India wins back some voice-based BPO services from Philippines

MUMBAI: India is winning back some voice-based BPO services from the Philippines, as the small southeast Asian country grapples with high attrition and the advent of multi-channel customer service offerings.

Voice call centres, which handle customer service, telephonic sales and collections, were the start of the BPO boom in India in the nineties. But the country lost a large chunk of that business to the Philippines over the past seven or eight years due to the closer cultural affinity and a natural American accent found there.

Last year, the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry in India estimated that the country had lost over 50 per cent of the international voice centre business to the Philippines. The BPO market in the United States is expected to grow at 4.3 per cent CAGR, reaching $97.3 billion in 2017, according to research firm IDC.

But that may be changing as the Philippines grapples with rising attrition levels and wage costs and a large concentration of clients being served out of a very small region, leading to business risks.

"India has always been a large delivery centre with size and the ability to scale and we are seeing the pendulum starting to swing back to India," TJ Singh, vice-president at consultancy firm Gartner told ET.

Business process outsourcing companies also point out that Indian employees are better at jobs that require some aspect of sales, as clients look to convert their call centres from purely a cost centre to a unit that could also drive some revenue for them.

"We have a large e-commerce company that asked us to move some jobs to India because there are better skills here to both sell and upsell services. We moved 600 jobs to India from the Philippines for this client," Sandip Sen, CEO of Essar Group’s BPO arm Aegis, told ET.

Telstra and BestBuy are some companies that have brought some work back to India because of better selling skills. While not all the work will move back, industry players expect the country to have a better chance winning some of the business.

"It will not all move back, because companies have invested in centres in the Philippines. But now India as an option is back on the table and clients are looking at it, which was not the case two years ago. Some incremental work is definitely coming here," a top executive at the BPO unit of a multinational company said.

He declined to be identified because the global company is in a silent period.

Also helping the shift back to India is the fact that "purevoice" services are falling out of fashion, and the newer multichannel offerings — which combine email and chat – have a technology aspect that is better suited to delivery out of India.

"The Philippines had an edge in pure voice customer service. But if you have technology-enabled services for customer support, or for services like technology support, for that we see the centre of gravity moving back here," said KS Viswanathan, vice-president at industry body Nasscom.

Convergys, a US BPO company with centres in India, is one of the companies adding agents to its multi-channel customer service offerings in India, its India head Hanumant Talwar had told ET.