Calling in the COPC^SM act
The Times Of India, September 27, 2002

Seems like contact centers are coming of age with certification, documents processes and performance monitoring, et al.

In india, Spectramind (now part of Wipro), 24/7 Customer, TransWorks, Talisma and ICICI OneSource (earlier CustomerAsset) a COPC^SM certified.

COPC^SM, which stands for Customer Operations Performance Centre, is the world’s leading authority on customer contact centre operations. For more than five years, COPC^SM has been assiting clients around the world in developing and executing high return-on-investment operational improvement strategies for their contact centres.

Says Clifford Moore, flounder of the COPC^SM standard which is ranking up an unusual amount of interest in the contact centre space, “there is tremendous amount of interest in getting the call centre processes documented. More than 8-10 call centre companies in India including Daksh, HCL Infinet and Vcustomer are speeding up their certification processes.”

COPC^SM is used around the world to improve customer service. It takes about a year or so to get the entire certification process through.

“Companies in Asia Pacific, Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan, Latin America and now India are all identifying high return on investment (Rol) opportunities and the methods that are required to improve operational and financial areas,” Moore added.

According to him, India is positioning itself on the world map. “Hospitalitiy firms like hotels, travel agents and car rental companies  are increasingly looking at India for outsourcing,” he added. The adoption rate for COPC^SM is much faster in India than countries. According to Umesh Anand of QAI, which is  implementing the COPC^SM certification process in India, “One issue that is a problem here in the call centre space is the lack of a middle management. We are trying to work out a training programme with certain state governments where we will try to bridge this gap.”

Interestingly, this certification will not apply to that call centre community alone. “we are looking at developing another standard for the buyers, that is cliens in the US and other countries who outsource work to other countries. A pilot standard should be out soon. This will fit in with the customer’s standards and in the long run will inject more discipline into the buyer’s processes too,” Moore pointed out.

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