Previous

Page - 2

According to the leading global business intelligence and consultancy firms such as Giga, Forrester Research and McKinsey & Co., geographical location of India, large human resource, Indian education system, English-speaking population, quality manpower and strategic government policies are cited as the some of the main reasons for the increase of offshore outsourcing by MNCs to India.
The inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the country has also contributed immensely to the progress of the BPO sector. Some of the key findings of the Strategic Review 2006, on the eve of its 15th Annual Event NASSCOM¹ (National Association of Software Services and Companies) are:

The Nasscom-Mckinsey report also predicts that the BPO business will witness a CAGR of 37 percent over the next 5 years². The research firm, Gartner in its research report has predicted that India has potential to generate $13.8 billion in exports by 2007³. At the moment, Indian companies offer a wide spectrum of outsourced services including Back-office Operations, Revenue Accounting, Data Entry and Conversion, HR Services, Content Development, Animation , Engineering And Design, GIS, Customer Interaction Services, Medical Transcription Services and Other Services like online education or web based training, market research analysis using statistical packages, remote network maintenance and monitoring. It is fast spreading to new areas like automobiles industry and clinical research.

Call Center & BPO

Norling⁴ (2001) defines call center as a communications platform from which firms deliver services to customers via remote real-time contact. Taylor and Bain⁵ define call center as a dedicated operation in which computer-utilizing employees receive inbound - or make outbound - telephone calls, with those calls processed and controlled by either an Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) or predictive dialing system. Call center and BPO are often used interchangeably, but call center is just the voice-based and web-based part of BPO organization.

Next

1 NASSCOM is the trade body representing India's IT software and services industry.
2 http://www.sunmediaonline.com/indiachroniclejanuary/infotech.html
3 http://www.indiaresource.org/issues/globalization/2003/midnightcoolies.html
4 Call Center Companies and New Patterns of Organization. Economic and Industrial Democracy 22.1: 155-168, 2001
5 Trade Unions, Workers' rights and Frontier of Control in UK Call Center. Industrial Relations Journal 30.2: 101-117, 1999

* Contributed by: -
M. S. Balaji & Diganta C.,
Research Scholars,
ICFAI Insititute for Management Teachers, Hyderabad.