Frost and Sullivan, a respected research and management consultancy firm based in the US, predicts that the full impact of the economic slowdown will be felt by the outsourcing industry in the coming year or two. And advises that outsourcers must be quick enough to react to developing conditions and rethink business strategies if they are to maintain growth in the face of a slowing global economy.
I suspect Michael Joseph, Safaricom’s CEO read this report and went ahead to make a rather unpopular business decision among the local Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) community. This decision was to invest and manage an Sh800 million ultra-modern call centre; his motive, to be able to answer 85 percent of all customer care calls within the first 20 seconds of the first ring. This to me, reads like a move to increase operational efficiencies. Over the last one year, Safaricom has been accused of poor customer care and ever engaged customer care lines and therefore a dedicated call centre to solve customer problems is a welcome addition.
It is, however, interesting that Safaricom decided to invest huge sums of money in a service that could have been easily out sourced, or so you think. Safaricom defied experts and global best practices, in making this decision and that is probably what Frost and Sullivan are talking about. I’m reminded that they actually wanted to go that way and even put out a tender sometime last year for a BPO operator to run the call centre. With BPO profiled as a pillar within the Vision 2030, it would have been politically correct for Safaricom to go that way, but they chose to a different route.
So why did Michael Joseph chose to go against the grain? Here allow me to speculate since I’m not the man who manages the company that has in three consecutive years won the East African most respected company award. As stated earlier, Safaricom had no intention of running the call centre. They even did not want to invest in putting it up in the first place and were going to work smart by outsourcing this non-core activity to the experts, read the BPO operators. But after putting out a tender for this work twice, they realized that they could not identify an operator who was ready for their kind of work.
It has been reported in different media that the local BPO operators could neither meet the technical specifications nor the pricing expectation. Something that reminds me of an observation I made a while back on this new economic sector that most BPOs were founded on unsustainable business models and lack vision. It is estimated that more than 75% of the existing BPOs were formed after the Government through the Kenya ICT Board announced that they would provide subsidies to BPOs as a way of growing the sector in line with the Vision 2030. So to expect companies that were formed on this premise and looking out for Government handouts to invest in the kind of infrastructure that Safaricom was looking for is to say the least, a long shot.
Then, there is the issue of focus. BPOs in the country have been spending too much time looking for business outside the country that they seem to have forgotten to build capacity in their operations and look for business locally. There are many organisations like Safaricom who would like to outsource there non-core but are stuck to them because there are no suitable suitors. It is my humble submission that there is need for the BPO sector to reorganize and restrategise for it to play a meaningful role in the development of the country and to contribute effectively in our ambitious vision 2030.
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