Evolution of Key Services and Verticals

[gopu]

We can categorize the present BPO services mainly into 6 areas:
Customer Care
Finance
Payment Services
Administration
Human Resources
Content Development
Among the above customer care is the largest segment and accounts for close to 40% of the industry's revenue. Financial services, insurance, airlines, retail, manufacturing, telecom, utilities, pharmaceuticals and healthcare industries out-source customer care to India. Within customer care, voice based work accounts for over 60percent.

The earliest industry to offshore back office work to India was the airline industry, British Airways set up a 30 people shop called World Network Services in Mumbai for non voice customer support services - processing ticketing, and they termed the work as “remote services”. As the back office process for airline established, WNS (World Network Services) a subsidiary of BA was brought out in 2002. In 1997, General Electri(GE) set up its own captive in Gurgaon called General Electric International Services (Gecis). American Express launched the Amex Service centre at Gurgaon in early 2000s. In the horizontal services, customer support and services clearly ranked and on the vertical front, financial services sector remains the industry's largest revenue earner.

The customer care for financial services included data entry, billing and payment services, accounting, investment research support, financial data mining, insurance claims processing and actuarial support. The billing rates varied from $5 to $30 per hour.

Few VC backed startups - Spectamind, Daksh, CustomerAssetl, 24/7 Customer designed their delivery models around email support services, which seems promising at the time of Internet boom. E commerce would lead to the generation of massive volumes of daily emails and docoms needed someone to manage their mail. Once the dotcom burst, this eCRM met a premature demise. Followed by the 9/11 and a long term recession in the US economy, companies in US were forced to cost cut and de-risk operations led to low-cost Offshore operations. Locations like India, offered an attractive solution to both the problems and the services like voice based customer support and basic telemarking functions were in great demand. The early big offshore deals included Sprint-Daksh, Spectamind-Amex o the third party side and Dell on the captive side. The key to remaining the world's premier destination for back office services lies in Indian BPO player quickly broadening and deepening their offerings from piecemeal services to end-to-end solutions.