|
It was some times in 1998 when working on a story on computer telephony
integration (CTI) technologies in Voice & Data, the sister publication of
Dataquest (for which I was working at that time) that I first stumbled upon the
phrase Offshoring. A vendor told me that GE has set up a call center in Gurgaon
to make and take calls from the USA and hence was buying a lot of call center
technology. Though I could not speak to GE after trying my best, I managed to
speak to another such company, iDLX (which after a few evolutions is todays
eFunds) and got to understand the whole thing. That was my tryst with the big
offshoring wave.
Though IT offshoring was established by then, I never really had followed
that segment. To that extent, BPO introduced to me to what would later be a big
wave.
 |
| shyamanuja das |
So, I beg your pardon if I sound a bit too nostalgic in this piece. This is
an industry I have closely followed almost since its inception and have seen all
the lows and highs as well as defining changes. I listquite arbitrarilysome of
these moments that are also pointers to defining trends of Indian BPO over these
years.
I remember Voice&Data bringing out an issue on call centers in June 1999,
declaring on cover that this could be the next big thing for India. When I was
planning it well before the famous Nasscom-McKinsey report was released, many
colleagues thought I was mad to compare call centers to an established industry
like IT. But the response that we got to that issuemost of them from people
wanting to know how to set up call centersis the best that we had seen in the
history of the magazine. That was the first trend of Indian BPO: the
entrepreneurs kicked it off. Some of the entrepreneurial ventures started around
the same time, like Spectramind, Daksh, Vcustomer, and EXLare still among the
biggest in the game, though some have gone through series of transformations.
Some time in early 2000, I was meeting the COO of a start-up BPO company. She
came a little late for the meeting but was quite excited about something. I
asked her if she signed the first customer. No. I just got my leased line (IPLC)
from VSNL cleared. Indian telecom today is a completely different story today.
This is probably the most visible external change that has happened to the
industry.
In 2002, a large team of executives from a European insurance company met me,
at the suggestion of more than one BPO companies, to seek a neutral opinion.
They were more than convinced about India but kept arguing with me why they
should not be setting up a captive instead of outsourcing to some vendor. That
debatecaptive versus outsourcedis still continuing.
In 2003, we at Voice&Data, organized the India BPO Summita series that still
continues in multiple cities. While we saw participation of most CEOs from the
then nascent industry and took a lot of pride in that, what opened our eyes was
the interest level not in the session where they participated but the session on
people and process. In Mumbai, the discussion, which was the last among the four
in that day, began right in time but continued for more than one hour after the
scheduled time. Those made us realize that going forward it is service delivery
issues that would dominate mind share, whereas all big events were focused on
how to sell India. Soon, everybody was talking about service delivery issues.
I can go on and on. Whether it is about the question of survival of the pure
play BPOs (I strongly believed that all of them would coexist) or the growth of
domestic call centers, I remember many instances when most of those ideas
actually struck methe same ideas, which over the years I have passed as mine
through my writing.
At this tenth anniversary of the industry, I feel satisfied, somewhat
gratified that this small opportunity which had aroused my interest as a
reporter in those early years has grown to become a mature industry, redefining
the rules of the game globally. Page(s) 1
| 
