Basic Key Services, Verticals and Horizontals in the Indian BPO

[gopu]

Who would think that the simple task of telephone operator would expand into $5 billion plus industry, two decades ago. The answer in reality is BPO. Today, in India alone a million BPO personnel do much more than answer telephone calls from US customers on credit card bills only. Indian BPO industry supports the 400 odd companies to equally diverse number of industry verticals. The array of services start from the bottom of the value chain telephonically answering customer queries, data entry on credit card transactions, and sophisticated services like data analytics, equity research and processing insurance claims. Refer to the Value chain pyramid . The end users of these services come from – banking, financial, insurance, retail, manufacturing, telecom, pharmaceuticals and healthcare, name a few. This is further expanding into high value services like scientific research and development.

Out of the existing scenario an annual global expenditure of $300 billion, India’s BPO contribution is merely $5.2 billion in 2004-05. Sixty percent of the industry comprises of voice based work with high volume business, very commercialized. Over the years, Indian BPO industry has established itself as the market leader in terms of voice related work and it is ready to take up high end, transaction-based services. Thus the future lies in integrated, end to end services proposition.

In India, the leading BPO companies like ICICI OneSource, 24/7 Customer, WNS Global Services, GE captive Genpact have scaled both in terms of people hiresand building services, defining both horizontals and verticals. Armed with global expertise Acceture, IBM Global Services, ADP and Convergys have made their huge presence in India in delivering end to end services across multiple industry verticals.

In terms of horizontal services, 60 percent of the revenues are contributed by customer support. On verticals, financial services have proved to be the lead revenue earner. Until late 2001, as the BPO industry began to evolve in India, the third party industry led the industry's stupendous growth. Between 2002 and 2004, though backed by VC startups companies were still struggling. Companies like Spectramind, Daksh, CustomerAsset, 24/7 Customer designed their delivery models among email support services. They invested on Internet related Opportunities like e commerce would lead to generation of mass volumes of mail on daily basis and dotcoms needed someone to manage their email. This set up was hit when the bubble burst in 2001, and gave birth to voice based customer support services. Along with this the recession in US after the 9/11 dropped the economy. There was urgency to de-risk their operations and cut costs. The solution came when low cost off shore locations like India and some of the South Asian countries offered the much needed voice based customer support and basic telemarketing functions.

The voice based services offered a wide opportunities in huge volumes. Scale ups in terms of headcount skyrocketed and BPOs started pulling in resources from other services industries like airlines, hotels, and even retail financial services. The boom in voice based telemarketing and handling customer queries has brought global call centre giants like Convergys to Indian Shores. Now the voice based business expands activities across the value chain from basic telemarketing queries to credit card balances to addressing software and technology related queries through tech help-desk on the inbound side.