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 some BPO firms, their non-voice service offerings are slowly seeing growth. And a fair amount of non-voice BPO, such as back-office email management, chat processing, coupons processing and claims processing, among others. Social media work is also considered back-office. By helping 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.
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. Employing 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 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, 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. Putting some attention into our technology business sector, a decisioning tool was developed to help agents personalize interactions with people on other channels, so customers get the same experience no matter what channel they use.
Young workforce
This shift towards multi-channel customer service demands a new set of skills from agents, 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, and that's important when you're going to serve customers.
Moreover, BPO clients dealing with new technologies such as smartphones and tablets call for more advanced troubleshooting skills.
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