Data Entry Centre: What’s Voice got to do with it?

Last December I reported about Lifewood , a fascinating BPO I visited in China. Lifewood, now part of Vanceinfo â the largest IT and BPO vendor in China â is a data entry BPO that specialized in transcribing handwritten documents in more than 25 languages. The surprising element in how Lifewood provides services to its growing clientele base is that none of the Lifewood operators is capable of reading any of the languages they transcribe â and yet some operators key 12,000 strokes in one hour with 98% accuracy!

I visited Lifewood again last month. This time I visited their operations in Dongguan which is in the Guangdong province. This is their biggest centre with about 700 operators. As part of the visit I was introduced to Lifewoodâs growth strategy and asset utilization. Growth has become a critical issue for Lifewood as this BPO is trying to position itself in the broader sense of business process services and not just the transcribing services it has been providing since 2004. A recent merger with a call centre has provoked some new ideas and the conclusion that Lifewood has an opportunity to transform the firm. I was sceptical: data entry merges with voice? Whatâs voice got to do with it ?

âJust think about the following challenges in data entry business,â said Ronald, Lifewood founder and CEO. âFirst, talent management is always a challenge. We select data entry operators according to a set of criteria that is pretty much about their interest and ability to type in a foreign language, but at the selection point we cannot assess their ability to type fast and with accuracy. This we leave to our training methodology to improve. Over time, two things happen with our operators: one, operators are looking to do other things or seek a career path; and two, not all the operators can type fast or at high accuracy. We end up with some individuals that we have invested in but we cannot really benefit from their typing abilitiesâ.

So I am still puzzled: whatâs voice got to do with data entry? Surely, itâs a different skill and completely different line of operation. âNot really,â says Ronald. Think what skills inbound and outbound call centres require and then think about how we can mix these two operationsâ. Lifewoodâs recruitment strategy is to target high school graduates who only speak Chinese, therefore their inbound and outbound call centre operators are not required to know other languages. Thatâs the first synergy I see between data entry and voice. Clearly, for operators who canât type fast or with high accuracy, there will be an option to switch to voice within Lifewood. So, Lifewood wonât need to âfire and hireâ as a response to momentarily high attrition but can stick with its current annual recruitment process from Chinese high schools in rural China.

The second advantage we gain from the merger between voice and data entry is the ability to use the advanced typing skills in data entry for voice activities. Nearly any contact management activity requires data entry, whether it is customer information, updates to customersâ files, and so on. We have trained our data entry operators to perfect their data entry skills in foreign languages, so improving their data entry skills in Mandarin or Cantonese wonât be a challengeâ.

I am starting to see the operational synergies between voice and data entry but I still wonder whether there are any strategic advantages from this merger. It strikes me that most voice and data entry centres donât expand horizontally by adding other BPO specialities but rather through an increase in scale and speciality. The threat to this approach is what happens if either voice or data entry suffers from a sudden decline or is faced with a disruptive innovation â what do you do then?

A recent study by Data Dimensions provides the answer: More firms rush to add multiple communication channels to service their customers. The striking news here is that in a yearâs time 46% of firms will be using web chat as a means of communication with their customer in their contact centres. Now think again: merger between voice and data does not look so strategically âoddâ any more.

âMay you live in interesting times,â goes the old Chinese proverb. These are interesting times for the contact centre sector. And Lifewood, as a Chinese BPO in the data entry and voice business, is making these times even more interesting with its long-term strategy to merge data entry and voice. Its strategy is indeed unique and ahead of many BPOs with a similar line of speciality. But the real challenge still lies ahead. Namely, the proper implementation of this strategy: can both operational and strategic synergies be gained from this long-term vision?