Bookmark this at Del.icio.usOutsourcing Trend: The Changing Face of Indian BPOs
Source: www.indiaabroad.com
The Business Process Outsourcing Business in India is changing. It is no longer about answering phones, but has turned into more of automotive designing, insurance claim processes, mortgage loans, and so on and so forth.
A few years ago, 20-year old Sandhya S. with her chronic tonsillitis, could not even think of trying for a job in a BPO. She would have been unable to cope with the task of attending calls for 8-hours at a stretch.
Today, lack of employment opportunities is not an issue, as Sandhya is inundated with job offers, despite her throat ailment. No, she hasn’t found a magic cure; it is just Indian BPOs have begun to do business in very different ways, these days. The BPO scenario is changing in India, and how. When the BPO boom took off, in 1999 voice-related services contributed to 85% of the Indian BPO industry’s share of business. Seven years down the line, voice accounts for just 35%. Sunil Mehta, Vice President, NASSCOM, the industry body for Indian IT and BPO companies, agrees: “The services have moved from voice to non-voice like automotive design, insurance claim processes, mortgage loans and so on.”
In the 1990s, the starting point of BPOs, Indian BPOs offered many young graduates their first job. Fresh-out-of-college employees (called agents) were expected to cold call customers in US or Europe and chase down credit card defaulters for payments. Or, they were required to troubleshoot calls on issues ranging from PCs to Internet, travel services, and more.
“The primary promise of BPOs was to offer acceptable services at lower costs,” says Gopal Kuchibhotla, Principal Consultant, Business Solutions, PriceWaterhouseCoopers. But, this low-cost advantage did not hang around for long. As, more and more, Indian BPOs emerged, they started pitching in the same geographies (US, UK, Australia) on the same ‘lower price’ promise, with the result, the low-cost proposition began to degenerate into a zero-sum game.
Myths and Realities of Offshore outsourcing
Offshore outsourcing:
Outsourcing refers to the hiring of an external organization (subcontractor) to perform most or all the business functions at a lesser cost in a foreign country other than the one where the product will be sold or consumed, whereas offshoring is whereby the functions are performed by a foreign division or subsidiary of the parent company at a cheaper cost. Therefore offshore outsourcing refers to outsourcing to firms in foreign countries, with the aim of taking advantage of cheap labor found there. In the past several years, outsourcing contracts have increasingly been given to firms in developing countries e.g. India and China. For offshore outsourcing to be economically viable, the savings realized must exceed the increased costs of management and risks associated with offshore outsourcing.
Myths and Realities
There are several myths and realities associated with offshore outsourcing. The following are some of the most common ones;
Myth: A job outsourced is as good as a job lost.
Paypal for Indian remit2india.com
Set up a PayPal account (available to residents of India) and use PayPal’s merchant tools to accept credit cards and sell online. The downside is that you can’t directly withdraw PayPal funds to a bank in India (though you can request a check). But you can transfer US dollars in a PayPal account to Remit2India (www.remit2india.com), a service of the Times of India. They convert it into Indian Rupees and deliver it to your designated recipient. Costs are the PayPal recipient fee of 2.95% plus 3% to 5% fees for Remit2India. See details in their FAQ.
http://www.timesofmoney.com/remittance/jsp/toi_faq.jsp?uiId=TOI&partnerId=TOML&faq=paypal
Pages: 1 2
0 Comments