India is no longer the epicentre of business process outsourcing (BPO) and call centres, with the retrenchment of 300 or more people, with one month’s notice, now becoming a more familiar occurrence.
This is according to Andrew van Niekerk, a director of Teleforge Communications, a tier-3 voice solutions provider focused on providing carrier grade voice services to medium and large enterprises – including call centres.
“India was the champion of BPO and call centres, but now it is not uncommon for entire batches of 300-400 people being asked to pack their bags after being given a month’s notice, when jobs got diverted elsewhere – or US companies cut down work in India.”
Bangalore was a cosmopolitan cauldron, swarming with well-paid youngsters who enjoyed a disposable income that allowed them to live a good life and shell out for luxuries such as restaurants and movies. But, on the downside, was the immense stress associated with their work, including stressful night shifts and an ever-present threat of job loss as recession gripped the developed world.
Indeed, it is arguably the deep recession that followed the sub-prime mortgage crash in the USA that delivered the final blow to the Indian BPO and call centre markets.
There is now one certainty: that there is now a reversal in the market, with more and more USA companies withdrawing from outsourcing.
Statistics show that many Indian BPO companies have culled their ‘voice’ business by as much as 60%. Others have shifted their English language call centres, servicing US clients, to countries such as the Philippines, Malaysia and China.
Almost all of them have realigned and turned their focus to more value-added ‘non-voice’ work that includes high-end analytics – as well offering services bundled with BPO and cloud computing offerings.
India –and Indian companies –paint this as transformation for the better. But this, in reality, brings a painful reality for thousands and thousands of young people without job prospects; and in a country where unemployment and poverty are rife.
In the last five years, India has lost one million jobs in the customer contact business to countries like the Philippines,” says T.V. Mohandas Pai, former director of human resources at Infosys Technologies.
No matter how you view things, the call centre culture, that burgeoned in Indian cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Gurgaon and Pune in the early 2000s, seems to be dying a slow death, says Van Niekerk.