Indian firms wake up to e-CRM goldmine

Y P Rajesh

BANGALORE: Sitting at plush desktops in downtown Bangalore or New Delhi,

dozens of graduates in their early 20s will tap away through high-speed Internet

connections, answering customer enquiries over the phone, by e-mail or online

chat.

The trained workforce is part of India's teething Customer Relationship

Management (CRM) industry, where about half-a-dozen young firms are discovering

the goldmine created by the Internet.

Armed with an abundance of English-speaking graduates and cheap labor, the

CRM firms are becoming favorites for US e-commerce giants to outsource their

customer support services.

"The critical resource in the entire Internet economy is people...and

with a large number of businesses going online in the US, demand for support

services is outstripping supply," Prakash Gurbaxani, chief executive of

24/7 Customer.com Pvt. Ltd.

Cater to demand



Earlier this year, Gurbaxani set up 24/7 Customer.com to cater to this demand
and the company now employs nearly 400 graduates in Bangalore.

In a year's time, that number is expected to swell to 1,000 as India's

information technology enabled services industry - which includes CRM,

transcriptions and call centers - is forecast to generate $17 billion in sales

and 1.1 million jobs by 2008 from $520 million in sales and 45,000 jobs

currently.

Industry officials said that besides low labor costs and an abundance of

talent, India has some cultural advantages over other parts of the

English-speaking world in the CRM industry.

"Unlike in the West, we don't have a mass holiday concept. So we can

service clients during holiday seasons when it is most difficult to get people

to work in the West," said K Ganesh, chief executive of CustomerAsset.Com

Pvt. Ltd.

Ganesh said that a Yankee Group study found that over 67 per cent of

transactions contemplated on the Internet are abandoned due to lack of customer

support or help.

"Some e-tailers got back to Christmas shoppers in February and told them

they did not have the products that were ordered," he said.

Cost half



"While CRM executives cost about half of what they cost in the US, we must
point out that we are not dingy sweatshops where hundreds of Indians are crowded

into a garage," said Ganesh who quit a global telecom firm to start

CustomerAsset.

CRM industry officials say young executives are fully trained about products

and services of the clients they are assigned to and get to work in the most

comfortable office settings in India.

Indian workers, already proficient in English, are trained to master phrases,

accents and customer habits to match US needs.

The e-CRM companies also use specialized CRM software from firms such as Kana

Communications Inc or India's Talisma Corp that sifts information to help

support staff.

Sanjeev Aggarwal, chief executive officer of Daksh.com, told Reuters that the

CRM business requires very high uptime, which he considered a key bottleneck to

Indian growth.

"What gives me nightmares is telecoms," he said, adding that his

company had backup systems like a private leased circuit to ensure constant

connectivity.

(C) Reuters Limited 2000.