Building Skills Capacity And Financial Security For Employees With Agent Prosperity
Summary
The BPO industry faces several challenges that result in significant issues. One of the most pressing problems within this sector is high turnover rates (as much as 50% among countries), leading to lower quality services and an unstable workforce prone to debtorship and financial insecurity because they’re paid less than a living wage. FTO created a specifically designed model for these employees focused primarily on stability, providing them opportunities beyond basic needs.
The Challenge
By partnering with Fair Trade Outsourcing (FTO), LumiQualis provides an alternative for the BPO industry that prioritizes employee well-being. Their mission statement goes against what most companies in the BPO space are doing by lifting each person out of wage-earning and into prosperity.
LumiQualis supports this mission by providing strategy, design, and development services for a bespoke learning & development application explicitly built to motivate and support each employee’s journey.
Discover
- Fair Trade Outsourcing wanted to deliver on its commitment to support the journey of each employee, while also providing quality service for overseas BPO providers.
- A number of issues were found in the sector among them was high turnover leading to lower quality of service.
- Pay for agents in developing countries can be below living wage while indebtedness rates are high, often contributing to a continuing cycle of financial insecurity. In addition, the increased adoption of AI and machine learning are eroding lower-skilled BPO jobs typically used as the gateway for many of those seeking to lift themselves out of disadvantaged living situations via BPO employment.
Ideate & Validate
- Our product managers set up a structured workflow to reinforce our delivery process. In Phase 1, our teams organized feature set workshops, solution sprints, prototyping, and user testing.
- After creating the prototype and testing it amongst a select sample group, we were able to obtain our MVP Definition to begin the release planning and technical architecture.
- Realizing the challenges inherent to the existing approach of BPO providers, Fair Trade Outsourcing (FTO) saw an opportunity to re-write the traditional arrangement between labor and capital within the industry. FTO created an operating model that focuses on the agent, needs, and long-term prospects as a wage earner and contributor to local communities.
Build
FTO came to LumiQualis with a vision to create a space where agents can build their skills capacity, access financial support programs, track their financial health, and level up their careers – all while providing new data and technology tools to support their mission of transforming poverty into prosperity. Together we embarked on a process to understand business objectives, organizational fit, and the desirability of this vision. A series of remote workshops established our key desired outcomes, the agent journey, and problems to be solved. Using the Google Ventures sprint framework for solutions, we established a strategy, prioritized features for the initial solution (MVP), and developed a plan for layering in additional features in the future. Combining rapid prototyping, user testing, and data analysis, we were able to validate our MVP via empirical learning
