Call centers and business process outsourcing providers are among industry sectors in India that are likely to cut more than 25% of their staffing

Call centers and business process outsourcing providers are among industry sectors in India that are likely to cut more than 25% of their staffing soon, according to a report by a trade body.

The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) said on Wednesday that companies in those sectors were faced with shrinking margins.

The prediction comes as the Diwali festival in India draws to a close. Companies postponed layoffs until the festival was over on humanitarian grounds, ASSOCHAM said.

Earlier this month, top Indian outsourcers like Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services reported slower revenue and profit growth in the quarter to Sept. 30. These companies get most of their revenue from the U.S. and Europe, with a large number of their customers in the troubled banking and financial services sectors. (Listen to a podcast asking whether outsourcers can survive the down economy.)

India's economy is also slowing down. The country's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, last week cut its estimate for the country's gross domestic product growth for the fiscal year ending next March 31 to a range of 7.5% to 8%, from an earlier forecast of 8%.

New hiring by India's IT and services outsourcing industry has slowed down, but companies are not yet considering large-scale cuts, according to analysts.

IBM India Lab develops data security solution for call centres

KOLKATA: The Indian lab of IBM has brought out a next generation solution to protect against theft of sensitive data from call centres, a major concern of the growing Indian outsourcing market.

"We have developed a solution that offers advanced data masking technology, which is a speech analytics tool that detects and masks private and sensitive information, both audio and onscreen without disrupting customer services or business operations," IBM India Research Laboratory Director Guruduth Banavar said.

The technology solution has been internally code named AudioZapper.

Banavar claimed the solution, developed after 18 months of intensive research in India, was the only solution in the global marketplace that addressed complete security concerns of a call centre.

"There has been some attempts on data masking of conversation but it did not prove to be worthwhile. The IBM solution offers the industry the required protection of confidential data such as credit card numbers, personal identification numbers (PIN), social security numbers, from getting into wrong hands," he said.
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The BPO boom

Chennai emerges as a destination of choice for several companies developing BPO activities.

BUSINESS Process Outsourcing (BPO) is the new buzzword in Information Technology (IT) circles. Typically, it involves the farming out of day-to-day operations of companies in the advanced countries to entities in developing countries to take advantage of lower wages. The development of IT facilities makes this possible. While BPOs could be in the form of call centres, medical and legal transcription facilities, airline ticketing and accounting operations, the basic idea is to lower costs for companies in the advanced countries. IT enables the transmission of data on an almost real-time basis so that data from any location can be processed at any other location in the world. The United States market has been particularly lucrative for Indian BPO companies because of the 12-hour time lag, which enables even day-to-day operations to be carried out seamlessly in India when the U.S. markets close for the night.

A call centre at Tidel Park.

Companies located in Chennai have taken advantage of the interest in the BPO segment. Several companies have established bases in Chennai to cater to the needs of companies operating from overseas markets. Speaking at a seminar on BPO held in Chennai recently, Romi Malhotra, Chief Executive Officer and Managing director, Scope International Private Ltd., a subsidiary of Standard Chartered Bank, said that the city suffered because of "perception-related problems", something which he said was far-removed from reality. He advocated "proactive selling" by the State government in order to enable Chennai to emerge as a destination of choice for BPO activities. Scope employs 3,000 persons at its centre in Chennai; that number is set to increase to 5,000 soon.

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Indian BPOs may lose Orange pie

NEW DELHI: Business process outsourcing (BPO) companies like 24/7 Customer , Convergys and EXL Service may be impacted post Orange UK’s announcement of job cuts and reduction in the telecom major’s reliance on India based call centres.

Orange, the mobile services arm of France Telecom, is amongst the largest cellular players in the world. Orange’s new UK CEO Tom Alexander, while announcing a cut of 450 middle management jobs this week, also announced a change of strategy: Reduce its dependence on its Indian call centres, where the company directly employs about 1,500 executives. The company has not clarified as to how many of the 450 job cuts will be from its Indian operation. The immediate impact of the move is that Orange will be halting its call centre expansion in India.

In the next stage, the company will gradually bring ‘back home’ its call centres to the UK, in a bid to sell British customer service as the heart of its new strategy. It’s likely that the employees working on Orange UK’s Indian call centres will be redeployed in other processes over a period of time.
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