BPO Vendors Plan to Extend Offerings !

Bangalore: Some firms like Wipro BPO are adding newer processes to their service offerings. Even Hinduja Global sees growth in areas like customer service management from other verticals. Other companies like Kale Consultants plans to add more platforms.

The Indian BPO industry is relatively less affected during this current downturn than its other counterparts. The business process industry is planning to expand its services offerings to cater incremental growth as existing customers look to outsource more to reduce costs.

Mr. Ashutosh Vaidya, head of Wipro BPO said that the company is adding more processes to cater to the growing needs of customers. As the sales cycle stay elongated the BPO vendors expect growth from existing customers. Even small BPO firms like Caliber Point, one of the subsidiary of Hexaware Technologies is seeking for more projects from its existing clients.

Mr R. U. Shrinivas, CEO, Caliber Point expects to leverage the expertise of its parent Hexaware to build newer solutions and processes. This is so because about 30 percent of its customers are seeking to do more work.

The independent BPO firms are however looking for partnership with the IT vendors to launch solutions. Mr Partha De Sarkar, CEO, Hinduja Global Solutions, said that it does not make sense for them to develop solutions on their own as they are capital intensive and the returns on investments are unpredictable. Mr. Sarkar said this while stating that his firm has partnered with system integrators, software vendors and hardware companies.

Hinduja is bidding as a consortium for projects and sees good demand in areas such as customer relationship management across different verticals which has partnered with Talisma and Astute Solutions.

Kale Consultants which mainly offers platform based back office services in areas such as billing, ticket sales audit and revenue accounting plans to add more platforms in other areas too. Mr. Vipul Jain, CEO of Kale Consultants said that, some of their customers are using one or two platforms. He added that, people are more willing to outsource while looking at the value proposition more strongly.
According to National Association of Software and Services Companies, the Indian BPO industry is expected to grow at a rate of 15 percent marginally ahead of the IT services.