Culture building

Firstsource trains and incentivizes employees at every level to use a simple yet powerful set of process excellence tools. Across the BPO industry as a whole, such tools are typically reserved for project managers participating in Six Sigma projects. However, at Firstsource they are actively rolled down to the base of the pyramid.

Internal contests and award schemes promote and incentivize the use of process excellence techniques and tools, helping to ensure that operatives naturally incorporate these into their daily work. The reporting and analysis of quality issues become second nature to all employees, and reports are designed to be portable, for sharing with clients.

Firstsource places great emphasis on employee development, with in-house Yellow, Green and Black Belt training and certification. An in-house university program grooms high potential supervisors into functional Black Belts, while more than 30 percent of operations leadership is Green Belt certified. In keeping with the focus on practical execution rather than dry theory, all candidates for Green Belt training must already have an identified and signed-off project.

Measurable results

Firstsource has proven the benefits of its process excellence framework in dozens of customer engagements around the world. Working for a major UK financial services company, Firstsource deployed its process excellence team to analyze and optimize existing processes, with the aim of improving the cross-selling ratio and boosting overall sales. More stringent customer screening processes introduced to meet new regulatory guidelines had pushed up average call times, resulting in a 40 percent decline in sales volumes. By introducing more detailed customer profiling and enhanced sales training allied to a new rewards and recognition program, Firstsource successfully doubled the sales of insurance products. In addition, Firstsource exceeded client benchmarks for customer conversion rates by around 23 percent, and produced annualized savings of £1.56 million.

By improving the customer conversion rates at this FTSE 100 bank from 64 percent to 86 percent, Firstsource won the “Best Six Sigma Project in Services and Transaction” category at the prestigious IQPC awards. Pareto charts and box plots were introduced to identify the priority areas for attention, and an effective action plan was rolled out to improve performance.

Also in the UK, Firstsource applied its process excellence framework to embed the Six Sigma approach throughout a new greenfield call center. All customer service processes were mapped from day one, dissected, calibrated and optimized. For the largest US telecom company, Firstsource optimized processes to cut the average completion time for all order types from more than 56 minutes to less than 40 minutes, a productivity improvement of 28 percent.

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