The Next Level of Indian BPO

Remember the Chetan Bhagat's One Night @ The Call Centre ? Do you think that Indian BPOs still work the same way - Taking calls and that's all?? Millions of so called easy jobs , mostly youth , good number of women employees, coffee, video games, chats, nights shifts - there is more to it.

There is a paradigm shift happening in this industry. In fact the global BPO industry is striving hard to strike through the growing manpower needs emerging out of new opportunities here. In India, there is a lot happening. The industry is no more limited to handling voice calls; the protectionists sentiments and economic conditions in western world are playing their roles; slew of mergers and acquisitions carving out cultural coherence; the 'cloud' buzz is finally taking over the BPO landscape as well. 

Voice to Non-voice

Yes , the later one is gaining momentum and growing faster than the voice-based sector. Its sheer common sense. Just look around on the web, better say social web. We now have customer services handled through twitter feeds; there is so much being spoken about and communicated to the firms through non-voice medium. The logic is simple, it costs me to make a call while the costs on web communication just go unnoticed, the minimal(commoditized?) it is. Then there are niche areas from healthcare to procurement to engineering services to advanced analytics - the part of KPO stream which actually never required voice-based support. And believe me, none of them are low-end works nor what we call as client's non-core part of the business. We are getting it less on the traditional cost arbitrage advantage and more on the value add and expertise plus time zone advantage our part of the world is able to provide - call it Intellectual Arbitrage. You can see several new gen indian startups catering to each of these niche non-voice based outsourced services. PharmARC Analytics caters to pharmaceutical & healthcare sectors; AutoQuill in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) domain; Elixer Web Solutions and Datamatics in Recruitment Process Outsourcing.

BPO Generations

• First - More of body-shopping , providing manpower for client's tasks.
• Second - is the BPO we know, took client's tasks(mainly contact centre ones) to offshore cheaper locations.
• Third - Transaction processing for the client. The pricing model changed from input based to transaction based. Eg: Xansa used to handle metered billing exceptions for U.K based utility company ThamesWater.
• Fourth - The current wave, involves analyzing trends across the transactions and make/suggest process changes for business benefits. The transition is happening from non-core transactions into more core ones, thus partnering with the client for their business strategies. The job is no more easy. And we have CA's , MBA's , statistician joining in for understanding and modeling these trends. There is no doubt that BPO is a people-intensive business but the model has evolved out of growing linearly by increasing the headcounts to providing real knowledge and skill based solutions.
• Fifth - coming up , involves leveraging the social media & cloud computing as service differentiators with focus on location based analytics and specific catering to SME's scaling their operations.

So if you are getting into just any job in BPO industry , make sure of the above changing trends (yes , the line is getting blur between the core IT jobs and BPO/KPO jobs) and select your area of interests accordingly and work accordingly to gain the relevant expertise. Its a huge market; as per NASSCOM , the Indian IT-BPO revenues is projected to touch US$ 225 billion by 2020. The BPO industry alone is expected to touch US$ 14.1 billion in 2010-11 , still a double digit growth of 14 percent !