India's voice BPO segment falling silent

BANGALORE: "Hey, this is Andrew calling. Do you have a minute? Can I talk you through the new features of your card?" The voice of a Gurgaon call centre employee, thinly disguised as American by rolling the Rs, addressing a customer in Iowa, may become a thing of the past. The traditional voice calls that tried to sweet-talk Americans into buying everything from credit cards to computers and which catapulted India to fame as the world’s back-office, is fading out.

Competition from countries that have a greater cultural affinity with the US is fast upstaging India in outsourced voice services, compelling call centres to diversify into non-voice areas and give up their efforts to change the accents of Indians. Some centres have started moving up to higher-end voice based services that requires technical knowledge and problem-solving capabilities (a space where India still has an advantage), while some others are moving to service domestic call requirements.

In voice, many customers prefer the Philippines, a country that has been a US naval base and is hence culturally far closer to the US than India has been. India has already lost tens of thousands of jobs to this Pacific Ocean nation.

India had over 3 lakh call agents in 2007 when the Philippines had just half of that. Today, India and the Philippines have an equal strength of 3.5 lakh people in voice BPO.

Raman Roy, regarded as the father of India’s BPO business, says that as a percentage, the outsourced voice services to India is on the decline while that to the Philippines is accelerating. "Quality suffers because of the lack of proper educational and training platforms in tier 2 and tier 3 towns. And productivity comes down when agents are given thin incentives for making successful sales calls," he says.

Deepak Patel, CEO of BPO company Aditya Birla Minacs, says just about one sales or loan recovery call out of 100 made from India would be successful, while it would be 4 to 6 in the Philippines. "South Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Australia and Ireland are other major voice destinations for US companies now," he says, adding, "Indians are often not able to handle irate foreign customers. We will certainly not be there to service premium markets, but we may be still there to service areas of high immigrant populations."

Omega Healthcare management Services CEO Gopi Natarajan says telemarketing services for insurance and credit cards are clearly on a decline in India. However, he sees voice still growing in niche areas like accounts receivables, analytics, follow up and claim denial management in healthcare.

Gaurav Gupta, country head of outsourcing research firm Everest Group, also says "it’s not a complete dead end for voice".

In certain areas like technical calls and problem solving calls, "where customers don’t bother so much about your accent, India still had a great opportunity because of our technical and engineering skills," he adds.