The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry is seeing a paradigm shift in its processes and outlook. What was once an industry dominated by big vendors and buyers, new trends amongst Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are emerging and shaking up the BPO scene.
As the outsourcing industry starts becoming saturated, BPO providers are starting to look at SMEs for new market development. The challenge here, though, is that the requirements are smaller, hence harder to reach economies of scale in delivery. Thus, BPO companies need to come-up with more creative delivery models.
Leading the change is VADS, a Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM) wholly-owned subsidiary. Its CEO Ahmad Azhar Yahya says: “Today, the SME sector is a robust and growing market, making up a majority of businesses and serving to fulfill many crucial niches that complete the industries – proving that strength does come in numbers.”
VADS recently rolled out Contact Centre 2.0 (CC2.0), an evolution of their existing traditional call centre. “As customer touch points have changed, they are increasingly turning towards alternative forms of contact such as social media to communicate with businesses and other customers. As such, it was imperative that we swooped in on this new trend to offer their customers a more comprehensive service,” added Ahmad Azhar.
The VADS CC 2.0 packages cater to the business needs of smaller enterprises, start-ups and entrepreneurs, who would be able to enjoy a multitude of products and service features on a highly scalable environment which will enable them to control their cost.
As part of CC2.0, VADS’ Social Media and Business Analytics (SMBA) solution helps their customers make wise business decisions based on the insights derived from the data.
SMEs could also realise business benefits by moving their internal service and support operations to the Cloud.
VADS offers a cloud-hosted service desk management platform, which uses best practices of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which would help businesses to integrate, consolidate and standardise all their service desk processes.
“Many organisations that run their internal help desk are finding it difficult to cope with the rising cost of technology and trying to abide by internal governance and risk management processes while managing requests from their internal users,” said Ahmad Azhar.
“With the VADS Managed Service Desk (MSD), all the processes can be shifted to the Cloud, making it easier to manage technology updates while adhering to the ITIL standardisation. This in turn ensures that all requests from their internal users are managed in a timely manner.”
He added that the traditional help-desk set-up included certain limitations; including poor service responsiveness, limited integration for point solutions, inconsistent delivery of end-user services and limited process optimisation.
“VADS MSD enhances and provides end-to-end management of endpoints and assets,” he said. “With VADS MSD, end-user requests can be attended to quickly and accurately.”
To further reinforce its SME offerings, VADS recently teamed up with software company Parallels. The collaboration included deploying Parallels’ automated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, enabling VADS to rapidly deliver Cloud services for SMEs, efficiently and cost-effectively.
The automation solution has enabled VADS to implement automatic provisioning of Microsoft Office 365, eliminating inefficiencies from paperwork movement between internal departments for provisioning of Cloud services.
This has reduced the high risk of errors from traditional processes.
Moving forward, VADS’ focus for 2015 will be to enhance its SMBA services to complement its voice-based services as well as looking at new markets via SMEs.
“The unique thing about the Outsourcing business is that we are already a global business. The physical location of our delivery centres do not matter; as we will be able to deliver our services to any location across the globe. As a TM subsidiary, we are in a unique position to leverage on TM’s international point of presence and global offices to expand our reach,” says Ahmad Azhar.