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Ms Shashi Ravichandran, Head, Corporate Affairs, SCOPE International Pvt Ltd, addresses the students of MOP Vaishnav College for Women, as part of the BL Club lecture series in Chennai on Tuesday.

Our Bureau

Chennai, Nov. 27 The BPO business goes beyond the simple voice-based service that it is often associated with. According to Ms Shashi Ravichandran, Head, Corporate Affairs, SCOPE International Pvt Ltd, BPOs would involve any process that is outsourced in order to achieve better efficiency in terms of the cost and productivity gains achieved by outsourcing these services.

SCOPE is a wholly-owned shared services firm of Standard Chartered group. The company has different business verticals such as HR-shared services, an IT services centre, a software development hub, global market operations, a finance shared services vertical and a contact service for the UAE.

Ms Ravichandran was addressing students of the MOP Vaishnav College for Women in the city as part of the BL Club lecture series.

Outsourcing some processes within a company allows it to focus on its core competency, Ms Ravichandran said. For example, as the captive BPO unit of Standard Chartered Bank, SCOPE undertakes all the back-office operations of the group. The six offices in Chennai handle transactions of 12.1 million customers and 60,000 employees of the group spread across 50 countries.

She said voice-based services are an often-used misnomer for the BPO business. Late night cab rides, American timings and long hours were the general associations one made about jobs with BPOs. However, this need not be the fact.

For instance, employees at SCOPE worked regular hours and enjoyed five-day weeks. Though it was a 24X7 operation, they were able to service queries from their overseas offices by maturing the processes concerned, such that they could handle the query when it arrived, Ms Ravichandran pointed out.

She pointed out that SCOPE offered career advancement opportunities to those interested in continuing to learn while they earned. With 6,000 employees, SCOPE represented 9 per cent of the workforce at the Standard Chartered group. The company recruited nearly 250-300 people each month, about 17 per cent of whom were fresh graduates.

In an effort to empower women to work while they manage home, the company had introduced flexi-timings, work-from-home options, summer camps for children at the office, and extended maternity and childcare opportunities, she said.

Besides students of the Commerce department, the Principal, Dr K. Nirmala Prasad, was also present at the address.

More Stories on : Outsourcing | Tamil Nadu

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