The BPO skills assessment test

PERSONAL UPGRADE

Indian call centres may be a boon to many companies that have outsourced their customer support operations. These call centres seem to be riding high on the outsourcing wave, but for one key concern that continues to haunt them _ attrition.

If one thinks that this is the only loophole to be plugged, then think again. The industry is not able to churn out fresh talent with high English speaking skills.

While retention is to do with motivation levels in a company, the issue of bad communication and English speaking skills can be a death knell to the Indian BPO sector.

MeritTrac Services Pvt Ltd is a country's well-known assessment partners for the who's who in IT and ITeS sector. The core function of this company is to assess individuals on whether they are suited for the call centre industry.

Once the call centre takes in the list of probables from placement consultants, this database is handed over to MeritTrac for assessment of candidates.

Interestingly, on an average, MeritTrac has found that only four out of 100 applicants meet the demand of the client, thereby indicating a severe skills shortage.

MeritTrac saw and assessed 1,50,000 candidates this year. Of this, nearly 90,000 candidates were assessed for BPO skills. And only about 4,000 candidates were actually hired.

"Grammar and accent neutrality are two key areas where the students fail. This is followed by general aptitude and ability to handle repetitive task. Many a time, a student does not even know why he is rejected by a call centre. It is important to work on these issues, especially in colleges," Madan Padki, director, MeritTrac Services Pvt Ltd said.

As soon as MeritTrac receives the database from the client, it conducts the resume screening process. This particular process ascertains whether the candidate matches the requirement of the client.

Once there is a match, the candidate is called for a Communications Test. This particular test is the basic minimum criteria for a voice-based call centre. Here, MeritTrac tests the spoken English skills as well as listening skills of a candidate.

"In this phase, assuming we receive 1500 resumes, nearly 1000 manage to clear it. Thereby they have good basics for a tech-support centre," says Madan.

The candidate then enters the General Ability Test where his numerical ability, problem solving skills, eye for detail and process orientation skills are put to test.

All these parameters constitute the next level of important skill sets required for a ITeS company. This process takes about 45 minutes.

The third process is perhaps the longest as it calls for specialisation. As each company specialises in different areas of call centre business, the requirements are also specific.

This may include domain specialisation in a various operating systems, accounting systems, insurance processes etc. This method takes anywhere between 30 minutes to 1 hour.

Once the candidate clears all these levels, then he is scheduled for an interview with the company. Typically, a candidate will take nearly 3 hours before he can clear all three levels.

So far, MeritTrac has not gone retail. The entire database of candidates rests with the company, while MeritTrac is paid for every candidate that it tests. MeritTrac tests nearly 15,000 candidates per month.

Some of its clients include ICICIOneSource, Oracle, Accenture, Microsoft, HP, Cognizant, SAP, CA among others.

On one hand, MeritTrac is excited about the prospects for this industry, while on the other, it is equally worried about the quality of people who are expressing interest to be part of this industry.

Besides internal assessment procedures by companies, assessment partners like MeritTrac do their bit to ensure that best-in-class talent enter this industry.