Thursday 22 July 2010

India Outsourcing BPO Costs – 1/?


The key driver of why BPO is moving to India is costs. Get this right. It is cheaper to do things here than it is wherever it was getting done before. Labor cannot move but with IT, work can. So we have work coming to India.
Having got the basics down how are BPOs looking at costs? And that horrible thing called cost control?
IMHO very badly. Right now the spending pattern would put a drunken sailor on shore leave to shame. To get a glimpse of it…see my earlier posts on the Party psyche.
Think about it. How does an average office in Mumbai pay a telephone operator? What does the telephone operator in Hotel Taj, a five star hotel, get? Or Karsandas Khimji and Co, a typical trading firm in Masjid Bunder pay its telephone operator. Do they have free lunches? Or weekly parties?
So why should call center agents be any different?
” There is an acute scarcity and hence prices of agents and perks are much higher.” Logic accepted…but does the customer care about it. When you become too costly…guess what he will do? He will base his decision on exactly the same reasons that bought him here in the first place.