Even as the broader Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry in India still discusses voice versus non-voice BPO models, the large corporations who have preferred to make and take their calls out of India, are quietly bringing small but important changes to keep pace with the times.
“I don’t want a scripted speech from my employees. I want them to help the customers by empathizing them with their problems,” said Duncan Ingram, Managing Director, Customer Service, BT, speaking at the Nasscom’s India ITeS-BPO Strategy Summit — 2006, held in Bangalore, India. The statement from the BT executive was not a comment in isolation. The U.K.-based telecom giant, which has outsourced large call center operations to Indian companies, including Indian IT biggie, HCL, has actually realized the need to make the offshore call centers more aligned to the business needs than just measure them purely by metrics and Service-level Agreements (SLA). Ingram even urged the call center service providers to focus on utility-type pricing so as to “share the risks and rewards” along with changes in their customers’ business. It is a paradigm shift, considering that a lot of industry-specific processes are still priced on a time-and-material basis.
Yes, the service providers are meeting the quality standards, SLAs and standards, agreed upon by most speakers in a discussion on next generation BPOs. But that, they said, is the problem — very often, the service providers are doing what they are asked to, albeit very efficiently. It is now time to take some initiative and offer more than what they are asked to. “ BPOs must invest heavily on technology, ‘assetization’, research and should have a model which revolves around the risk-sharing and reward-sharing aspect,” said Pavan Vaish, COO, IBM Daksh Business Process Services.
The customers have to change, too. And some of them are already changing. Many companies like BT and Captial One have asked their employees to maintain their identity and not to use an “alias” name and also to speak in an neutral accent rather than the U.K. or U.S. accent.
Overall, the speakers agreed that they were on the threshold of the next stage of the industry’s evolution. “Getting business for an Indian service provider has become quite an easy task for an Indian BPO, but the real challenge is on how maintain that business,” said Vaish.
While numbers are growing, the outsourcing wave has still remained limited to a few companies. “Companies which have realized outsourcing are outsourcing and will continue to grow,” said Anders Maehre, Senior Analyst, Financial Services and Outsourcing Services, Datamonitor. “While that will take care of the numbers to a large extent for some time, to sustain the growth, the real need is to educate the companies who are not outsourcing about the benefits of outsourcing. They are apprehensive about outsourcing as they fear it may affect their customers’ satisfaction level,” he added.
