NMIMS Global Access
School for Continuing Education (NGA-SCE)
Course: Managing Business Process Outsourcing
Internal Assignment Applicable for April 2021 Examination

1. Describe the conceptual model of BPO strategic partnering with reference to the
following:

a. Readiness for outsourcing
b. Selection of an appropriate BPO partner
c. Tender negotiation

(10 Marks)

2. Too often, once a project is completed, management attention goes elsewhere and things
revert to the way they were. Often the anticipated benefits are not realized or even audited
to see if the goals were reached. If there were benefits, they are often not applied
throughout the organization. Many pitfalls can happen when process improvement is
attempted one process at a time. It is difficult to tell which processes contribute the most
to achieving the business objectives or which process is the critical process to improve.
Can business process portfolio management help in such situations and how?
(10 Marks)
3. ALPHA CallCenter, a leading healthcare BPO company based out of Gulf approached
MeraBPO with a requirement to improve their BPO process. The customer's BPO
division handles over a million customer calls every month, but their customer
satisfaction levels were plummeting downwards. Even their CSAT was as low as 47%.
Since the customer was a part of the healthcare industry, it was unacceptable for the
company to find a low level of satisfaction from their customers. MeraBPO's role was to
nail down the causes for the low CSAT levels and then to provide a customized BPO
solution that would help the company's performance to soar.

At the onset of the project, the BPO team at MeraBPO decided to dissect the problem and
get to the root cause. Through a detailed analysis, they identified some of the critical
issues in the process that were affecting the customer's BPO's performance. The
following were the requirements of the customer:

 There was a linguistic and cultural mismatch between the BPO's personnel and the
client's customers. The client's customer base was native Arabs while the BPO
employees of the customer (5 male agents and 5 female agents) were not native
Arabic speakers. This language barrier made it difficult for the employees to
effectively address the culture-specific requirements of the customers
 There was a critical need to align the BPO support team with the standard processes
that govern BPO functioning. The BPO team also required intensive training in BPO
platform management
 The BPO's turnaround time lagged over a period of 7 days in contacting their
customers after discharge
 The support BPO team worked only 5 days a week (Monday to Friday) and only
between 9 am to 5 pm. This posed a serious limitation for the customers who wanted
to contact our client
 The customers wanted to make sure that they were talking to an Arab agent and
would ask the BPO employees for their last name
 Female patients of our client would submit contact numbers of the male members of
their family instead of their own
 The customer reach percentage was less than 2%

After identifying the unique problems that were affecting our client's BPO, they
deployed one their best teams to implement a customized BPO platform. MeraBPO's
skilled BPO team refurbished the entire BPO process of the customer by adopting the
following measures:
1. BPO Service Timings: they increased the support time span by a period of 4 hours.
Next, they made the support center available from 7 AM to 7 PM. To match the working
week of UAE, they decided to change the work days of the BPO to Sunday to Thursday

instead of Monday to Friday. Multiple shifts was also introduced to meet the time
demand with WFM.
2. Local BPO Agents: they hired a team of native speaking Arabs to eliminate the cultural
gaps.
3. Support Infrastructure: they enhanced the infrastructure for the customer's BPO center
and included best-of-breed voice, email and internet facilities. This helped in
substantially reducing the turnaround time of the BPO team.
4. Value Added Support Services: they also offered a host of value added services, such as
the following:
 they extended the 24 hour call support for excess processing requirements during peak
hours
 The BPO agents were given customized 'Last Names' to suit the caller's country
 The DID number was masked based on the caller's country
 The BPO agents were given 20% hand-outs
 Culture specific provisions were specially created to record rebuttals from the objections
raised by the male family members of female patients
 The BPO process of the customer was continuously improvised and enhanced based on
Lean and Six Sigma methods
 The database of the customer was always kept up-to-date
 The BPO application was rectified periodically
Within a short time span of just 2 months, they were able to present the following results to
our customer. From an unsatisfactory 47% the CSAT galloped to a whopping 85% - 87%.
The turnaround time was improved by 24%.

a. What were the cultural challenges faced by ALPHA call center and how were these
specific cultural challenges met by ALPHA call center (5 Marks)

b. What are the advantages of outsourcing call center operations of a hospital to a BPO like
ALPHA call center?