Knowledge- the driver for India’s BPO crown

NEW DELHI: One third of Ireland's total population of 3.6 million people works for the BPO industry. Its geopolitical positioning is the biggest USP of this small island in Europe. It has the location advantage of being in Europe and locals knowing almost all, European languages. Is India following the same trend? Manpower Inc.'s MD — APAC, Iain Herbertson is of the opinion that India might soon follow suit, wherein ITES might become a driver for the complete nation as the fastest growing industry.

He said that if India sticks to its USP - knowledge - and learns to gather the soft skills, it would be the leader in the BPO sphere. Citing the evolution of the BPO industry in Ireland, he said that Ireland was able to give not only the cost advantage but also the cultural advantage to the US. Lots of outsourcing companies feel that Ireland is more closely aligned with that of the US than other countries and thus the US companies making the location decision were more comfortable with that region. Political environment too seeded the growth of the industry.

Talking about the prospects of the Indian BPO industry, Herbertson feels that India already has a large pool of human resource. It has to focus on channeling these resources at the right places, which would result in greater rate of growth with lower attrition rates.

When asked about the scenario of the rate of attrition in the developing markets, he said, "growing markets might foresee attrition rates between 20 percent to 200 percent. The focus should not be to arrest the rate of attrition but how to make sure that the good employees remain with the organization and the not-so-good get to leave the company."

According to him, the HR departments of these attrition-high-organizations will have to realize the total cost of attrition. "An attrition according to our calculations costs a complete annual salary of the employee," he added.

Ireland too had similar attrition problems but the situation became better as the industry matured. "Mature industry does see an arrested rate of attrition, but that is partly due to right recruitment procedures, higher training levels and internal employee deployment," Herbertson said. He added that India would have to follow few international recruitment practices to arrest the rate of attrition in the BPO industry. Anti-poaching agreements, according to him, are non-instrumental in curbing attrition rate.

The competitive state of the specific industry vertical will have certain pros and cons and according to Herbertson, the linear learning curve will not help in such a scenario. Learning will have to be logarithmic as skill to be learnt are not technical but soft skills that take longer time as compared to any other training," he explained.

He said, "India has few advantages on which it will have to build its growth - geographic location, cost advantage, good perspective employee pool and smaller learning curve. But it will have to deal with the aspiration levels of these highly qualified employee talent pool to maintain a consistent retention policy."

(CNS)