Role of Innovation in Transforming the Business Processes The new age digital wave is enabling possibilities way beyond the normal imagination
By Bhupender Singh •
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"It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change' goes a famous quote by Charles Darwin. The Indian BPO industry appears to perfectly depict this phrase having evolved from basic process outsourcing to higher-end service delivery to selling Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) to its clients. Once synonymous with being termed as call centres, the BPO industry has now evolved to reflect mature market offerings which offer an end-to-end view of the processes and work on improving productivity, by providing efficiency gains through robotics, automation, analytics, artificial intelligence, and digitization.
Role of the technology:
All these serve as testimony to the fact that technology has played an important role in the BPO industry in enabling transformations as well as in expanding the scope of relevance of BPM players. One such instance is the influence of the BPM industry in enabling disruptive changes in the travel industry over technology proportion that has immensely enhanced the overall end consumer experience. In this instance, the problem statement addressed by technology backed innovation was to overcome the conventional practice of agents required to go through the fare rules within the Global Distribution Systems (GDS) and other reference points to conclude the applicable terms for 85% of the transactions.
Average Handling Time
Due to a lot of documentation in the fare rules, the Average Handling Time (AHT) gets a direct impact and mistakes in understanding these rules lead to agent errors and eventually retail losses. Over 72% of the errors resulting in these retail losses are related to fare rules. Organizations in the fulfilment function in the travel industry have to deal with multiple time zones, queues, POS, Global Distribution Systems (GDS) and inquiries from different languages. The most significant challenge is to serve different time zones in a most efficient manner such that no customer or travel agency is affected by the limited multitasking ability of a human mind. There was a need to create a tool which reads and extracts the applicable conditions for the agents to save Average Handling Time and prevent errors due to misunderstanding or miscalculating as well as overcome the inconvenience caused due to constantly referring to multiple screens.
Al Based Innovation:
An AI-based innovation enabled the travel service provider to reduce operational costs and retail losses via automated fare calculation. Furthermore, the transformation achieved touched upon the elements of reduced handling time, reduction in airline debit memos & retail losses, reduction in call wait time with improved first call resolution, Global Distribution Systems (GDS) and other reference points to conclude the applicable terms and lastly Optimized Transaction Handling Capacity.
The above is just one among many examples where technology-based innovation proposition of BPM industry has completely transformed conventional sectors. The new age digital wave is enabling possibilities way beyond the normal imagination and the future certainly appears exciting for the industry!
