‘India capable of offering high-end BPO services’
Our Chennai bureau(25 november)
The INDIAN business process outsourcing(BPO) sector has the capability to offer high-end services such as networking consulting and management, product development and financial research. According to Ms. Uma Rattnam Krishnan, COO, Optimus Outsourcing, the BPO subsidiary of Polaris Software, high building rates for such services could dramatically increase the revenue realization of BPO firms.
Speaking at an event of the ET Club held at Indian Institute of planning & Management here, Ms. Krishnan said high-end services require technical, medical, legal or related graduate or postgraduate education and are typically billed at $ 100-200 per hour in USA and Europe. As against this billing rates for customer interaction services usually stood at $ 10-12 per hour.
Stressing that India had the capability to tap this market, she said providing such services required a specialized workforce, mature business processes, strong culture match, good infrastructure and conductive regulatory environment. India, she said, scored well in many of these areas.
The country has 2,00,000 engineering students, 1,20,000 trained doctors and 40,000 management students who graduates every year, she said, quoting Department of Education figure. With offshore outsourcing experience of over a decade and strong Indian diaspora, India also had strong cultural match with USA and UK.
These two markets were of primary importance to the country thaks mainly to English language capability. As such, the US accounted for 63% of Indian exports in this sector. This trend, she felt, was likely to continue.
However, sounding a word of caution she said, as the sector moves up the value chain, language capabilities would cease to be a comparative advantage and BPO firms would have took look at building domain expertise.
A bank’s outsourcing decision, for example, would be based on a BPO’s expertise in banking rather than its capability to speak a language well, she added. Besides, it was possible for a country like China to develop language speaking capabilities fairly quickly, she said. |
