For instance, take call centers. The focus has shifted from quickly closing the call (to achieve efficiency targets and reducing the handle time) to doing all that is possible to increase client’s revenue and level of satisfaction. The mindset of the vendor has transformed into thinking from the clients’ perspective and serving the client’s customer better. This has become possible by focusing more on people, though process continues to be important.

In a recent interaction with Global Services, Manisha Kapur, Director - Continuous Improvement, India and EMEA, Convergys Corporation, very passionately spoke about how internal focus (i.e. active engagement and empowering of the manpower) increased operational effectiveness and customer satisfaction, and accelerated revenue growth to create a sustainable competitive advantage. She believes that, "one will get best answers on how to do things [in a BPO] not in the corporate boardroom, but on the floor".

Thus, focus on people seems to be the new watchword. This, Manisha says,"...translates into two things; first, engage employees with fun activities to increase employee satisfaction (as the workforce constitutes of young individuals most of whom are just out of college), second, empower them with knowledge and teach them to calibrate themselves for higher delivery." Once empowered, Manisha set a unique way of measuring performance their performance. Far away from using the law of averages, she focussed on determining individual performance by managing variations.

Measuring the worker has become more important than measuring the work. According to Manisha, the concept of managing variations does not only look at the average performance of the team. It also tracks the performance of each individual from low-to-high. A performance median is selected and continuously monitored to check if the productivity is moving upwards or downward as a team. She told www.globalservicesmedia.com,"It was decided that 50% of my team should be above the target (through a variety of engagement programs). Such a strategy helped us maintain better performance level month-on-month. As more people wanted to do better than the average, they began meeting targets and eventually reduced the risk of attrition."

Also, the managerial staff that paid all its attention to manage day-to-day operations is now being supported by robust processes and variation management tools. Their focus has now shifted to managing client expectations and P&L.  Such an approach has tremendously helped the BPO industry to move from being process-driven service provider to a people-oriented organization that understands their clients business and strive to build partnerships.

Manisha believes it is important to nurture partnerships with clients, especially with those who have been associated with a service provider for a long time. She adds, "The clients faced the same recessionary environment as we did. We saw volumes dropping all across the BPO industry. It is just that we weren't facing the end consumer. It is time we partner with our client and work hard to help them reduce revenue leakage. For one telecom client, we worked with them to redefine the guidelines, set targets at every level, put score-cards to measure as to how much could be waived off as credit and for what reasons. Such a 'quality improvement program' significantly reduced the leakage reduction for the client in 2009."

When asked about the key areas of focus in the coming year, she spontaneously reacted saying, "Improved, well-drawn out and collaborated analytics for her clients, encouraging and empowering people on the floor to come-up with client improvement initiatives, and finally, managing and consolidating knowledge to develop intelligent solutions". Her continuos effort and innovation in quality has already won her company the prestigious National Award from the Quality Council of India in services sector.

While the experts are at work, the trends in this industry are bound to change rapidly. Most established vendors are now pitching for jobs that don’t necessarily need a large workforce but are niche, generate more revenue and return on effort. As vendors continue to awe their prospects by adopting the latest in technology, it is the quality (of people and partnerships) that will define the success of an organization in the long-run.