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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.

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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

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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.

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Quick Standardization & Platform Services

Standard platforms have not been adopted whole-heartedly 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

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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.

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Source Link :-

https://medium.com/research-surveys/how-covid-19-will-impact-the-bpo-industry-97035007c223

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