Over the last 15 years, the outsourcing has evolved and seen a number of the major changes. For a long time the industry in Australia was battling negative perceptions because of a disproportionate level of the scrutiny driven by the accent neutralization challenges with the outbound telemarketing call centers in the South Asia and the challenge was making the Australian public understand that the outsourcing is so much bigger than annoying calls at dinner time. In Australia, outsourcing is a very broad church and people might be surprised to learn that the industry employs over a quarter of a million people in Australia. In the front office outsourcing in which is often referred to a call center work, it is a small albeit that is very important part of the outsourcing value chain. It is used by the businesses for both of inbound customer service work and outbound telemarketing work.
With over 80 percent of all customer interactions now going via call center, the call centers and how they work and their functions are reasonably well understood and over the years there have been countless research projects investigating them. Most of them have been centralized and they are now being outsourced to specialized outsourcing companies for the various reasons around the efficiency gains, expense reduction and enterprise reengineeering. The broad church of the outsourcing is also about the back office processes including the data entry, accounting, debt collection, database management, claims processing and HR administration and recruitment all the way through the shared service and Information Technology data centers. To move the debate along from very narrow perspective of the call centers to the larger arena of all the business process that can be outsourced.
They can now see that the first wave of the outsourcing has just about passed with the benefit of the hindsight. To put things in the perspective and to give the context to their understanding of the outsourcing journey that all the major companies are going through. They are now refer to the three stages of the outsourcing as BPO 1.0, BPO 2.0 and BPO 3.0.
In the BPO 1.0, the first of the outsourcing was all about the basic lift and shift or the labor arbitrage, that wave has landed and washed back on the back of this around 1999 they saw the rise and rise outsourcing destinations like Indian and the Philippines. To the table, there countries were able to bring their highly educated. The BPO 2.0, although the Australia has a risk adverse business culture, the businesses are bing driven by an appetite for the change and a gradual acceptance of the outsourcing as a legitimate and mainstream business strategy. The BPO 3.0 as an organization that move along the outsourcing journey, they will see organizations that moved beyond outsourcing transactional processes to the outsourcing complex, high end processes that have a higher impact and thus positively impact the bottom line and create shareholder value faster. They will see terms like Knowledge Workers that may not necessarily be based in centralized locations.
REFERENCE:
http://www.outsourcemagazine.co.uk/component/flexicontent/tag/35-australia
http://www.outsourcemagazine.co.uk/articles/item/4087-the-australian-outsourcing-journey
http://www.outsourcemagazine.co.uk/articles/item/4087-the-australian-outsourcing-journey
