The Making of an Industry

An industry is born. After software, this could be the next big forex earner.

Year 2000-01 will be remembered as the year of the contact center boom in India. While the industry is yet to mature into an organized industry, too much hype is forcing many big companies and entrepreneurs to actively look at this segment.

• In the year 2000-01, the offshore outsourced call centers in India did a business of Rs 390 crore, according to Voice&Data estimates. This does not include the captive call centers of multinationals or the domestic outsourced call centers. The domestic industry is of the order of Rs 45 crore, according to our estimates.

• By the end of the year 2000-01 (31 March 2001), there were about 7,500 people working as CSRs in offshore outsourced contact centers in India, in about 4,000 live seats, across close to twenty contact centers. This figure also does not include people working in captive multinational call centers like that of GE.

• The per hour rates varied from as low as $5 per seat per hour to $11 per seat per hour for web/e-mail support. Voice, of course, fetched a higher rate starting from the lowest of about $11 per seat per hour, to about $19 per seat per hour, a few exceptions notwithstanding.

• Primarily there were three types of companies who are active in this market—corporate houses, professional setups funded by VCs; and small/medium business backed contact centers. About 80 percent of the companies fall in the last category.

• The corporate houses have big plans and with a few exceptions like Global, Hero and Phoenix, not many have begun. The ones to watch are Jindal Transworld and HDFC-TCS promoted Intelenet.

• The professionals are the ones that are doing brisk business. Major names include Spectramind, Daksh, Transworks and Tracmail. All of them started with e-mail/web chat based support and a few are now entering the voice business as well. Today, these companies account for about 70 percent of the business to India.

• Many small/medium companies who entered the business and thought of competing on India’s strength—cost—alone are in bad shape. The reasons behind the failure of many of these companies are three-fold. Wrong approach, voice-only call centers, and the perceived lack of scalability of their facilities. Many small businesses were promised business from overseas clients by the vendors and depended too heavily on them for business, which did not happen. The second major reason was that voice was perceived to be a low-tech and high revenue generating business. Most small companies entered the business with voice call centers. By doing so, they were taking two risks. One, they were entering a high cost (both capital and running) business. Two, they were trying to compete with an industry (the US call center industry) that is fairly established over the last four decades, has brands, and has set processes. The one advantage they had—cost—carried them till some time. But as the US recession began and many of the US call center companies started coming to India, that one advantage was gone as these companies could also offer lower prices. Third, most small businesses began with 100-seat call centers without provision to expand. It was very difficult for them to convince clients about scaleability.

• The most significant change that has happened in 2000-01 is driven by the US market slowdown. That has made cost extremely important. India, being a cost saving destination, many US-based contact center companies are setting up their facilities here. While Sitel, West Telservices, and Stream are already here, Convergys is apparently setting up a big facility in Gurgaon.

• Till now, most of the call centers are being set up in the Mumbai and Delhi region. While Navi Mumbai is the hot location in Mumbai, Gurgaon and Noida are the places where most contact centers are coming up.

• Indian companies today offer only a handful of services. While most of the e-mail/chat services are for first level tech support, a few of the professionally set-up companies also handle general e-mail/chat based queries from dotcom companies. In voice, it is invariably catalogue marketing and/or cold calls for basic information acquisition.

• Despite rising volumes, the real outsourers like the banks and telecom companies are yet to decide in favor of outsourcing to India. There are two worries. One is the capability of Indian companies. The other is the question of trust. Both are equally
  important.

• Real integrated contact centers with all channels fully blended and facilities like co-browsing are hardly existent. However, quite a few professional companies like Daksh and Transworks are deploying such infrastructure in their new facilities.

• Out of the fifty odd contact centers in India, only three (24/7 Customer, vCustomer and Transworks) have applied for COPC certification for quality. And only 24/7 has ISO 9002 certification.

• Skilled manpower shortage is going to emerge as a major problem for Indian call center companies in a few months.

• There are various lobby groups that are misleading the market. Some of the projections are being inflated and being managed by people who do not understand the ABC of this business. This year, it is expected that Indian entrepreneurs will learn from the mistake of those who have run into bad time. Else, there will be a painful transition period.