when combined with personality traits, management behavior, and employee profiles helps find out what correlates to high customer satisfaction.

When it comes to process – I believe we need to agree that labor arbitrage and cost reduction are not out of the equation completely, but they are not the primary factors affecting growth.

The word of the day is Go Digital.

The first thing that we need to ensure is that processes cannot be effective unless they are not enforced throughout the organization and not in silos. Customers demand consistent digital experience (DX) and it can’t be achieved unless the Application Development and Delivery teams work to integrate these silos across the organization and make integration core to their DX platform strategy.

The business process services and outsourcing (BPS&O) market has seen major changes in service offerings and technology is playing a major role in defining processes. The bpo services and technologies have evolved over the past few years and will continue to reshape the future of BPS&O services.

Two BPS&O technologies are expected to revolutionize the outsourcing industry – Digital Business Process Consulting Services and Intelligent Automation Next-Gen Services.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is another aspect that is governing the processes for the outsourcing industry and the same is reflected in Gartner’s statistics “By 2020, digital services, automation (such as RPA) and AI will convert 60% of BPS providers’ current “people-process-centric” business models to a “business-services-centric” model. This new model will also reduce employee requirements in business shared-service centers by 65%”.

Digital, automation, and analytics service is rapidly changing the face of the BPS&O industry. The amalgamation of all these factors leads to an omnichannel delivery system which is key to providing a customized, effective, and hassle-free end-customer experience.

To conclude, rather than continuing later it would be safe to say that the business process services and outsourcing scenario is evolving at a great pace and that customer experience initiatives are key to growth without adding the extra burden of human management and the like. M&A and partnerships need to focus on enhancing access to technology, extending portfolio offerings (investing in vertical-based AI tools & technologies), and expanding geographic reach.