Moving toward international standards

Nasscom, the IT industry's lobby, says a survey it conducted with an American business process outsourcing (BPO) standards body shows Indian BPO firms are moving towards International standards.

Nasscom (National Association of Software and Services Companies), which organises the annual India ITES-BPO Strategy Summits, has also identified other important "challenges" in the way of "operational excellence".

Nasscom and US based Customer Operations Performance Centre Inc. (COPC), a call centre standards setter and certifier, say, broadly, consistency of service and quality are critical.

The survey, based on some 600 "COPC audited reviews from 35 countries", finds Indian information technology enabled services (ITES) and BPO firms are achieving end-user satisfaction ratings ranging from 82 per cent to 100 per cent.

The survey also says, Indian firms are now rated above 8, on a scale of one (low) to 10 (high), in areas such as client satisfaction, responsiveness, mininising "fatal errors", efficiency of using call centre agents and telecom infrastructure.

In areas such as client satisfaction and minimising errors, Indian firms were actually ahead of counterparts in Europe and Asia, the survey found, says Nasscom.

On Wednesday, COPC is expected to announce its new standards, here. The standards body was started 10 years ago by American multinational firms such as American Express, Compaq, Dell, Intel, L.L. Bean, Microsoft, Motorola and Novell.

They used an existing standard, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria and framework as the basis for COPC Standard. The idea was to make their own call centres better.

COPC now certifies call centres worldwide. For instance, Accenture's Indian contact centre is certified at version 3.3 Gold, one of the higher standards, for its voice based technical support work.

Wipro Spectramind's voice-based "Inbound Customer Contact Centre Services" is certified at version 3.3 Base, as of November 2004, according to COPC's website.