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. There are more than 700,000 SMEs representing 99.2% of total active business establishments in Malaysia. 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-owned subsidiary. Its CEO Ahmad Azhar Yahya says: “Today, the Malaysian SME sector is a robust and growing market, making up a majority of the country’s businesses and serving to fulfil 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. Ahmad Azhar adds: “As such, it was imperative that we swooped in on this new trend to offer their customers a more comprehensive service.”
On top of that, their new offering to the SME community, the VADS Social Media and Business Analytics (SMBA)solution is tailored to meet each customer’s needs based on their existing databases. With this service, VADS can help SMEs make far better business decisions based off the insights derived from the data.
The VADS SMBA packages caters 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.
SMEs could also realise business benefits by moving their internal service and support operations to the Cloud.
The cloud-hosted service desk management platform 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.
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.”