i w ant to start a bpo

The following factors need to be studied in detail before starting a BPO

Identify the clients or potential clients and talk to them. Only after you have enough confidence that they will use your facilities.
Place from where you want to operate matters a lot. Check the local government policies, real estate costs and the operational costs. Many companies are moving to second level cities where the basic infrastructure exists.
Manpower requirements and the section of location go hand in hand. You must do your homework about the Manpower before moving to any place.

Keep the infrastructure costs low while retain the best Manpower, this is the mantra of this industry.

You should bear in your mind that:

Though there are so many English-speaking graduates, you may find it a bit difficult to build a good team.

Attrition – A cutthroat competition:

You may face a problem of high attrition from the very beginning sometimes it really becomes tough to retain quality Manpower so you have to develop your in-house policies and working atmosphere in a way that coming to work would be a fun for the co-workers.

Big Fish Game:

If your company is successful it may become the target for acquisition. This is a good thing. In case you want to sell you should go through the process of negotiations to get the best price.

Infrastructure

Erratic power or telecom or Internet connection would cause problems to the BPO operation. Internet service providers generally provide certain service level agreements (SLA). Make sure that the SLA provided by the provider is adequate for your needs. You need to arrange alternative power supply yourself.

You must address the following issues:

1. Do you have good contacts and the client is going to stick with you, presuming that you deliver reasonably well to his satisfaction?
2. Do you have capacity to service more than one client at a time? This is required to ensure that you need to close if you lose your only client.
3. Keep in touch with the client on regular basis and build a good relationship.
4. Educate the client about what is possible and explore implementing new processes for the client.

The most important of all:

Never ever pay upfront guarantee fee to anybody.
Create best website with processes diagrams and if possible also place powerpoint presentations for client’s review.
Never over-commit with client.
Be prepared for capacity expansion both Infrastructure and Manpower.
Select a reasonable area.
Provide good value addition to the client.
Strive to see that the client ‘needs’ you for all his work.
Provide a good environment for the employees and make them feel at home so that they may stick to you a longer time.
Above all, pray God for the success.

Sorry, I cannot give you any idea about Govt’s policies since I am living in Pakistan

A good starting point when discussing service levels is to ask ‘How will we know that the project is working? For long-term strategic projects, plan for service levels to increase as the project progresses – start with achievable targets and plan to improve standards during the relationship. Service levels need to be defined for a wide range of activities including but not limited to the:

i. speed of answering
ii. call durations
iii. proportion of ring back appointments honored
iv. speed of fulfillment
v. data quality
vi. customer satisfaction
vii. account management
viii. reporting
ix. levels of abandoned
x. busy and unobtainable calls
xi. conversion rates
xii. quality of call handling
xiii. speed of provision of statistics.

For service levels to work, the measurements used must be tangible and auditable, but there are some ‘soft’ components of the call that are very important for example:

a. the quality of the dialogue
b. the rapport achieved by the agent with the customer
c. the intonation of voice, etc.

It is possible for you to record a proportion of calls and use an external quality assessor to mark the calls against agreed criteria. This allows the quality of the dialogue to be determined independently.

No matter how much you plan, until the service actually goes live you can never tell what it will actually be like. Things like call length can vary enormously from what is expected. It is sometimes a good idea to allow a settling in period during which you pin all the Service Level Agreements down based on what actually happens. This also allows any teething problems with the implementation of the service to be sorted out before the Service Level Agreement kicks in.