Mumbai BPO Sacks Slack American Client
By Rinku Shah

A Client based out of Texas, US was ‘let go’ by one of the leading international BPO’s in Mumbai, India. The BPO was dialing for a US based process dealing in Satellite Television.

The BPO faced losses as this client never released their payments on time for the sales made. While seeing the report it was noticed that 60% of the sales led to cancellation by the clients. As per the agreement, the call centre was paid on every installed sale. But reports sent by the client in USA had an alarming high cancellation rate.

Team Leaders and Managers in Mumbai were questioned by the higher management as to why the sales were getting cancelled.  One of the main reasons floated was that the customer had changed the mind. It was very difficult to figure out that why customers were changing their mind or were not interested. The sales which were sent to the client were all quality approved where the customer in USA had agreed to the terms and conditions.

Everyone in India was scratching their head as they were losing lots of sales, and in turn revenue. After a few days of analysis, it was decided that three senior agents would call on cancelled sales and would find out the reasons for rejections.

The reasons were really surprising.  It turned out that the installers in USA never turned up for the satellite dish set-up,  or they never turned up on the scheduled  date and time which made customers sign up  with other provider or finally rejecting the offer. To add insult to injury, few customers in USA thought that the agents from India who called them up were frauds as they took the credit card details from them but nobody bothered to turn up after that call.

Management in India became very upset and annoyed with this kind of unprofessional behavior shown by this vendor (client) who provided the BPO with this process. The client was also stalling payments on the installed sales.

Soon, the number of agents was reduced on that process in the month of February this year.  After 6 months of dialing, the process has been stalled temporarily. Now the centre is not dealing with the client anymore but waiting for the pending payments.
 
According to office goss, the reason for this fiasco was that the client did not have enough manpower to handle the installations in USA.  Naturally, this led to the cancellations of sales.  This American client continues to do businesses with other BPO’s across India.

Now we know it is not only the clients who always pull processes from the centers,  but sometimes even BPO’s  can take an action by refusing to do business with such unprofessional clients.