Maintaining Balance with Business Process Outsourcing Metrics

Metrics have many uses for a company. But for a call center or any business process outsourcing company, metrics are methods used in maintaining the balance of the organization. Metrics are nothing but variable data that may climb and dip, just like any sales graph. It is dependent on the performance of the company and its employees. If the graph starts to dip, it is a red alert that signals the company of a decline. The decline could pertain to employee productivity, sales, or product quality. The managers should then find ways to neutralize or improve the decline. Balance – this is the key purpose of business process outsourcing metrics.BPO companies often embrace common performance metrics, like CSAT or customer satisfaction, quality, and AHT or average handle time. There could be other possible metrics, but the three are generally the chief components. Call centers, medical transcription providers, and other BPO companies regularly have customers that demand stringent and tight deadlines. On behalf of the client, the company should measure the customer satisfaction rating, quality of handling, and the success rate of the contact, in the case of a call center. Using metrics therefore, is not only for the BPO’s purpose, but also for the client and the customer. It is a meticulous process that requires balance in the three components.However, it is difficult to sustain balance in these three areas, especially if the business processing outsourcing company tries to augment its customer satisfaction rating for their calls. Magnifying one component often leads to compromising another. In this case, focusing too much on customer inquiries decreases the AHT or average handling time, since call center agents will devote more time in resolving the problem or concern of the customer. In contrast, aiming for low average handling time leads to a decrease in quality.To solve this concern, modern BPO metrics tools now package its system with three distinct sub-metrics. Each of these metrics focuses on a single aspect, but all three are monitoring simultaneously to maintain balance. These three aspects are task outsourcing, product outsourcing, and service outsourcing.Task outsourcing metrics center its activity on evaluating tasks. They review how employees carry out tasks and analyze the success rate of their performance. Task outsourcing metrics cover four perspectives in business process outsourcing: operational efficiency, strategic perspective, service quality, and financial perspective. Sample metrics may deal with percentage of savings in operating costs, percentage in deviation from present, and percentage of increase in profits.The second sub-metric deals with product outsourcing. If task outsourcing has something to do with the input, product-outsourcing metrics are more on output. They review activities related to the delivery of products, integration capabilities, continuous reporting, and wise spending of funds to a name a few. Sample metrics may cover the percentage of increase in labors cots, expenditure on research and development, increase in operational costs, and increase in revenues.Service outsourcing metrics are also concerned on the output, this time; it is more on the intangible side. Aside from keeping the average handling time at an attractive level, service outsourcing metrics evaluate integration capabilities of the employees, privacy issues, percentage of task completions, and accuracy of operations.Despite the presence of these three sub-metrics in business process outsourcing metrics, it is still best for the BPO companies to observe balance of the three components. Since metrics systems are tools and depend only on human inputs, managers should keep average values for quality, average handling time, and customer satisfaction.