Importance of BGV in BPO industry

What is BGV?

BGV stands for “Background verification”.

Background verification or investigation of past records of the to-be-employees of the organization have taken an important role in this era. Background verification process is an integral part of the recruitment process these days and is common in all kinds of industries including BPO outsourcing industries present across the countries.

Why BGV Is Important under BPO Industry?

The primary objective of Background verification of the employees is to gain some vital information about the employees. In India BGV is totally legal and is becoming almost mandatory to perform before the organization decides to hire the people.

The reason being, there has been an increase in the cases of falsified certificates or educational degrees by the employees lately. Government of India is just trying to mitigate those risks of hiring employees based on false credentials. The proper background check also assures the safety of the would-be-employees of the BPO services providers.

BPO service providers take up the matter of background investigation called as BGV in today’s world way too seriously, because of the following reasons:

·         To Stop Fraudulent Activities: Scams and phishing activities have shored up off late in India as well as in other countries. People are blaming the Indian BPO Service Providers for that. So, to ensure they are not blamed further BPO Outsourcing companies are giving a lot of importance to the verification process of the to-be-employees.

·         Past Experience: Many a times in the past the BPO industry has seen fraudulent claims regarding the important credentials of the employees. Mainly because the BPO Service Providers in India rushed to hire in bulk to start different projects that are outsourced to them, failing to scan the submitted documents by the employees to them. As a result, they faced a lot of criticism when the reality of those employees was exposed. And people blamed the recruiting body of the organizations to not take up their job seriously. To avoid those blames, in current time, the BPO service providers in India and other regions of India like Delhi/NCR are taking up the task of BGV way too seriously.

·         Check Capabilities: As we all know that BPO service providers in India need people who can handle stress and long hours of work continuously and that too (most of the time) during the night shift. So, checking the medical history of the employees-to-be is totally justifiable and needed.

·         Higher Productivity: A proper knowledge provides an upper hand to the employees who are in charge of executing vital tasks. Like, managers or team leads of the BPO Outsourcing industry would need to perform several kinds of works and that would need some qualifications. A proper background check would ensure that the hired employees have the potential to drive sales in the BPO services sector also to increase productivity eventually.

·         Less Attrition: BPO Services require patience and certain other skills to continue working in the BPO Outsourcing segment. If skilled employees are hired after a thorough scrutiny of their background, then it is less likely that those employees would leave the job or would have a chance to be thrown out of the organization.

Records that are checked under BGV process:

It has almost become a norm or unsaid rule to go through the credentials of the would-be-employees of the organization. These credentials include the following:

·         Checking Criminal Records: It is important to check whether the potential employee was involved in any kind of violence in the past or not.

·         Educational Background Check: This step involves verification of the educational degrees held by the would-be-employees to see the claims made by them regarding their educational qualification are correct or not!

·         Pre-Employment Records: Why the employee has left his/her previous job is an important concern for the current organization. Because that would tell a lot about the employee. The current employee can also know about the previous salary that used to be credited in the potential employee’s account and that information also helps to negotiate the salaries better.

·         Medical Reports:  It is important for the recruiting firm to check whether the employees they are planning to take on-board are of sound mental and physical health or not, to see whether they would be able to handle stress and work pressure or not.

·         Address: Verification of the address is also important for the employers. They would probably inquire from the neighbours where the potential employees stay about the nature of the employee-to-be. A valid address is thus an important component when it comes to background verification.

·         Check on Social Media Accounts: These days a new way to check upon a potential employee’s character is to check his or her social media accounts that reflect their social activities. This can indicate what kind of a person is the would-be-employee.

·         Financial History: This would give information regarding the credit history and tax payment history of the potential employees. This is an indicator of ethical values maintained by the employees.

·         License: At times the driving license of the potential employees is also verified by the employers. This is done to ensure that no accident related issues or traffic rule breaking issues has been there or not. This can indicate the discipline maintained by the employees-to-be.

·         Citizenship: The current status of citizenship is also very important when the question of hiring comes in the picture.

So, basically a proper scanning of various documents submitted by the potential employees give the recruiting organizations to have all the required and vital information about the employee to be hired like address proof, educational degrees, medical information etc.

Hope, this article has enlisted all the important points regarding the BGV in BPO Industry and also in general. If you think something is amiss and can be added up to the above list of importance of BGV in BPO service providers in India and Delhi region falling under the BPO Outsourcing Industry, then do not forget to tell us about the same!

How to reduce the pain of high Average Handling time

BPO industry has its own kinds of metrics or say components (these act as instruments to measure) to evaluate their efficiency and productivity. One of such important component of evaluation of quality calls is known as ‘Average Holding time’.

In this article we will dive into this particular component to check why Average Handling Time should be as minimum as possible.

What do you mean by Average Handling Time?

‘Average Handling Time’ is the summation of the entire process of receiving a call till concluding the call from a customer by the inbound call centre or inbound telemarketing companies. It does not only count the receiving of the call from a customer, but also considers the time when a customer is made to hold on a call-the whole time of conversation with the customers till the time the transaction is completed and the customer hung up the call.

Why Average Handling Time is important?

The ‘Average Handling Time’ indicates how much time is taken by an inbound call centre agent to handle the call and fix the problem raised by the customer. This indicates the efficiency of the inbound call centre employees as a whole and also helps to plan tasks better.

Two components that are not included while calculating Average Handling Time are:

Ring time and queue time. These two are included in the calculation of Average call Duration.

Formula for Average Handling Time (AHT):

Average Handling Time:

(Total time of talking + Total time of holding + Total time of wrap-up)/Total number of calls handled

Now that we are quite sure and clear about what Average Handling Time is all about, we can dig a little deeper into the subject of the same.

High Average Handling Time is not desirable for the inbound call centre or telemarketing service providers. Because it means, an agent takes more time to conclude one call and thus the productivity of that person declines because he would not be able to handle more calls in a day if the Average Holding Time is high at his end.

It is also important to note that while the inbound call centre or tech support employees try to keep the customers on hold so that they can transfer the call to another more experienced agent, the customer might get annoyed. Because customers who call the call centres to seek help for their problem would want to resolve their problem as soon as possible and not to hold. Thus, an increased AHT would hamper the customer satisfaction too!

So, the wise decision that can be taken by the inbound tech support or Inbound call centres is to reduce the Average Handling Time to the maximum extent possible so that customers stay happy and productivity remains intact.

Here are a few suggestions for the inbound call centre service providers in India to reduce the pain of High Average Handling Time:

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  1. Calls Must Be Recorded: The first thing that should be done by the Inbound Call Centres or Telemarketing Service Providers is to record all the calls that are received by the call centre agents during the working hours. The Purpose of the recording of the calls is simple! The recorded calls would not lie about the performance of the call centre agents over calls. Thus, the problem areas can be identified easily with the help of those recorded call history and the team leads or managers can plan accordingly.

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    2. Impart Proper Training: Impart right kind of training to the employees of the Inbound Call Centres or Telemarketing Service Providers or Inbound Tech Support employees. They should be taught the art of how to address the problems raised by the customers. They should know whom to be contacted in case they can’t find a solution. Because, the skilled employees of the Inbound Call Centres would be able to handle the calls in a better way than the unskilled employees. They would be able to thus reduce the Average Handling Time in each call they receive.

·         3. Switch to Technology: Managers can opt for technology based solutions that would help to reduce the Average Handling Time. They can switch to automation for the works which are repetitive in nature. Few of those processes that were executed by the Inbound Call Centre agents if automated would speed up the whole process of calls. Thus the overall time of the call or put it as the Average Holding Time can be reduced to a great extent.

·         4. Greetings: The Inbound tech support employees can save a lot of time if they spend less time in greeting the customers. Instead, they can simply jump to the main problems that the customer is facing and try to fix it as soon as possible.

·         5. Monitor The Calls: Evaluation is a mandatory task to judge the quality of the performance of the inbound call centre agents, specially the new ones. Thus call monitoring becomes very important. This would help the employees to identify the reason why their AHT is high compared to others. Thus, they can improve on that part.

·         6. Structured Questions: More structured questions would help to wrap up the call faster. Because if the agents are to come up with their own set of questions to fix a problem on the spot then that would automatically increase the AHT. But if the manager of the say, Inbound Tech Support has already prepared a list with all the possible questions to fix the issues of the customers then automatically the Average Holding Time would reduce.

·         7. Listen: Inbound call centre employees should be given the recordings of their own calls so that they can compare it with other employees’ call recordings to see where he could have done a better job to reduce the Average Holding time.

·         8. Proper Routing: Routing of the calls to the most efficient agent would reduce the chance of transferring the calls to other inbound call centre representatives. Thus, it would reduce the Average Holding Time.

So, we have had a clear perspective about the Average handling Time and how Average Handling Time can be reduced.

Do you agree with the above discussed points? If no, they please feel free to share your ideas to help the inbound call centres or telemarketing service providers who belong to BPO industry in India to reduce their Average Handling Time and thus increase their overall productivity!