Giva Blog

What is BPO: Business Process Outsourcing?

BPO stands for Business Process Outsourcing and is the contracting of services to third-party companies that can provide them more inexpensively or better than your company. Businesses outsource their work for many reasons but are most commonly looking to decrease costs, expand capabilities or lessen risks. Some common outsourcing services include Customer Service/Call Center/Helpdesk, Client Management, Human Resources, and even Accounting. Third-party providers offer these solutions using cost-efficient approaches. This article will focus on Call Center providers, although many of the points can apply to other types of outsourced services as well.

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The troubled Service Desk manager called the ITIL Guru and asked to see her right away. When he arrived, he had a panicked look on his face. The ITIL Guru calmly asked, "What has got your feathers ruffled?"

The manager said, "I just received an email from the CIO asking about my department's metrics. He says that they don't look great compared to top service desks. Before I respond, I wanted to get your opinion."

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In the AI-driven era, customer service has evolved to be more efficient and self-learning. AI systems help companies in a variety of ways including improving customer satisfaction ratings, reducing operational costs, and increasing revenue. AI has many other advantages for customer service that human agents cannot compete with — it is always available, 24/7 and never gets tired or distracted. One of the leading AI systems in this area is CBR Systems' machine learning help desk system.

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The Service Desk Manager arrived at the ITIL Service Manager's office and found her staring out the window. He politely knocked, and the manager invited him to sit down, saying, "Glad to see you back. How is your SLA project going?"

"Progressing, thanks to your guidance."

"That is great! Tell me what you have done so far."

"I met with several key business leaders and explained the project and what a Service Level Agreement is. They are excited about us addressing their critical needs, and they are looking forward to a continuous improvement process partnership. However, I am not experiencing the same excitement from the various IT departments. I thought they would love to know what the business needs."

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When the young man arrived at the ITIL Service Manager's office, he found her reading a book. He politely knocked, and the manager invited him to sit down, saying, "What can I do for you?"

The young man said, "My manager asked me to write an SLA for my Service Desk, and I don't know where to start. Another manager told me you know everything there is to know about IT best practices."

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IT Change Management stakeholder feedback into Continuous Improvement Practice is the best and fastest way to transform Information Technology (IT) into a strategic asset for your company.

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Discover the meaning, principles & benefits of the Shift-Left support model approach & best-practice implementation strategies

IT departments have always lived in a world of balancing two opposing activities with limited resources:

1. Maintaining user productivity by responding when something breaks (an Incident) or a user request for services (a Service Request).
2. "Maximizing the number of successful service and product changes by ensuring that risks have been properly assessed and authorizing changes." ¹

What makes this juggling a challenge is the same high-level skills for planning, testing, and implementing changes are also the same resources required for resolving more complicated escalated incidents. Anyone that works in IT is familiar with firefighting interruptions. You are in your cube with your head around a time-sensitive change project when you receive a new incident that cannot wait. If you only had more people, then you could split the tasks between project management people and operational people. But is that really going to happen? So, what does happen is that you take the time to help out the users and skimp on the change project because projects are also time sensitive.

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Any break in the standard flow of a business can result in severe financial losses. Where do these losses stem from? One of the most expensive business interruptions is IT or system downtime. What is system downtime? It's when a technological "glitch" shuts down production. For healthcare companies, it's when servers shut down and your electronic health records become unavailable. No appointment scheduling. No access to patient records. No processing of payments.

There are some estimates that downtime costs range from $427 per minute for small businesses to as high as $9,000 for large enterprises.

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Change management models are a crucial part of any organization. Healthcare settings in particular are known to be resistant to change and have a lot on the line when it comes to implementation. In order to stay competitive, it is important to know how best to implement change management strategies that will keep your organization running smoothly and efficiently. There are many different models for change management frameworks, but which ones work the best for healthcare?

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