Seeking to cut costs in a sluggish economy, the US and European com-panies
capitalized on the latest buzzword in India: BPO. But this buzzword has now
started agonizing both the worlds. And this is pretty much evident from the
recent developments that happened in this sector. Dell, followed by Lehman
brothers, shifted back part of their operations to the US from India. The stated
reason: quality of manpower.
On the face of it, it seems that the recent developments occurred because of
the back-lash against outsourcing. That could be true to some extent, but the
real issue that Dell and Lehman cited for withdrawal was ‘quality’. Quality
is still a bone of contention for MNCs, coupled with infrastructure-related
issues.
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Steps taken by companies |
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Lehman stopped outsour-cing its IT help-desk, which handles employee reports
of computer problems, to Wipro. According to sources, Lehman wasn’t satisfied
with the level of service. "The level of quality-of-service was not up to
the mark," the official spokes-person of Lehman Brothers said, hinting at
Wipro. Last year, Lehman Brothers hired TCS and Wipro Ltd to manage some of its
IT operations. The company has stopped outsourcing help-desk job to India but it
still continues to outsource other IT functions, including software application
development, applications support and some IT infrastructure support. In fact,
now they have decided to double their workforce in India for other IT-related
activities. Therefore it’s quality issue that forced the company to shift
their help-desk to the US, as this voice-related job requires good English
speaking manpower with proper accents.
Similarly, sometime back, computer manufacturer Dell took a similar step and
stopped routing calls of its corporate customers to its call center in India
after receiving complaints about the quality of service. The calls are now being
taken by customer-service centers in the US. Some of Dell’s North American
customers have been demanding for long time to shift the customer care back to
US. Here also, the issue has reportedly been quality of service and scripted
responses.
Although analysts have predicted that these instances will have negligible
effect on outsourcing business in India but it’s definitely a wake-up call for
most of the outsourcing ad-mirers. It’s no longer cost-effec-tiveness that
will continue to attract companies to outsource work to India. Quality manpo-wer
and good infrastructure are required to trigger the growth that India is looking
for in this segment, especially in the voice space.
MNCs’ concerns are true to some extent that by outsourc-ing to India they
don’t get the quality of manpower that they are looking for. These compan-ies
have now become careful, especially when they are work-ing with middle-tier
suppliers, as it is more likely that they might get inexperienced staff to work
with. Christine Gamba-corta, VP (Quality and Process Engineering), GTL Ltd said,
"Cost effectiveness is one ad-vantage that we have in India but quality is
still a bone of contention for us. The major issue is with the accent."
It is important to ensure that overseas staff adds value to your work. Even
when a supp-lier has a recognized quality standard, it doesn’t mean that the
same knowledge is embe-dded in all its teams. Gone are the days when fresh
undergra-duates were considered perfect for outsourcing jobs. Now companies
(especially third-party solution providers) desire to get experienced people
with specialization in certain verti-cals. That helps companies to serve in a
better way. Diana Christine, Director (Quality and Training), Infowavz, said,
"We reject around 50 percent of recruitment applications that come because
of the quality. Even after proper training, these guys don’t match our
expectations."
Rahul Gupta
(CyberMedia News Service)