Call Center Research Reports | BPO Research Reports

January 2012

December 2011

November 2011

AMR Research
- Indian BPO Services Grow Beyond the Call Center, and Doctors, Lawyers, and CPAs Await - Feb 16, 2005
- Finance BPO: Achieving Benefits and Minimizing Risks - Feb 7, 2005
Amit Nayak
Banknet India
- Report on BPO in the Financial Sector
- How & Why of Outsourcing - A manual for both client & provider
Bartosz Sobotka
- Lublin as a new player in the Polish BPO market
Bitpipe
- A Unified Solution for IT Problems: Asset Management, Software Licensing Compliance, and Help Desk Management
- A User's Guide to BPM
- Benefits and Advantages of Recording and Archiving Calls
  Record keeping has become an indispensable part of our culture. As the number of daily transactions and interactions a business performs has gone up, so too has the burden of proof on all parties involved.
- Business Performance Management: Merging Business Optimization with IT Optimization
- Business Process Management Visualization with ILOG Jviews
- Business Process Automation ... without Software
- Best Practices: The Path to a Black Belt in Customer Service
- Call Center Management: Planning, Scheduling, Historical and Real Time Statistics
  This paper examines how Call Centers in a number of industries have been able to significantly improve agent performance while reducing cost by using Agent Power Planning and Scheduling from Desk flex.
- Consolidation 2.0: Consolidation Trends in Contact Center Technologies and Operations
  Consolidation 2.0 is the latest and most effective call center consolidation strategy. Its core concept is simple: to consolidate the many, diverse activities of the enterprise contact center on a single virtual platform that supports the global distribution of contact center agents.
- How Empowering Customer-facing Employees Leads to Extraordinary Results: Empowerment as a Growth Strategy
  CRM must empower users to work above and beyond the traditional application boundaries and do the right thing for customers. Implementing a strict set of policies and procedures across all customer-facing functions often stifles the one element that enables companies to break away from the pack and grow profitably and consistently - employee-driven innovation.
- Record, Evaluate, Monitor and Archive All Your Customer Interactions For Your Avaya Switch
  ECHO™ provides the vehicle for focused customer experience management through real-time monitoring and agent performance evaluations. ECHO is the ideal recorder for any customer looking for a competitively priced, feature-rich recording solution.
- Retail 101: Juggling POS with Mobility, Call Centers, BI and Security
  The retail industry is a fast-paced environment that relies on integration and accuracy above all else to maximize ability and profitability. Point of Sale (POS) is a key integration tool that influences customer satisfaction and assists in the management of business intelligence of sales cycles. This conglomerate is even more complicated when you add in mobile capabilities, security concerns and call center implementation.
- Contact Center Intelligence Leveraging Performance Optimization to Help Achieve Corporate Objectives
  When contact centers align strategic business objectives with the goals of front-line employees, it is much more likely to achieve success. But the right tools won't make a difference in a contact center that isn't analyzing and evaluating the right metrics, or has not properly trained its agents. The real mark of a successful contact center is what happens after the agent is connected to the customer.
- Data Protection on Enterprise Networks: Meeting Continuity, Compliance, Confidentiality and Cost Requirements
- Delivering and Measuring Customer Service While industries vary greatly, the general methods used to evaluate employees are easily grouped into a few buckets including internal auditing, external shopping or the actual customer experience. Despite the evaluation method, it is critical to know how the customer perceived the service experience.
- Improving Customer Support Effectiveness
- Echopass EchoSystem
  Simply put, the Echopass EchoSystem is the ultimate evolution of the call center. A totally customized service integration platform that can flexibly adapt, extend and scale to meet your changing call or contact center needs on demand, as you need it, today and into tomorrow.
- Implementing a Hosted On-Demand Call Center
  When Outrigger Resorts and Hotels needed to upgrade its existing premise ACD, they chose instead to implement a hosted on-demand call center and add new types customer touch points and more agent flexibility. All critical metrics immediately improved, and Outrigger saved $100,000 in the first year. Outrigger is now able to incorporate work-at-home agents into their solution. Watch this 4 minute video to see their story, and feel free to forward to interested peers and colleagues.
- Improving customer service while simultaneously reducing costs - Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee
- Improving Call Center ROI
- Key Factors Driving Accelerated Growth of On Demand Contact Centers
  Over the past five years, IP hosted contact center applications with more robust feature sets and other inherent advantages including simple and rapid start-up cycles, and remote management and agent capabilities, have effectively leveled the playing field in the contact center marketplace.
- Messaging Security Approaches for HIPAA and SOX Compliance
- Positive Customer Experiences Point Squarely to Business Success
- Proactive Contact Center Management: A New Paradigm for Driving Continuous Improvement?
  Proactive Contact Center Management is a term we're just beginning to see in the market. Coined by some new players in the contact center management space, it's intended to differentiate management based on historical facts from management of the here-and-now. For companies that have made customer service their mantra, evolving the mission of their contact center from cheap to customer-pleasing, proactive management will become a must, and the new tools available to make this transformation a reality will need to be carefully considered.
- Provident Bank Cuts Inbound Call Duration Times 40% Using Echopass Advanced Call Center Service
  Once The Provident Bank made the decision to work with Echopass, the two companies carefully reviewed the bank's call center data to assess call volumes and service requests. Based on the findings, Echopass customized the home screen for The Provident Bank agents to instantly provide them with the customer data and account information needed to answer the most frequently asked questions.
- Seven Habits of a Highly Effective Compliance Program
- Sun Microsystems: A Multimedia, Global Call Center ... with ROI
- Tame the Two-Headed Monster: Cost Efficiency and Revenue in Customer Service
- The Top 10 Information Challenges in Today's Call Center
- Top 4 Reasons to Implement Speech Self-service: A Call Center Imperative
  Despite the increase in Web interactions, Forrester states that the telephone continues to be the customer service channel of choice. However, opposing factors such as the size of the contact center and budget constraints make the hiring and supporting surplus staff impractical. Learn how to avoid the escalating costs of call centers while still providing customers with the fast service they expect.
- Using Real-Time Information to Improve Contact Center Performance
  With every call center interaction, customers provide valuable insight that can be used to improve the customer experience and make the call center more profitable. The challenge is sifting through this information and analyzing it to make better decisions. There are tremendous benefits to capturing customer information in real-time or close to real-time, but many call centers fail to do so.
CIO
- 10 Outsourcing Predictions for 2008 (and One to Grow On)
  It's been a dynamic year in the information technology outsourcing industry. The Indian rupee rose to record levels while the U.S. dollar declined against most major currencies, impacting global IT service providers and customers alike. Merger and acquisition activity went into high gear (with the exception of poor Affiliated Computer Services, which tried—and failed— for the second time to go private). The consolidation activity was most notable for the inroads Indian providers made into the U.S. market by buying local providers. And Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services announced a $1.2 billion IT service deal with The Nielsen Company, technically the biggest offshore contract to date, hinting at the increasing maturation of the outsourcing market. Buyers of IT services also began to look beyond India to balance their offshore outsourcing portfolio, from Shanghai to São Paulo and more than a few spots in between.
- India's Greenest Outsourcer?
  Indian IT services provider ITC Infotech is touting its carbon-neutral status as a selling point. And that corporate focus on sustainability has the potential to woo new IT outsourcing customers away from less green competitors.
- Outsourcing Vendor Genpact Makes Mexico a Passage to India
  India-based outsourcer Genpact has greatly expanded its Mexican operations in the last year, focusing on lower-end business process outsourcing instead of IT services work. The former GE unit calls Mexico a gateway to India offshoring and a "nearshore" alternative for BPO and call center work.
- Five Steps to Take If Your Outsourcing Service Provider Is Sold
  Merger activity is on the uptick among IT service providers and experts say the industry is ripe for more consolidation. Here's how to protect your company if your outsourcing provider is sold.
- How to Make Offshore Outsourcing Deals Withstand Crisis Situations
  Globalization is suffering from economic, financial and political challenges. IT organizations can improve results and mitigate risks by revamping offshore strategies. Implementing globalization no longer creates automatic competitive cost advantage. While nearly all companies have globalization programs, most were created randomly and reactively without strategic consideration. To gain competitive advantage, companies must strategically engineer the integration and synergy from service providers.
- Want Innovation from Outsourcing? You Have to Pay for It
  To get new ideas from your outsourcer, you have to be willing to rethink your approach, including how you pay for the services.
- The Next Wave of Globalization: Offshoring R&D to India and China
  The globalization of research and development is already under way. Two Harvard researchers explain what's going on, and why the research and development done in China and India is not all bad news for U.S.-based companies.
- Offshore Outsourcing: Can This Captive Center Be Saved?
  Executives with captive centers in India are starting to wonder whether it's time to offload their offshore assets as GE did and Citigroup is reportedly doing. But Cliff Justice, an expert at EquaTerra, says that most captive data centers can be fixed.
- Outsourcing Vendor Genpact Makes Mexico a Passage to India
  India-based outsourcer Genpact has greatly expanded its Mexican operations in the last year, focusing on lower-end business process outsourcing instead of IT services work. The former GE unit calls Mexico a gateway to India offshoring and a "nearshore" alternative for BPO and call center work.
- Outsourcing Continues to Rise, "State of the CIO" Data Show
  Nine of out 10 corporate heads of IT outsource some functions, up from 85 percent a year ago, yet very few outsource the majority of their IT operations.
- Communication: The Holy Grail of Outsourcing
  It is striking how most everyone will insist that communication is a key activity to successful outsourcing. So why the heck can it be so darn hard to make people within an organization understand what is going on? And why is it so hard to have clear-cut communication between the outsourcer and the outsourced?
- Security Secrets of Outsourcing
  Today, mitigating outsourcing security risks is more important than ever. Burton Group Analyst Diana Kelley offers tips on determining risk levels, monitoring your vendor and negotiating service level agreements.
- What The World Is Flat Means to IT Outsourcing
  Nandan Nilekani, CEO of the outsourcing firm Infosys and the man who inspired the phrase “the world is flat,” is pushing a new mantra that could become just as universal. Relaxing on the couch in his Bangalore office, Nilekani points out that his own company has offices in 39 countries around the world. And it’s not alone. Wipro, another large India-based IT services company, has eight offices in Europe alone, and TCS, the IT services arm of the Indian conglomerate Tata, has 10 development centers and 10,000 consultants in the United States and Canada.
- How to Create a Good Relationship with Your Indian Vendor
  Despite the threat of commercial ascendancy from China, Russia and others, India still leads the pack as an offshore outsourcing destination, and its global presence is only growing. You need your Indian vendors’ expertise, you entrust them with many of your company’s secrets, and you depend on them for profitability. A good relationship benefits you both. But relationships are tough to build in the best of circumstances, and when you bring cultural differences and distance into the mix, misunderstanding and frustration can arise on both sides. Here’s how to bridge the U.S.-India cultural divide.
Gartner
- Management Update: Evaluating and Mitigating Outsourcing Risk - April 2004
- Insurance BPO: How a Deal Evolves - Jan 9, 2003
- Buyers Beware: Indian IT Service Providers Foray Into BPO - Dec 2, 2002
- Business Process Outsourcing - A Market Overview
- VoIP in Public Services: Facts, Fiction and Myth - Dec 2, 2002
- VoIP: Beyond the Hype - Dec 2, 2002
- Wholesale VoIP: The Secret Ingredient in International Voice - Nov 29, 2002
- Asia/Pacific VoIP: A Change of Heart
- Why Customer Relationship Management Will Not Go Away - Oct 31, 2002
- Users of BPO Report High Satisfaction With Existing Relationships - Oct 7, 2002
- An In-Depth Assessment of the Philippines for Offshore IT-Enabled Services - Sept 18, 2002
- Business Process Outsourcing in India: A Fact Book - June 26, 2002
Giga Information Group
Harvard Business School
- How Many U.S. Jobs Are 'Offshorable'?
  Tomorrow's business leaders see tremendous potential in sending more U.S. jobs offshore -- and in keeping economic tasks on the march around the globe as national conditions change, according to research on the Harvard MBA class of 2009. "Increasingly, jobs are being viewed as groups of tasks that can be bundled, unbundled, and sent to different places," says Harvard professor Jan Rivkin, one of the faculty members directing the exercise.
IDC

IT Papers - A Product of CNET Networks
Karvy
- The Multiple Personalities of Hedge Funds
- Revenue Management for the Hospitality Industry - Karvy
Moitf Inc
- Accelerating the Learning Curve by implementing Six Sigma practices
- Enhancing Performance through Zero Tolerance
Sanjeev Sharma
Wharton
- 'Boats in a Rising River': The Challenges of a Hypergrowth Economy
  That makes the task of companies in emerging economies easier in some ways, according to Levinthal. Since businesses are already well defined -- whether the business is a call center or steel plant in India or an automobile or footwear facility in China -- firms have the advantage of not having to start completely from scratch.
- What's Next for India: Beyond the Back Office
  In December 2006, Mumbai-based Tech Mahindra won India's biggest outsourcing deal to date -- a five-year, $1 billion contract from British Telecom to provide technical support. Tech Mahindra, in which BT has a 35% stake, bettered a September 2005 deal in which three Indian IT services firms were among five international providers picked by Amsterdam-based financial services company ABN Amro for one of the biggest outsourcing contracts ever handed out. Infosys Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services and Patni Computer Systems share that $2.2 billion, five-year contract with IBM and Accenture. In another corner of India's outsourcing industry, a much smaller firm created a niche "spot market" for knowledge services. Yet another Indian outsourcing service provider built a platform of expertise to provide patent-related legal resolution support services -- several notches above the patent writing functions that were considered high-end assignments until recently.
- Indian BPO Firms Step Out of the Back Office, toward Knowledge Process Outsourcing and Beyond
  At every juncture in the Indian outsourcing industry's growth curve, its players seem to be discovering a changing array of new frontiers, beyond merely scaling up in their familiar territories. Interviews with experts from Wharton, Boston Consulting Group and outsourcing companies reveal that the industry is moving well beyond transaction-intensive services like call-center support or check processing, and now seems to have achieved critical mass in its quest to provide knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) services -- where skills, judgment and discretion are the tools.
- China or India: Which Is the Better Long-term Investment for Private Equity Firms?
  India and China are both vast countries just opening to development, filled with opportunity and risk for private equity investors. Inevitably, the two countries' rising economic fortunes invite debate over which offers the better climate for investment.
- Offshore Outsourcing: What's Working, What's Not
- Can Big Blue Succeed In BPO?
- Offshoring Services: Which Are the World's Top Locations -- and Why?
- India: No Gains without Growing Pains
- Can BPO Work for Small Business?
- BPO Providers Are Moving Up the Value Chain
- How Hyderabad Emerged as a BPO Hub
- Mauritius Calling: We Want Your Call-Centers
- Managing the Extended Organization: Handling the Risks of BPO Relationships
- The Case For, and Against, Shifting Back-office Operations Overseas
- In a Global Economy, Competition Among BPO Rivals (Philippines, Jamaica, Sri Lanka) Heats Up
- IT Enabled Strategic Outsourcing: Knowledge Intensive Firms, Information: Ravi Aron and Jitendra Singh
- Time to Redial: VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) Makes a Comeback
ValueNotes
Others
- Attrition In Indian BPO Industry
- BPO - Plain Vanilla or Sundae? - Jaspreet Arora
- Call centres take jobs to India - Arizona Star - May 14, 2003
- Call and Contact Centre Research: Mitial International
- CRM Market Predictions for 2004
- Cold calling, Bangalore style - National Post (Canada) - July 16, 2003
- Getting Started with VoIP: A Practical Guide for Midsize Business
  IP communications is the key. It can help you lower costs by moving all your communications-voice and data-to a single manageable network supporting your existing systems and software. Begin by taking a good look at what your communications technology does for your business today and then see how much more you can do with VoIP.
- Human Resource Management Implementing best practices
  - Motif Inc
- Indian Outsourcing Vendors - Grammar
- Legal Process Outsourcing: A Service In Full Maturity
  The Editor interviews Chris Veator , Executive Vice President and Bhaskar Bagchi, Country Head - India, Computer Patent Annuities Limited (CPA).
- Location Roadmap For IT- BPO Growth: Assessment Of 50 Leading Cities
- Loosen The Noose Around Outsourcing
- Multinational Company Investment in Developing Countries: BPO Case Study - McKinsey
- The outsourcing debate moves up a level - Mark Hillary
- US Meltdown 2008: Doomsday spell on BPOs?
- What it takes to set up a call centre
- White paper on BPO-Contact Center Offshore Outsourcing - Arif G Syed
- White Paper - Technical Support Services - 247customer.com
- White Paper on State of the Healthcare Offshore BPO Industry and Market Dynamics for 2003 (PDF) - FREE
- White Paper on Strategic BPO in the US Healthcare Industry - FREE