Training in technical language must for KPO services

MUMBAI: Move over BPO, knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) is the latest buzzword these days. Here, fluency in communication, especially written communication, becomes imperative as employees are essentially using judgement to interpret data in areas like research; or case law in the field of legal outsourcing. “With no clear definition of right or wrong, the manner in which a sentence is constructed, the nature of language used may play a critical role in overall perceptions of quality of service delivered,” he says. Written communication skills have thus become an integral part of daily work, as well as a necessary ingredient to working in geographically-dispersed teams. In the legal arena, for instance, almost half the work in US litigation is written advocacy, says Abhay ‘Rocky’ Dhir, president of Atlas Legal Research, a US-based legal process outsourcing (LPO) firm with offices in Chennai and Bangalore. “And often, what we write will appear verbatim in front of a US judge. In KPO, knowledge is not something you verbalise. Everything is being passed in a written format,” he adds. Same is the case for firms like Thomson West, a global publishing house with a pilot office in India that prepares summaries of unpublished US court decisions. In high-end medical services, offshoring areas of growth include diagnostic services, telemedicine, telepathology and testing services like genetic profiling, oncology tests, HIV and allergy tests. “Training is believed to a key enabler of process accuracy, for which new employees are typically trained for a period of nine months in areas such as listening skills, medical language and other basic transcription skills,” notes a PwC study on the KPO industry. E-learning and healthcare knowledge management are currently untapped avenues, which will focus more on writing skills. Training in technical language is considered an essential part of KPO services, since the industry recruits both professionally-trained and mainstream graduates who, often under the guidance of US-trained experts, undertake specialised high-end work.
CANDICE ZACHARIAHS & ARNAV PANDYA
The Economic Times