Today we are going to talk about something that has the potential to completely transform the call centre industry in India and more importantly the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry.
The BPO industry in India can be estimated to be nearly a 40-billion-dollar industry and this means that any micro changes to the industry can have drastic implications.
There are currently quite a lot of BPO giants operating in India whether it is Infosys, Wipro, Genpact or even TCS.
However, the one thing common with these companies is that they are slow to implement change.
Today we are going to talk about one such change that can be so drastic that you can even transform the entire Call centre industry and make it much more efficient and much more profitable.
This change we are talking about will be in the form of reducing manpower and introducing automation to this industry which is already inefficient. We are of course talking about artificial intelligence (AI).
Before we talk about the impact of AI in the BPO industry, let us look at the landscape of BPO in India.
The Present BPO Situation in India
The present situation of BPOs in India is that India holds a lot of potential when it comes to business process outsourcing and call centres.
This is primarily because of:
A Large English-Speaking Population
One of the biggest advantages of the Indian BPO market is that India has one of the largest English-speaking populations.
Some considerable estimates suggest at least 130 million people with a good level of English proficiency.
This means there is no shortage of Call centre agents and BPO operators who are able to fluently communicate with the rest of the English-speaking world.
A Large Graduated Workforce
The second biggest factor is that India has a lot of engineering and IT graduates as well as other degree graduates.
They are not only very professional and dedicated but they also hold special degrees that make them over-qualified for Call centre jobs in some instances.
This ensures you always get the best kind of workforce.
Significantly Lower Training Times
The reason why we are seeing this huge growth in the BPO industry is simply because it does not take a long time to train a BPO operator.
You can train someone as a call centre agent within weeks and get them confident enough to handle calls and be good at it.
Infrastructure Investments Lower
If you compare the BPO industry to any other industry then you are going to find that the cost of investments is significantly lower compared to any other industry.
For example, if you compare setting up a BPO with setting up a manufacturing plant then the BPO setup is going to be a fraction of the cost.
Operating Costs Lower/ Lowest
And finally, we have to talk about the operating cost of running a successful BPO and we are primarily dealing with Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).
Let’s say for example you are an American insurance company that needs a lot of call centre agents to talk to your clients.
You can get 10 highly qualified BPO operators and call centre agents for the salary of 1 minimum wage demotivated underqualified teenager in the US.
Choosing India makes sense logically.
So, What Is AI For the Uninitiated
You might be new to the AI gold rush that is taking the world by storm. You do not need to worry because not knowing what AI is, is also very common.
AI or artificial intelligence is simulated human intelligence which means AI can mimic human reasoning and human problem solving and language understanding skills quite easily.
This is because artificial intelligence is trained based on human intelligence and is put through a lot of data with includes millions and millions of data points.
This helps the artificial intelligence model to understand things from the perspective of a human and that is why you can quite easily utilise AI for tasks such as that of a BPO company.
Since we are not talking about a Quantum level of data processing, it is very easy for any kind of AI trained with multiple BPO models to interact with clients and have very original conversations.
We hope you now understand the level of growth potential of AI when it comes to call centres.
This Is How AI Can Transform the BPO Industry
Task Automation
The BPO industry is full of repetitive tasks and humans and repetitive tasks do not mix well and that is how all the errors can come into the system.
When we talk about repetitive tasks, we mean things like data entry as well as invoice processing and a lot of data categorisation.
When you give humans tasks like this and ask them to do it for hours then your best call centre agent is also prone to make mistakes.
That is where AI can revolutionise the system because AI can introduce automatic data entry and automatic customer service resolutions.
All you need to do is to train the AI with the local language model and also introduce the AI to hundreds of hours of collected data to train it.
Data Analytics
The current situation of call centres in India is that whenever they do customer targeting for promotional calls, it is just a shot in the dark.
The introduction of AI into the operating procedure of these companies means that they will now be able to understand and analyse data much more effectively and target more effective demographics.
Simply put, AI will help BPO companies analyse large batches of data which will then help them target clients that are more likely to convert to customers.
This is not only going to be revolutionary but it will change the entire effectiveness of BPO companies.
Personalised Customer Service
There are a few things that make customer service great and one of them is a personalized experience when it comes to customer service.
If you visit any high-end luxury boutique store or any high-end banker or banking service or any kind of service then the biggest difference in service is going to be customer service which will be personalised for you.
BPO companies lack that personalization because there are too many clients and too few agents.
But with the introduction of AI, you can train the model to understand what customers want and study customer behaviour patterns to only provide them with what they like.
This means personalised promotions and personalized product recommendations and moreover, a targeted approach rather than blindly suggesting things to customers they are not likely to like.
Training and Monitoring
While we understand that a complete transformation from a human model to an AI model is impossible in the present situation or even in the near future but if you want to include AI in your BPO then this is what you can do.
You can utilise AI to train your call centre agents. You can utilise AI models to teach your call centre agents and you can even use AI to analyse their performance.
This is because a human trainer can only notice so many things and a human trainer might not be able to deal with individual data points for dozens of employees.
However, a trained AI model can do quality monitoring and training of your BPO agents and tell them exactly what they are lacking.
Cost Optimisation
The best case scenario for BPO companies is to implement AI models that completely automate the process of data extraction and entry or even the entire call.
If your AI model gets to do data entry then it will free up more time for the customer agent to take more calls and just focus on talking to the customers rather than data entry.
Humans are good at talking with humans and they might make mistakes when they have to handle data and also think about customer relationships.
That is why AI can automate the entire data entry model or even take calls and answer just like a human.
This will make your workflow more efficient and your business more profitable and if you can automate the entire thing then you do not even have to pay a workforce and have the AI do everything.
This can improve your profits 100-fold.
Business Expansion
If run a BPO then you always need to think about business and business expansion because no business is going to survive without expanding itself.
That is why the introduction of AI into a BPO makes expansion much easier.
If you think about it then it is actually quite simple to understand because if you are running a call centre and you want to expand that business and you have human employees then you need new buildings new infrastructure and everything new.
However, if you run that BPO with the help of AI-automation then you might need more devices and maybe a few more server racks. You don’t even need that if you run your operations through the cloud. No new buildings, no new desks, computers, coffee machines etc.
That is why expanding BPO operations without human employees is actually quite easy and simple.
So, Will AI Replace Human Call Centres and BPO Agents
The Ethical Consideration
One of the most important things you must keep in mind when you are planning on executing such a drastic step of firing your employees and replacing them with AI is the ethical side of things.
It is just not the right thing to do something like that and even if you do not want to think of ethical considerations then think about this.
Humans will always be the best way to talk to other humans at least for the time being.
That is why you should not completely change your model but integrate some forms of AI automation into your current operations.
The Business Side of Things
If you consider it from the business side of things then it might be difficult for you to completely transform your operations into an AI-operated model.
AI is in its infancy when it comes to the BPO sector and you might need to shut down your operations for some time in order to train the AI model.
This will cost you money as well and it is just not practical to do so.
That is why you should opt for a model that combines human elements with AI elements.
The Hybrid Approach of AI Integration
That is why if you want an efficient system and you already have a working system with human employees then this is going to be the best option for you.
This hybrid approach is going to combine human elements with AI elements to create a system that is much more efficient with much fewer errors.
The reason why we know this is because we are the pioneers in developing such a system for the BPO industry and the call centre industry.
CallMate.ai is a Think To Share product and we have been continuously developing this AI-powered call data extraction system for years and it is already 95% accurate when it comes to data extraction and automated data entry.
What our proprietary B2B solution does is that it lets the call representative talk to the clients while our AI system extracts the data accumulated during the call.
This means the employees and customer representatives do not have to think about data entry as it is done automatically during the call.
The best thing about our system is that it only gets more accurate with every call and additionally, we also have the best predictive analysis and call analysis systems in place that will help you target the clients with the most potential for conversion.
We welcome you to check out CallMate and along with that, you can also check out everything else we do because we are a full-service IT Solutions company with over 20 renowned IT services and solutions.
We welcome you to visit our website and check out everything we do.
Common BPO AI FAQs
What is the AI trend in business 2024?
If you talk about the latest AI trends in business then we have to talk about automation because AI is making it possible for businesses to introduce automation.
This means automation of everything from data entry to automation of repetitive tasks that simply do not need any human intervention.
AI is automating a lot of business processes and the best thing about AI is that it learns things and with that, you can customise what you want out of AI for your specific business needs.
That is why businesses are trying to implement AI wherever they can and improve the efficiency of their business processes.
How is AI used in BPO?
AI at the moment is being experimented with in the BPO industry because AI for BPOs is still in its infancy and that is why major BPO players do not want to experiment with a new technology unless it is very stable.
That is why AI is being used in a limited capacity in the form of data entry and data extraction and some forms of client communication solutions.
However, BPOs are not completely open with a completely automated model as of now.
How will AI affect BPO jobs?
If you talk about the future then AI will definitely affect BPO jobs in a way that will make human employees unnecessary.
It is just a matter of time before AI gets so good that it can have conversations with people and actually understand the context of their problems and solve their issues.
However, we also predict that some companies might not want to utilise this model simply because consumers like to talk with humans when they are facing problems.
So, we are predicting that while major BPO operators might be more inclined to utilise the complete automated AI experience when it comes to calls, the smaller brands might not do that.
Exclusive luxury brands will certainly never move to AI when it comes to customer communication.
