“The Indian IT-BPO industry is facing several concerns that need to be addressed. Is it ready?”
This is the opening question from a recent newsletter published by NASSCOM on the challenges faced in the India BPO industry. So what are the real concerns the BPO industry is facing? Let me list a few:
- Attrition: The attrition rate in this sector in India ranges from 30% to 40% that is much higher than the global average
- Competition: Specifically from emerging markets like Philippines and China
- Administration: Managing huge number of recruits for new processes and clients in a minimum amount of time
- Management: Employees with desired skill-sets in different functional areas
There is no magic pill to resolve these issues. If India as a country is to be a leading destination for outsourcing services, the quality of resources must be superior. This involves a change in the way resources are trained, by focusing on grooming, building multiple skill-sets at par with global practices and building a future-ready workforce. All this must be done while keeping the costs in control.
With the short time-spans for deployment and go-live in the BPO industry, very basic training is provided to get the employee task-ready for the particular client or process. Important aspects of training like allied technologies, accents, listening skills, telephone etiquette and functional area knowledge are ignored. While this does get the task done for now, it results in challenges related to employee engagement, attrition and performance in the long term.
BPO companies should utilize online training platforms to tackle challenges in skill development, knowledge delivery and employee engagement. Online training provides the management in the organization with a tool to quickly create and assign courses on topics without worrying about assembling the learners in one physical location or administrating tedious classroom sessions. Online training provides learners the freedom to learn at their own time, place and pace. For training administrators and decision-makers, they can get granular reports on the training progress, completion status along with scores for graded modules like quizzes. This provides a huge competitive edge to any company for the operational efficiencies and cost-savings alone.
This does not mean that classroom training is a thing of the past. Classroom training does prove to be more effective in certain cases. Thus online training is not necessarily a replacement for classroom sessions, rather online training can be used as a means to support the classroom sessions. Quickly create and assign refresher courses or create courses on basic skills like accents, listening and telephone etiquette. If there is a software or process that employers want their employees to be familiar with, then it should be quickly created and assigned with minimal lead time.
Let us see how online training can assist in creating a skilled workforce and engage employees at the same time:
1. The attrition rate in BPO sector in India ranges from 30-40 %
This is much higher than the global average of 20%-25%. Low employee engagement, mundane work and limited growth opportunities lead to employees frequently quitting. A good training platform can be used as a great way to engage the workforce and offer opportunities for learning new skills. Setting up a course online is a one time activity that can be assigned and utilized an infinite number of times in the future.
2. Employees with desired skill-set in different Functional Areas
Classroom training on additional skill-set development of employees is expensive and may not seem justified under current market conditions. By training online at a fraction of the cost of traditional training programs can better engage the employee and the employees find better value in staying with the company.
3. Shortage of Qualified Trainers
The shortage of qualified trainers makes training a large number of employees on a required skill-set difficult and expensive. With online training, the focus automatically shifts to creating quality learning content rather than scheduling multiple training programs and requiring a large number of trainers to do so.
4. Lowering the Cost per Seat
With process outsourcing companies, the key metric is the ‘cost per seat’, more specifically there is a focus on bringing that cost down. Due to high attrition, rising costs and increasing training requirements, that cost per seat is rising faster than it is falling. Online training allows for big savings for organizations that rely on skill development and training as a large part of their value proposition.
5. Managing a large number of recruits
The key here is to constantly and quickly hire new recruits to manage new processes and clients. Companies need to quickly reach a wide and geographically dispersed audience. Online training platforms can assist in reaching out and delivering training to a large number of people across the organization in a consistent fashion, and easily conduct assessments to understand the impact of the training. Granular reports help in identifying the weaker sections that require more attention.
If you are looking to discover the advantages of scalable training and fostering business goals by effectively training your workforce, then Courseplay can be your partner towards creating and maintaining an effective training program. Courseplay offers a robust cloud based platform with an easy to understand interface that makes training simpler for organizations and engaging for learners. With Courseplay get detailed reports and track progress just with a click of a button. Start a free trial today to learn more!