Starting in the year 2000, 24x7 BPO has made a global presence in less than eight years. Almost 41% of its business comes from Europe, helping the company in registering a growth of 14% despite the US slowdown. S Nagarajan, co-founder and chief people officer, 24x7 BPO, talks on several aspects of the company as well as the industry. Excerpts

Though some say that non-voice is the next big thing, 24x7 BPO continues to focus on voice-based services. What are the reasons behind following the old model?
The perception of voice and non-voice is totally wrong. Any business moves on the support from a few communities. There will be a vendor community and a service provider community, but the major thrust will remain on the customer community.

In our case, we make our business strategies keeping the customer in mind and what their demands and expectations are from us. So, if a customer asks for a non-voice process, we are ready to provide them with a non-voice process. It is totally customer driven and nobody can claim that customers are more inclined toward voice or non-voice.

Within voice, what is your focus area?
As I said, it is totally demand driven. For instance, we have an insurance company as our customer for whom we provide voice-based services. We also do the analytics for their data and deal with approximately 7 mn transactions a month. Whenever an insurance claim comes, we crosscheck the correctness of the claim and then negotiate to reduce the payment to be made by the insurance company. Therefore, we are helping them in their core business.

How much blame do you put on the government to be unsupportive of the BPO industry?
The government is not very supportive of the BPO industry. It is becoming difficult for the industry to expand in the Indian market. There are many issues when you plan to establish a new facility in India; whereas in emerging markets, it is much easier in terms of levies and duties. The government should realize that the BPO industry has leaded the growth path, which is visible in almost every sector today. Our concerns are largely ignored at the ministry level.

What is your reaction to the Union Budget?
The Budget has not made any difference to the IT hardware industry. Channel partners were apprehensive that excise duty would drop to 8%. The finance minister has taken a good decision to drop excise duty from 16% to 14%. This drop is not going to have much impact on the computer hardware industry.

If STPI benefits are withdrawn in 2009, it will be a big blow to the BPO industry, especially to small and medium BPOs that have just started to move up the ladder. Unfortunately, it has not got any mention in the Union Budget.

Whats your take on the demand to form a separate BPO ministry?
I am not too keen on that. I dont think this is going to solve any problem of this industry. When you create something new, it comes with a new set of problems, and who knows whether it will serve our demands better or put more pressure on us. We are happy with taking the fight under the Nasscom umbrella.

Your comments on the Indian talent pool
India has a large talent pool but they need to be trained and guided in the right direction. The ratio of candidates interviewed to the candidates selected is very low compared to other emerging markets. In metros and tier-1 cities, there is a good chunk of English speaking people, but there is a dearth of the same in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. As a matter of fact, the right talent comes at very high price, even in metros.

Kumar Anshuman
anshumank@cybermedia.co.in

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