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BUSINESS
The BPO-SME Tango
The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry is seeing a paradigmshift in its
processes and outlook. What was once an industry dominated by big vendors and
buyers, new trends amongst Small andMediumEnterprises (SMEs) are emerging
and shaking up the BPO scene.
A
s
the outsourcing
industry starts becom-
ing saturated, BPO
providers are starting
to look at SMEs for
new market develop-
ment. There are more
than 700,000 SMEs representing 99.2%
of total active business establishments in
Malaysia. The challenge here, though, is
that the requirements are smaller, hence
harder to reach economies of scale in
delivery. Thus, BPO companies need
to come-up with more creative delivery
models.
Leading the change is VADS, a Tele-
komMalaysia-owned subsidiary. Its CEO
Ahmad Azhar Yahya says: “Today, the
Malaysian SME sector is a robust and
growing market, making up a majority of
the country’s businesses and serving to
fulfil many crucial niches that complete
the industries – proving that strength
does come in numbers.”
VADS recently rolled out Contact
Centre 2.0 (CC2.0), an evolution of
their existing traditional call centre. As
customer touch points have changed,
they are increasingly turning towards al-
ternative forms of contact such as social
media to communicate with businesses
and other customers. Ahmad Azhar
adds: “As such, it was imperative that
we swooped in on this new trend to offer
their customers a more comprehensive
service.”
On top of that, their new offering to
the SME community, the VADS Social
Media and Business Analytics (SMBA)
solution is tailored to meet each cus-
tomer’s needs based on their existing
databases. With this service, VADS can
help SMEs make far better business
decisions based off the insights derived
from the data.
The VADS SMBA packages caters
to the business needs of smaller enter-
prises, start-ups and entrepreneurs, who
would be able to enjoy a multitude of
products and service features on a highly
scalable environment which will enable
them to control their cost.
SMEs could also realise business
benefits by moving their internal service
and support operations to the Cloud.
The cloud-hosted service desk man-
agement platform uses best practices of
the Information Technology Infrastruc-
ture Library (ITIL), which would help
businesses to integrate, consolidate
and standardise all their service desk
processes. “Many organisations that
run their internal help desk are finding
it difficult to cope with the rising cost of
technology and trying to abide by inter-
nal governance and risk management
processes while managing requests from
their internal users,” said Ahmad Azhar.
“With the VADS Managed Service
Desk (MSD), all the processes can be
shifted to the Cloud, making it easier
to manage technology updates while
adhering to the ITIL standardisation.
This in turn ensures that all requests
from their internal users are managed
in a timely manner.” He added that the
traditional help-desk set-up included
certain limitations; including poor ser-
vice responsiveness, limited integration
for point solutions, inconsistent delivery
of end-user services and limited process
optimisation.
Point of saturation …
Service providers are
looking to SMEs for new
market development.
The physical
location of our
delivery centres
do notmatter; as
wewill be able
to deliver our
services to any
location across
the globe.”
W o r d s :
J a m i l a h L i m & S i m o n V e l l a