The Indian economy is on the upswing and mostly consumer-led. With companies across sectors like retail, real estate, telecom and BFSI going after the same customer, there is one factor which could help them beat competition — better and faster customer service. Here’s where BPOs come in.

This need has put the local Indian BPO industry on the fast track. According to Nasscom data, the domestic BPO market was estimated at Rs 6,600 crore in 2006 and is expected to grow to Rs 30,000 crore in 2011. The segment is growing at about 40% CAGR.

Says Firstsource Domestic Business head Sanjeev Sinha, “We see a lot of leading Indian brands wanting to differentiate themselves based on customer service – both back-office and front end services. They are now willing to invest in quality customer care and are eager to adopt global best practises. We expect companies to partner with BPO players to ensure scalability and consistent service delivery.”

Stating that the potential of domestic BPO work continues to attract new players to partake in the economic growth and fulfill the huge demand, HTMT Global Solutions (HGSL) National Operations & International Business Development senior vice-president BN Narasimha Murthy adds, that “some of the key verticals that are experiencing huge growth include telecom, BFSI, retail, airlines & travel.”

The in-demand backoffice services include sales of credit cards, managing service centres and call centres and processing payrolls. Some of the companies who have outsourced work locally include Bharti Airtel, HP, Dish TV, Barclays and State Bank of India.

This segment is also where the mid-sized firms like HTMT, Firstsource and Infovision are outracing their more well-known peers like Wipro BPO. They already account for a majority of the domestic BPO revenues though some largely-export-oriented players have now started to look at the Indian market to ward off the rupee impact.

This group of companies also employ staff of between 3,000 and 9,000 people each focused on domestic clients. This figure is expected to grow rapidly in next two-three years.

Source: www.cxotoday.com

New Horizons, the IT training company, has announced that it will offshore global content development to the Indian joint venture. New Horizons India (NH India) will create content for internal training material that will be used in sixty countries across the globe. It will also offer the same services to both Indian and global customers who require customized content. This marks New Horizons’ foray into the content development space that until now, it had outsourced to vendors in the US.

Speaking on the subject Ajay Sharma, President and CEO of New Horizons India said, “We believe that the market for content outsourcing is a US $ 1 billion opportunity worldwide, and we are confident that New Horizons India will be able to leverage their expertise in technical training as well as the strong Indian intellectual resource pool to capture a significant share of this market. In fact we expect to undertake exports of US $ 1 million within this financial year.”

To execute the business, New Horizons India is likely to invest an initial US $ 10 million over the next 3 years. New Horizons will set up a 13,000 sq ft. state of the art development centre with 200 content writers in the first phase. By the end of 2009, New Horizons India will increase this headcount to 1000, taking its overall staff strength to over 3000 in India.

With innovation driving global technology change more rapidly than ever before and businesses IT adoption cycle down to 3 years from 5 a decade ago, the need for content in the IT space alone is overwhelming. It ranges from user manuals to internal technical guides, process manuals etc. Added to this is the opportunity in the internal communications arena that is also fast becoming a specialist field.

“And this is just the beginning of the consolidation possibility in the hitherto fragmented arena of content development. Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) will be the key growth driver in the global outsourcing opportunity, and India is perfectly suited to leverage this trend to accelerate its positioning as the global knowledge hub,” added Sharma.

The content development center, based in Noida will provide content for over 500 titles, spanning both IT and non-IT segments. The former includes instructor led proprietary course material, technical documentation, user manuals and e-learning material while the latter includes content for K12 segment text books and career development programs in the non-IT space as well as customized content for internal customers of fortune 500 companies. To begin with, the titles will be developed in English, but going forward NH India plans to add multilingual capabilities too.

The KPO industry in India is now big business and India is no longer just a hub for cost-effective, english-speaking ‘bodies’. It is emerging as a goldmine for high-level skills, too. KPO outfits are helping global firms’ source high-skilled work out of India in a cost-effective and efficient manner. According to industry estimates KPOs in India will grow to US $12 billion by 2010 from US $0.72 billion in 2003. There will be over 2.5 lakh KPO professionals by 2010 compared to the current figure of 25,000 (source: Evalueserve).

Source:www.business-standard.com

Spanco Telesystems and Solutions is poised to invest over Rs 400 crore in its Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) operations, over two years.

The company plans to set up facilities across cities including Chennai, Jaipur, Mysore, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Noida.

The company today announced its foray into the domestic BPO market. Spanco has set up two flagship customer support centres, one each in Gurgaon and Mumbai, to provide back office and contact centre services to domestic clients.

The company is looking to service industries such as financial services, insurance, telecom, entertainment, retail and hospitality in India.

Spanco’s new centres will be spread over 2 lakh square feet with a capacity of 2,200 seats. The company aims to increase the capacity to 15,000 seats with over 25,000 employees by financial year 2009.

In its first phase of the expansion, Spanco’s BPO arm is expected to employ around 5,000 employees. The company currently employs over 3,000 people in its BPO.

Commenting on Spanco’s entry into the domestic BPO space, Sandeep Soni, executive director and chief executive officer, Spanco BPO, said, “We believe this is the best time to enter the domestic BPO market, given the huge emerging opportunities within the country. Given Spanco’s erstwhile experience in the domestic space and proven technology competency, we will seek to differentiate ourselves by providing complete BPO and end-to-end strategic outsourcing solutions for organisations in India.”

Spanco BPO has set up call centres for many government enterprises including BSNL and MTNL.

Key services at the BPO include outbound and inbound sales, customer service and collections as well as back-office functions such as e-mail response.

Spanco also has an international call centre with a presence in India, the UK and West Asia.

Source: indiapost.com

Long before outsourcing became a byword of trade, John Bissell of Hartford discovered Indian artisans and trained them to work for exports. Educated at the Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, and at Yale, his love for India began as a child, listening to tales his father told of his time in India during World War II. After college, John Bissell worked at Macy’s, and began to like the look and feel of hand-woven fabrics.

Those two interests merged in 1958, when he was given a two-year grant from the Ford Foundation to instruct Indian villagers in making goods for export. Once his grant expired, John Bissell decided to stay back. He founded a business, Fabindia Ltd., that bought locally produced items like durries, rugs and exported them.

In 1958, well before American companies were sourcing from India, John Bissell left his position as a buyer for Macy’s New York to work as a consultant for the Ford Foundation in order to develop India’s export potential in its emerging textile industry. What Bissell discovered was a village-based industry with a profusion of skills hidden from the world.

”The greatest thing that happened to our business was the move in Europe and America a few years back to the natural look — natural textures, natural fibers — and away from things like polyester and nylon,” he said in a 1977 interview. Determined to showcase Indian handloom textiles while providing equitable employment to traditional artisans, Bissell established Fabindia in 1960 in order to fuse the best aspects of East/West collaboration.

Fifteen years later the first Fabindia retail store was opened in Greater Kailash, New Delhi with a range of upholstery fabrics, durries and home linens. By the early eighties, they started producing garments made from hand woven and hand block printed fabrics.

Over the years the focus of Fabindia’s marketing shifted from exports to the local Indian retail market. What started as an export house has today become a successful retail business presenting Indian textiles in a variety of natural fabrics, and home products including furniture, lights and lamps, stationery, home accessories, pottery and cutlery. Extending this partnership to the farmers in rural areas, Fabindia launched its organic food products range in 2004.

Fabindia Sana, the company’s authentic body care products range has also been launched at all Fabindia outlets. Fabindia sources its products from over 15000 craft persons and artisans across India. They blend indigenous craft techniques with contemporary designs to bring aesthetic and affordable products to today’s consumers.

They provide customers with hand crafted products which help support and encourage good craftsmanship. Fabindia works closely with artisans by providing various inputs including design, quality control, access to raw materials and production coordination.

The vision continues to be to maximize the hand made element in products, whether it is textiles, block printing, embroidery or home products. John Bissell married Bimla Nanda, who served as social secretary for Chester A.

Bowles and John Kenneth Galbraith when they were United States Ambassadors to India. His business flourished despite his widely known family connection to Richard M. Bissell Jr., the legendary Central Intelligence Agency operative who was his uncle. Besides his wife, he is survived by a son, William, who now runs Fabindia, and a daughter, Monsoon.

Source: business.timesonline.com
A look into the new world of web-based services opening up for the cash-rich but time-poor

“The most unusual request?” ponders Anya Portnik, the chief executive of iwantaPA.com , a start-up based in London’s upmarket Park Lane. “That would be the investment banker that employs us to read a story to his daughter every evening, for an hour, in French.”

Welcome to the world of “person-to-person outsourcing”, where the cash-rich time-poor use the web to outsource those irksome personal tasks – booking holidays, tracking down prospective life partners, educating children – that threaten to upset their precarious work-life balances.

According to Evalueserve, an India-based research firm, the market for outsourced personal services, where people hire remote “Bangalore butlers” and “time finders”, was worth more than $250 million this year. It is expected to hit more than $2 billion by 2015.

“It probably saves me a couple of hours a week. More, recently, in the run-up to Christmas,” says Caroline de Courreges, an American expat who works 11-hour days for a fund of hedge funds in Mayfair and outsources her personal administration to AskSunday. com, an outfit that looks after the tiresome jobs that plague high-flyers as much as mere mortals.

“I use it via my BlackBerry for making restaurant reservations and booking flights mostly,” she says. “The little things that everybody could do, but take up the ten minutes here, ten minutes there that I just don’t have.”

AskSunday, which channels work to sites in India and the Philippines, charges $29 (£14.60) a month for its basic package. That buys access to a “24/7 personal assistant”, accessible on the phone or via the web for up to 30 tasks a month.

Avi Samudrala, the former investment banker turned private equity staffer who co-founded the company, says that there is no typical customer. “I use the laptop analogy,” he says. “What a schoolkid, a student and a Wall Street analyst are going to use it for are very different.” But he does split up the broad classes into which AskSunday’s thousands of customers fall.

Average urbanite tasks include tracking down consumer goods – from “the hottest Manolos to a shirt for tomorrow’s board meeting”. For those too busy to engage in retail therapy, Sunday will track down the best prices and place an item on hold. Call bridging – where the site calls a doctor, gas company or telephone provider and stays on hold until the right person is on the other end – is pitched at the same set.

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