THE country’s business process outsourcing (BPO) companies will be more competitive if the industry will adopt common standards in measuring and training competency among the industry workers, said an official of a major BPO consultancy firm.
In an interview with the Business Mirror, Future Perfect director of communications Hayley McCarthy said the country can still produce the adequate number to fill the demand if the industry will adopt a common standard that accurately tests the skills needed and effectively trains communication skills.
“Call centers have specific requirements for communication assessment and training. Currently these are not being adequately met: an over-reliance on school-book approaches and error-counting is threatening the growth of outsourcing in the Philippines.”
McCarthy said it is important for the BPO firms to implement valid assessment practices that are standardized to ensure that the competitiveness of the Philippine workers is maintained in a consistent level.
At present, recruitment assessments often don’t relate to quality scores and many call centers have been found to be turning away good communicators and hiring poor ones at an alarming rate. Inaccurate recruitment assessments put additional pressure on the training department to raise the competency of new hires. By having standardized training materials created by subject matter experts in language and communication for call center purposes, BPOs can ensure communication skills are up to standard before agents start taking calls. With a consistent standard in both assessment and training, McCarthy said “the Philippines will be in a better position to get more outsourcing services from overseas.”
As far as adopting a common standard is concerned, McCarthy said the Business Processing Language Assessment Scales (Buplas) could be an appropriate assessment tool toward implementing a common standard either by BPOs or the industry itself. Buplas has the features that can handle the language concerns of workers when dealing with their clients because it is the only test available in the industry that tests the four key competency areas: pronunciation; language accuracy; discourse (the ability to make logical, clear explanations); and interactive and strategic competency (the ability to talk with ease and confidence and negotiate intercultural communication issues).
Although there are existing standards being used by several BPOs in the country, McCarthy said the industry is different from other industries (such as universities) that use assessments as a final test to determine a candidate’s score in general terms. McCarthy said many call centers have customer satisfaction issues and the companies cannot pinpoint the root cause.
Communication is often blamed, but trainers don’t know the remedial programs to affect performance because, more often than not, the assessment systems used in operations don’t relate to the communication assessment of training.
She said pronunciation problems originated from mother tongue interference errors, but there are many more important features in pronunciation that are ignored in many call center assessments, such as stress and intonation, which have a large impact on comprehensibility for the listener.
McCarthy also notes that many assessments on count errors rather than determine whether the candidate is globally comprehensible.
Source:http://businessmirror.com.ph/home/companies/19222-bpo-firms-urged-to-adopt-competency-standards.html
