Local BPO firms expand into social media, other services

Emerging technologies such as social media are not only changing the way people communicate, but are influencing the services offered by business process outsourcing (BPO) firms as well. According to Andrea Ayers, president of customer management at Convergys, a largely voice-based BPO firm, their non-voice service offerings are slowly seeing growth. "We do a fair amount of non-voice BPO [such as] back-office email management, chat processing, coupons processing and claims processing, among others," Ayers said. "Our social media work is also considered back-office. We're helping one of our clients in inserting experts into blogs and forums on the web, so that when there's an issue in the social media realm, we insert an expert there to resolve the issue," she added. Evolving BPO services Non-voice BPO services are beginning to push the local BPO market to growth, as voice-based BPO services in the country near saturation. In April, the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) said that non-voice BPO sector has outpaced the contact center industry in 2010, as it posted a high 30-percent growth rate last year. "We now employ more than 100,000 professionals in this sub-sector—with many of these BPO employees coming from financial and accounting, legal, and medical sciences backgrounds," it added. Ayers said it is only in the past year that the company has started doing social media relationship management, in response to the changing landscape of consumer technologies. "Consumers today are becoming pretty demanding and expect a high degree of satisfaction," she said, adding that consumers now expect the same level of service rendered in different kinds of channels—be it through the phone, email or social media. "We're putting some attention into our technology business sector. We have developed a decisioning tool which can help agents personalize interactions with people on other channels, so customers get the same experience no matter what channel they use," she added. Young workforce This shift towards multi-channel customer service demands a new set of skills from agents, Ayers noted, but fortunately, the current crop of workers are immersed enough in these new technologies. "The younger generation [of agents] have familiarity with texting, chat and social media. They have wonderful multi-tasking skills. That's important when you're going to serve [customers]," she said. Moreover, BPO clients dealing with new technologies such as smartphones and tablets call for more advanced troubleshooting skills. "The trend is going toward a direction where simple issues can get handled by automated [response systems], while more complicated tasks need more talented people to handle them," she explained. This is one of the reasons why Convergys is ramping up its recruitment efforts this year as it eyes to augment its 25,000-strong workforce to reach 30,000 by the end of the year. "We'll keep building [sites] here as long as the labor is [skilled]. We're feeling very good about the investments the government has made in education and infrastructure. [So far], we're finding really good people," Ayers said. To date, Convergys operates 15 sites in the country, the latest of which is its Baguio facility, opened just a few months ago. — TJD, GMA News