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The Future of Business Process Outsourcing
With the world moving in a high paced technological advancement and with an open market in the world market scenario, it is but expected that the way business is being done is going through remarkable transformation. Globally services are being outsourced to companies specializing in particular areas. Outsourcing happens when certain areas of running a business establishment hinder the effective functioning of its core competencies. Hence Business Process Outsourcing or the simple BPO has grabbed a major share in the IT and IT related services.
The earlier form of BPO consisted of outsourcing only some areas of work like Payroll, Retail, Insurance, Mortgage, Banking and Finance, Healthcare, Telecommunications, Technology, Travel and Hospitality and Supply Chain in manufacturing industries. Not limited to these anymore, BPO caters to many areas of business and is expected to dominate almost all areas in business sector. Both the types of outsourcing, the back office functions like human resources payroll etc. and the front office services like customer and contact related services have a wide scope in future.
The world business market now looks at the Asian countries for its present and future BPO activities. Service being cheaper and delivery being quicker, this market is being praised by the developed countries as the modern Mecca for outsourcing business needs. Creating offshore centers provides a flexible and cost-effective structure for business establishments. The large influx of BPO into Asian countries promises a very stable future for both the parties involved.
Similar to BPO, Knowledge Process outsourcing (KPO), has evolved in the recent past and has a promising future. While BPO emphasizes on process expertise, KPO stresses business expertise. KPO requires advanced exceptional technical skills coupled with judgment to execute highly complex and customized processes.
There is a high potential for future of KPOs worldwide. The scope of KPOs is not limited to Information technology (IT) and Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) but scale the other areas like Legal Processes, Intellectual Property and Patent Related Services etc. While an outsourcing company concentrates on its core specialization and competency activities, it can outsource other activities and gain a lot of momentum in the core areas. A cost minimization this way and a total optimization in the business can happen when this is put in practice.
The Future of Indian BPO
India has been a favorite market for BPO, with Australia being the biggest market in the Asia-Pacific region. In the Asia-Pacific region, Australia has major share in the revenue generated by BPOs. However India has been the fastest growing BPO provider in the last decade. According to Gartner estimates, India is expected to reach $1.4 billion at the end of 2011 which is 23.2% more than 2010. By 2020 India is expected to touch $285 billion, according to KPMG reports. China has an enviable position when it comes to call centers and has reported a revenue of $28 million in 2010. Philippines has a bright future in BPO with an approximated revenue of $12 billion in 2010.
While world over outsourcing has caused an open market, Africa too has ventured into grabbing its share in BPO meat with Kenya launching its first call center. Mauritius is also vying at all possibilities in this area.
The Indian BPO market has an extremely promising and encouraging picture in the future. The scope of business opportunities predict endless areas for businesses to explore and thereby creating millions of jobs for the large amount of talent pool available in India. A promise of highly qualified and skilled professionals making career in BPOs is also a possibility being seen for future in India.
Streamline Your Work Process With Contact Management System
Managing client information is vital for any organization. A successful organization enables its clients in storing and managing the contact and leads data locally while ensuring security and data integrity.
Is your company facing any of the following issues?
- You have a variety of customers
- There are too many rows on the spreadsheet with many customers’ information
- Spreadsheets are often disorganized and hard to sort through
- Customer information is duplicated and you do not have time to sort out
- You have a variety of users in your company accessing the same information
- You need to run searches to find different types of data
- There are too many spreadsheets waiting to be organized with a lot of information
If you have any or all of the above concerns it is time you opted for a Contact Management System (CMS).
Contact management systems have become increasingly popular today. A contact management system help you streamline your work processes and make your company more efficient and productive. When you look at what all a CMS provides, it is easy to see why so many businesses are turning to them.
You are operating in an extremely competitive market and must get the edge over your competitors. If you want to have this edge, you need to use a good CMS to help you stay on top. Your business becomes a lot more efficient. Effective management would empower your company to manage effectively your contacts and leads. CMS is one of the best options that enables you to manage contacts really powerfully.
Here are some benefits of CMS:
- Scalable to organizations of any size
- Can be customized per the organization need
- A search option enabling strong search
- Track mailing addresses, contact numbers, Email addresses, Websites
- Keep a detailed record of all client contacts and transactions
- Supports unlimited number of contacts
- Can be accessed from anywhere with Internet connection
- Easily generate Email lists, printable address labels and printer friendly reports
- Easy to deploy and administer
- Tested to work in multi user environment
CMS allows you to be in constant touch with customers thereby ensuring a healthy relationship with your customers. Installing CMS would you to spend precious time on more important areas of work and accomplish more business. CMS is an effective tool with a host of features to manage your business easily.
Google’s New Tool to Speed Up Your Website
Ever since Google started using website loading speed in their ranking algorithms, it has become imperative for webmasters to keep a check on their site’s loading speed. While loading speed is considered as an essential of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), this also shows the impact speed has on the visitors to a site. Users prefer websites that load faster and tend to spend more time on such websites.
Google’s tool- Page Speed Online analyzes the effectiveness of web pages and gives individual suggestions that help you to make your web pages load faster. Page Speed Online tool is available at any time from any browsers. This facility allows you to access Page Speed from any location and take action immediately. Page Speed Online is a special tool from Google Labs that helps you test your website speed and make them better.
This new tool is easy to use. Google has given clear steps you need to take to speed up your website. You just need to enter your website and Google gives you these steps. Depending on the importance of what you need you may select the type of steps you need to select for your website. These steps are identified as:
- High priority: These suggestions represent the largest potential performance wins for the least development effort
- Medium priority: These suggestions may represent smaller wins or much more work to implement
- Low priority: These suggestions represent the smallest wins
After addressing the high priority, you may select medium priority and then in the end the low priority suggestions.
Page Speed scores and analysis from Google can be accessed from time to time to set the speed. Both your desktop version as well as mobile version can benefit from this. Mobile sites would have larger benefits because these are not optimized properly and therefore a drastic difference may be seen in scores. Google provides high, medium and low priority suggestions for each version of your website. High priority helps in leveraging browser caching, medium minimizes redirects and low minifies CSS.
Page Speed Online is extremely useful for mobile devices that have a limited CPU capabilities and high round trip times of mobile networks. The rapid growth of mobile usage has made it even more critical to understand and optimize mobile performance. Page Speed Online does just this by allowing you to easily analyze and optimize your site for mobile performance. To create a faster mobile experience, recommendations are tuned for the exceptional characteristics of mobile devices and have many practices that offer more than the recommendations for desktop browsers. These practices include reducing the amount of JavaScript during the page load and removing uncacheable landing page redirects that slow down mobile pages.
If you have ever asked yourself why your website was slow, you may want to use this tool to see your personal recommendations from Google to improve your site search rankings. Google uses Load Time in Page Rank Algorithm. Faster laoding is highly conducive for SEO. Even from a visitor point of view a fast loading page is far more tempting to visit and stay than the slow loading pages.
Litigation Coding
Support provided in any form to attorneys is known as litigation support. Litigation support entails providing of support to attorneys in the form of consultation and other subsistence for current or pending cases. The type of services offered typically depends on the range of services expected by the attorneys. These services can vary from research and documentation of facts or precedents before the case comes for trial or assisting in assessing the damages in a case already tried.
In the world of litigation, it does not end if a case is won or lost. There is a great deal of documentation that needs to be done either way. In the event of a loss, there is a need to find out if there are any factors the attorney may use to log an appeal or of the case is won then the support has to assess the amount of damages that are to be awarded etc.
In both the cases there is a need for document utilization service which is a part of litigation coding. Litigation coding can be considered a branch of Business Process Outsourcing as legal businesses outsource legal coding to offshore companies to ease their burden as well as cost. Litigation coding is a specialized service that enables attorneys to capture large chunks of data in a coded format. It is the process of creating a summary or keyword data from the available documents. Legal professionals find this especially useful to retrieve volumes of data coded as index or data base. Documents or records in a date base are indexed or coded to facilitate a quick retrieval.
There are two types of Litigation coding- Objective and Subjective. In subjective coding the coder seeks key information from the document, analyses it and makes a short summary of the document. This subjective information assists the user when there is too much of information in the document. In objective coding legally trained experts review every document and prepare a computerized index of basic objective data.
Legal documentation certainly is not cheap at all. Legal companies largely depend on offshore litigation coding. The offshore litigation coding companies provide a proper transfer of data by forming a database and then coding and indexing these records to the customer’s satisfaction. The offshore litigation coding companies offer accurate, quality and immediate response to the need of clients.
Litigation companies can avoid a lot of expenditure as well as stress that is caused due to this process. By outsourcing the coding work, legal companies can maximize their output by concentrating on their core activities and establishing success. Outsourcing of litigation coding cuts down a company’s expenses dramatically which fund can be sued for further augmentation of business.
Google’s New Algorithm 2010 / 2011
A search engine typically throws up results for what you type in the search. A Google algorithm would understand what you meant when you types a particular search term and will give you the exact result.
A potential outline of what the Google algorithm might look like based on research and suggestions this might be how the formula basically could look like;
Google’s Score = (Kw Usage Score * 0.3) + (Domain * 0.25) + (PR Score * 0.25) + (Inbound Link Score * 0.25) + (User Data * 0.1) + (Content Quality Score * 0.1) + (Manual Boosts) – (Automated & Manual Penalties)
Algorithm that best works and the most common factors that affect your website ranking:
Search Engine Optimisation Key Word Usage Factors
- Keyword in title tags
- Rich Header tags
- Documents rich with relevant text information
- Keyword in alt tag
- Keywords in internal links pointing to the page
- Keywords in the domain and/or URL
- The order key words appear in
Domain Strength / Speed
- Domain Strength
- Domain Speed
- Local/specific domain name
- Quality Hosting
Registration history
- When the Domain was registered
- Strength of the links pointing to the domain
- The topical neighborhood of domain based on the in bound and out bound links
- Historical use and links pattern to domain
- Inbound links and referrals from social media
- Inbound Link Score
Age & Quality of links
- Quality of the domains sending links (non paid)
- Links from Authority Websites
- Quality of pages sending links and relevance
- Anchor text of links
- Link quantity/weight metric (Page Rank or a variation)
- Subject matter of linking pages/sites
- User Data
Historical CTR to page in SERPs
- Time users spend on a page
- Search requests for URL/domain
- Historical visits/use of URL/domain by users
Content Quality Score
- Duplicate content filter
- Order of key words in content
- Content update frequency
- Highlighted and visibility of keywords
- Usability and W3C rules
Negative Penalties (for SEO purposes)
- Forums
- Article Submissions
- Blogs
- Link Exchange
- Paid Links
- FFA’s (Free for all backlinks)
What’s new about Google’s latest algorithm in 2010 / 2011?
The SEO world is abuzz with what Google is going to focus on in 2010/2011.
The result area of your website is to get success through optimization. Here are a few successful tips for 2010/2011:
- Host your website on a super fast Internet Service Provider
- Use CSS as much as possible and comply with website usability
- Write quality content, not quantity content
- Convert your a Flash website to a HTML website
- Export your Flash animations where possible – more SEO Tips
- Keep images and their size to a minimum without loosing the quality
- Test your website in various browsers and mobile phone devices
- Make your website Google Friendly
- Get free guidance from a reputable SEO E-marketing Company
If such would be the nest aspiration in Google algorithm, then there are numerous concerns that need to be addressed immediately. Will Google algorithm change the way developers create website? Now the focus seems to be on having websites that load faster with less quality content and not quantity content. The digital marketing people will be expected to be at once creative with short art work. Flash animation may soon be a thing of past with videos being hosted on your website. If such is the case then Google might favor websites and it might penalize some sites where too much of content, customer reviews, blogs, articles, links and endless images are found.
The good news is websites that are clean, focused, compatible and fast will benefit!
Many SEO professionals are complaining that this will not be fair for the SME’s (small to medium sized business) that cannot afford to be hosted on super fast hosts and do not have large teams that can restructure their websites to go faster. On the other hand SME’s probably will be in a better position to react a lot faster due to quick decision making compensating for all the other factors.
Faster websites means Google can keep up with the growth of the Internet without the need to keep buying and installing new servers.
Data Analysis and Entry
Data analysis and entry is an exceptionally important area of expertise that helps boost the performance competence and increase your productivity. Whether data analyzing or large-scale data capture, claims processing or any other business process outsourcing services, most time sensitive and data centric projects can be handled by Data Analysis and Entry by specialist units.
Analysis of data is a process of inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling target data with the goal of emphasizing useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision making. Data analysis has multiple angles and applications, covering diverse techniques under a variety of names, in different businesses, science, and social science domains.
When the domain from which the data is harvested is a science or an engineering field, the more specialized term data analysis is typically used. This is a focus on the highly specialized and highly accurate algorithmic derivations and statistical calculations that are less often observed in the typical general business environment. In these contexts data analysis packages like DAP, gretl or PSPP are often used. This divergence of culture is exhibited in the typical numerical representations used in data processing versus numerical; data processing’s measurements are typically represented by integers or by fixed point or binary-coded decimal representations of numbers whereas the majority of data analysis’ measurements are often represented by floating point representation of rational numbers.
The process of data analysis can be divided into:
- Data cleaning
- Initial data analysis
- Main data analysis
- Final data analysis
Data entry is the act of transcribing some form of data into another form, usually a computer program. Forms of data that people might transcribe include handwritten documents, information off spreadsheets from another computer program, sequences of numbers, letters and symbols that build a program, or simple data like names and addresses. Some people perform jobs that are exclusively data entry and back office services, while others, like programmers, might have to occasionally enter data.
Data entry requires focus and concentration, and some find the work exhausting and even challenging to the body. For any person who types all day, paying attention to maintaining good posture, typing in an ergonomically sound position, and taking breaks for the eyes and hands are all important.
With a number of information systems requiring a constant stream of data, data entry doesn’t necessarily have to take place in an office or workplace. Many people work out of their homes entering data, transcribing medical information, or updating websites – especially websites that offer merchandise.
Dealing With Planned Site Downtime
It is sometimes argued if a site’s visibility in Google’s search results can be influenced in a negative way if it’s unavailable when Googlebot tries to crawl it. Sometimes downtime is unavoidable: a webmaster might take a site down due to ongoing site maintenance, or legal or cultural requirements. Outages that are marked ambiguously can negatively affect a site’s reputation. While we cannot guarantee any crawling, indexing or ranking, we can devise ways to deal with planned website downtime in such a way that would generally not negatively affect your site’s visibility in the search results.
It is better to tell search engine crawlers that the downtime is temporary by returning a 503 HTTP result code (Service Unavailable) instead of returning an HTTP result code 404 (Not Found) or showing an error page with the status code 200 (OK) when a page is requested. Furthermore, it allows webmasters to provide visitors and bots with an estimated time statistics as to when the site wouls be up and running again. If known, the length of the downtime in seconds or the estimated date and time when the downtime would be complete can be specified in an optional Retry-After header, which Googlebot may use to determine when to recrawl the URL.
- Googlebot can detrmine when to recrawl the Url if the length of the downtime is known to the webmasters and theyspecify it in an optional Retry-After header
- With the above both the visitors and bots can estimate the time when the site will be back in action and accessible again
- Returning a 503 HTTP result code could also solve various problems encountered by search engines “with sites that return 200 (OK) result codes for server errors, downtime, bandwidth-overruns or for temporary placeholder pages (“Under Construction”)
- Have a separate server for actually returning the 503 HTTP result code in case of planned server downtime like hardware maintenance
- Nevertheless, 503 is not a permanent solution. If your site prolongs the return of 503 HTTP result code, your URL could be removed from Google’s index
- You may also provide a customized 503 message that explains the situation (of your site) to users and inform them when your site will be available again
header(‘HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable’);
header(‘Retry-After: Sat, 8 Oct 2011 18:27:00 GMT’);
If you set up a 503 (Service Unavailable) response, the header information might look like this when using PHP.
On similar lines of making 404 pages more useful to users, it is also a good idea to provide a customized 503 message detailing the problem to users and letting them know when the site would be available again. You may refer RFC 2616 for any further information related to HTTP result codes.
If you are using WordPress you can use “Site Maintenance” plugin which automatically creates a 503 page for you. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wet-maintenance/
Note: Upon activating this, plugin puts your site into maintenance mode.This you should simply deactivate the plugin to bring your site back online.
Back Office Services
Back office typically means all the back-end operations of a company. This term originated from times when the building of organizations had a typical front office to incorporate the sales teams and other staff that interacted with customers directly. Back office therefore meant all the manufacturing, developing and administrative activities of the company and the staff working in the back office would not interact with customers directly.
Although back office operations are usually not given a lot of consideration, they are a major contributor to any business. Back office operations are like a soul to a body. Large amount of data needs to be stored by organizations which typically eats into the core business activities. If companies outsource processing of non-core but sensitive and critical data, it reduces costs, increases profitability and delivers greater core value and operational excellence.
Back offices are a part of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). They include Information Technology departments that maintain telephones, networks, accounts, computers, human resources, operations architecture, administration and other support functions. These tasks are often supported by back-office systems: secure e-commerce software that processes company information (e.g. a database). A back-office system keeps a record of the company’s sales and purchase transactions, and update the inventory as needed. Invoices, receipts, and reports can also be produced by the back-office system.
In banking, the Back office includes a heavyweight IT processing system that handles position keeping, clearance, and settlement. In legal and para legal areas back office operations include research, report writing, deposition summaries and most common legal duties for lawyers and other legal experts. Legal operations are typically time consuming but with Back office services speed can be accomplished to centralize daily activities and information, client and case management, document preparation, research and billing. Such ease of legal operations can ensure a smooth functioning of legal firms.
In investment firms, the back office includes the administrative functions that support the trading of securities, including record keeping, trade confirmation, trade settlement, and regulatory compliance.
In sales, the back office typically plays a key role internally, providing support to the sales force for administrative duties such as legal, finance, marketing, order management, operations support, etc. as well as customer facing roles typically positioned to include functions that support customer order fulfillment and duties involved with readying customer-support call centers.
Data analysis and entry is an important area of expertise that helps boost the performance, competence, and increase the productivity of an organization. A quick support for data analyzing or large-scale data capture, claims processing or any other business outsourcing services can be accomplished by a back office operation.
Back offices may be somewhere other than the headquarters of a company. Much of the time they are in areas and countries with cheaper rent and lower labor costs. Back office functions can be outsourced to consultants and contractors in any country.
YouTube Keyword Tool and Video Optimization Techniques
Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO) employs optimization techniques through the video planning (script), production, the usual on-page SEO and off site factors, including links and the YouTube community user and channel signals for ranking on Google/YouTube.
YouTube Optimization Targets:
Below are the optimization targets for optimizing YouTube Video:
- Descriptive Keyword Rich Title
- Relevant video tagging (keyword equivalent)
- YouTube internal page linking with playlists and video responses
- Description
- User comments (sentiment?)
- User ratings
- RSS Subscribers & YouTube Friends
- 3rd party embeds
- Attention Score ( Video Content Quality Signal )
Video Optimization: Using Video Production Techniques:
- Use Flash production “best practices” relating to indexing and the settings and binding of your movie
- Insert Video transcripts possibly with sub titles and captions if Task ROI is adequate
- Insert annotations to Flash
- Place optimiz said that Google gets the thumbnail from the exact middle of the video. Though, no one at GoogleTube has verified this information as correct, however, Jim Kukral posted in “How to change your YouTube Video Thumbnail Image” that YouTube has indicated this as false.
- In production quality in optimization, the higher the quality of it the better it is perceived by users and that affects user reaction, which are signals
- The video raises “Brand” awareness and traffic to website and makes the thumbnail less of a branding/visibility issue
Video Optimization: On Page and Site Structure (Sitemaps):
Google relevancy signals make use of the on page context in which the video is embedded and the sitemap is used in determining relevancy. Video Optimization targets include:
- Video Transcript and captions on YouTube
- Annotations in Flash Player
- Thumbnail Image
- Video Sitemap
Choose Relevant Keywords
The first step in this procedure is to think regards the words users would type into the YouTube search box to find your video. Deciding pertinent keywords can help you get your video content in front of interested users.
You can use the YouTube keyword tool to get new keyword ideas. It gives you a couple of options. You can enter a few descriptive words or phrases, or you can type in a YouTube video’s ID or watch page URL. Results can be tailored to more than 40 languages and more than 230 countries.
In addition, the YouTube keyword tool lets you choose the area you wish to target. This includes male or female, ages 13 to 65+, applicable countries, and from animals to travel.
Although you can use these keywords for advertizing if you want, you don’t need to. The YouTube keyword tool can be used to optimize your video for YouTube search, too.
Users search for topics related to what entertains them, so choose your keywords accordingly:
- Names (celebrities)
- Titles (movies, shows)
- Quotes
- Actions/verbs
- Objects in the video (cars, etc.)
- Emotions (funny, hilarious)
When selecting your keywords, consider the trends in online video overall, plus trends on YouTube (hot topics, political awareness, celebrity gossip, and popular videos).
Optimize Your Video Title and Description
The next step is to make sure that your titles, video descriptions and tags actually comprise of your keywords. This will help your videos to be discovered in YouTube search results and related videos.
Your video’s title can be up to 100 characters long, which includes the spaces between words. This means your title can be up to 16 words long, depending on the number of characters in each word. If you want to include your brand name in the title, it should always go last. You brand name has less competition, so put the keywords that have more competition at the beginning of the title, which shows to help in YouTube search ranking.
Your description should be as appropriate, precise, and thorough as possible — short of presenting an entire transcript. It can be up to 5,000 characters, including spaces. This means your video’s portrayal can be up to 800 words long. Include links to other videos, playlists, or your website in your description.
Include URLs with http:// to other videos, playlists, or your website in your description. This will turn the URLs into a hyperlink.
Optimize Your Tags
Finally, your tags should be as detailed as possible within the 120-character limit. They can include your brand, city, and topics. Consider using your current tags or another user’s tags.
On-Page Video Optimization
Video should be considered as an addition to the page with other supporting or relevant information. Adding the transcript as text to a page is not very useful when transcript is part of the video as well. The tradeoff is that the transcript provides accessibility to the video content for the impaired. At the very least you may add additional content to counterbalance the exact duplication if you were including transcript to the video landing page.
Sitemaps & MRSS (Promoting viral content)
A video sitemap helps in indexing and discovery of your video by search engines. Incoming links to video page help in the same way as links to any other content; however it is not clear of their value to the video ranking. A video sitemap ensures the thumbnail for your video is of your choice because the sitemap includes a namespace for the image in addition to a description namespace to describing the video.
If you have multiple websites, you can simplify the method of forming and submitting Sitemaps by creating one or more Sitemaps that includes URLs for all your verified sites, and saving the Sitemap(s) to a single location. All sites must be verified in Webmaster Tools.
External Video Ranking Factors:
Incoming Links:
It depends on the SEO on the video landing page and engagement on your YouTube page. The 3rd party embeds may have the same value as links. The promotion of the YouTube Channel and the corresponding gains in your subscribers, views, comments, ratings, friends and stats tied to quality of the video are weighted heavier than incoming links. So it should be a case of monitor the results after adding the video and based on results build links to the page/content to meet your goal.
