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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.

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