Business Processing Outsourcing
(BPO) Industry in India
is up against yet another challenge in 2012 – The Euro Crisis. Though
challenges are not new to this industry, the current scenario assumes
significance in the wake of the global economy facing the Euro crisis much
before the scars of 2008 US
recession faded out.
Backed by factors like cost
advantage due to the abundant availability of skilled manpower, infrastructure
and fiscal incentives offered by the State, BPO industry has had a decent run
till 2008 with ‘attrition’ being the only major thorn in the flesh.
Analysts had in the past and even
now advise BPOs to move to lower-cost delivery centres as a means to improve
their profitability but the industry has its own concerns for the lack of
‘Quality’ workforce in Tier-II cities.
As a result, BPOs are increasingly
focusing on reducing costs within the existing framework which, calls for
diversity in the way the companies are looking at business.
A majority of the BPOs who till
date were primarily engaged in serving multi-million dollar deals with high
transactional and operational costs will now be looking at smaller and shorter
contracts, profits for which, can be booked within 6-12 month period.
The above strategy of booking
profits in the short-term will give the BPOs the flexibility to scale up in those
parts of their business where growth is occurring and to scale back their
operational count in areas where levels of business and transactions are
declining.
The advent of advanced
technologies like “BPaaS” (Business Processing As A Service) on “Cloud” (The
practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store,
manage, and process data, rather than a local server) also helps BPOs to serve
the clients better without much investment on infrastructure.
Not only will “BPaaS” be effective
in serving small time clients, it will also be helpful in enhancing the already
existing core systems and processes and applying the same to those processes
where there was minimal process and technology in the past.
In future, BPOs will look at BPaaS
not only to service the smaller clientele as above, but also to run their
social media campaigns for sales & customer service process optimization.
Be it customer engagement or
finding new business, social media through multi-channel outbound notifications
can proactively identify issues and resolve them. This cost effective medium
will also be used by the BPOs to attract more and more customers to their list.
There is no denial of the fact
that in this period of global recession customers are definitely looking for
more at lower budgets. BPOs that identify problem areas of clients, provide
specialized services, verticalize, optimize their infrastructure and resources
through consolidation and are inclined towards new technologies like
virtualization/cloud will survive the current tide.
The future belongs to those BPOs
which will cautiously embed cloud sourcing into their traditional outsourcing
model.
