How COVID — 19 Will Impact The BPO Industry?
COVID -19 pandemic has had an adverse effect on almost every industry across the globe. The disrupted supply chains coupled with country-wide lockdown has forced the organizations to explore all the possibilities of remote working. Some organizations have announced a long-term remote working while some are thinking about it on a permanent basis. Many enterprises are already working on strategies to survive in the market, at the same time giving priority to their employees’ safety. Of course, the sustainability of the employees will depend on various factors like their ability to adapt to the new working conditions. In all of this chaos, comes the role of BPO companies. A BPO company essentially comprises employees working from multiple locations and answering a multitude of calls every day. Even though it is too early to know the precise impact of COVID -19 on the BPO industry, it can be said that the industry is going to come out of this crisis way differently than it entered the crisis. The impact will be in the following three contexts:
Business Continuity Plans (BCP) to Distributed Workforce
A business continuity plan will ensure that business processes can continue working during the time of a disaster. But before the COVID -19 crisis, BCP typically meant a center, location, or city which became unavailable to work, and the actions were taken to compensate for the same. Usually, the solutions for such a situation are alternate locations in the same city or people being moved to another location. If the work was distributed between two distant locations, then some of it could be shifted to the un-impacted location. However, the COVID — 19 crisis has changed all of it.
Right now, every location has been affected in one or the other way. The quick response, therefore, is to move the work infrastructure to the employees’ homes. It means that everything has shifted from being a business continuity plan to a distributed workforce. Managing a distributed workforce comes with its own set of limitations. The initial concerns across industries were the security of data and the possible impact on the productivity of employees. It can be either due to infrastructure quality or lack of supervision. Some solutions were quickly deployed such as upgrading the internet services of employees working from home and using collaboration tools like Hangout, Zoom, or Skype to ensure that supervisors can constantly stay in touch with their team.
Multi-functional V/S Shared Services
After the COVID -19 crisis, every enterprise would want to de-risk its operations to the maximum extent. That is not possible if a significant amount of work happens from a single location. So, it can be said that there will be a need for multiple service lines and specifically priority from it will be given to the low-cost ones. Looking at the current crisis, multiple locations options may look inconsequential, but a varying degree of crisis definitely makes a difference. For instance, when the pandemic initially hit China, other countries in the world picked up the slack. Now that things are better in China, most of the delivery centers are operational with the right mix of WFH and office.
The biggest impact of the COVID -19 crisis on the BPO industry is that the efficient employees will be filtered. An organization will be able to recognize the ones that can adapt to the changes in work and scale accordingly. They will be considered as the key players then. There is no data yet, but it is believed that some of the small shared service centers are still struggling to adapt to the situation. From now, the enterprises will have to decide between the multi-functional approach/multi-location approach or splitting the work between internal and external resources.
Quick Standardization & Platform Services
Standard platforms have not been adopted whole-heatedly for cross-industry processes due to multiple reasons. The reasons for it range from the limitations of company-specific systems to nuances of a process. The new-age companies have lesser limitations as compared to Fortune 500 companies that were established even before the internet came into existence. For example, let’s take into account a cloud-based, multi-tenant platform where 70–80% of the work is changeable and only the remaining 20% is company-specific nuances. In this scenario, cross-trained resources can be employed quickly. If this is combined with the location factor discussed above and training is rendered through collaborative tools, then the response rate will increase substantially.
The shift to standard platforms will bring about a positive change. There will be less manual work and more ways of automated working. It is a known fact that automated working is bound to increase productivity and effectiveness. As business needs and processes have evolved with time, BPO’s are now dealing with more complex business processes. Therefore, increased adoption of standard platforms during or post COVID -19 crisis will enable the BPO providers to offer valuable services to their clients.
Concluding Thoughts
As COVID -19 is spreading rapidly across the world, it is necessary for the BPO sector to cope with the changing times and adapt to it. If the BPO sector fails to do so, there are high chances that the industry will take a huge hit. Not to forget that the BPO sector also consists of various sub-segments. Each of them will be affected by COVID -19 a little differently from each other. Even though the BPO sector has not explored the possibilities of remote working in the past, this is the time to adapt and improvise the remote working standards.
Last but not least, the decisions taken by the respective government of all countries for their BPO sectors have the potential to impact the BPO sector to a substantial extent. For now, without any announcement from the government’s end, it can be said that only time will tell what is the ultimate impact of COVID-19 on the BPO sector across the globe.
