Sandip Sen, President (Americas) & Global Chief Marketing Officer, Aegis, shares his views on the revival of the BPO segment post the economic downturn and the key issues affecting the revenues of BPO firms. Sen, the founder of call center firm Customer First Services, talks about the Aegis strategy to stay ahead of business and its brand building plans to push for growth as the economy revives and outsourcing gets back into fashion. Today Aegis is a $700-million, 40,000-employee firm with operations in 15 countries.

Excerpts:

In what way did the economic crisis impact the way the clients and the BPOs are doing business today?

Sandip Sen: The outsourcing business has had a paradoxical relationship with the economic crisis. A lot of large firms like Bear Stearns of the world who were outsourcing in a big way were adversely affected because the companies closed or downsized, but what happened as a result of the crisis was people looked at their balance sheets and said, "We need to become more efficient and reduce costs." A lot of the firms that were not outsourcing or at the very early stages of doing so looked at both outsourcing and off-shoring. A lot of companies [that] were not in the outsourcing paradigm came into outsourcing.

What is current market scenario for the BPO firms across the world?

Sandip Sen: In the new scenario companies like us have globalized. That helps you mitigate your risks; the U.S. is not the only player in the market. We are today in multiple countries and multiple geographies. Despite the economic crisis the Indian economy grew and we grew very big here. We are also big in, for example, South Africa, which saw growth. I saw two trends. One was of companies that were not outsourcing very much were either forced to outsource, or to think more seriously about outsourcing. The second was if you are completely diversified, then you have different markets that are growing at different levels. So with similar approach we didn't do that badly. The industry didn't have the kind of growth that it had in 2007. But in 2010 you will see much more robust growth for the industry.

Today the lowest-cost is not the only value proposition for prospective clients. In fact, India is not low-cost anymore. There are countries that are lower in cost than India. But there is a market for doing the kind of work where you get huge economies of scale. There are good margins in the business. What we have done in India to keep the cost advantage is, for example, move from a Tier 1 city to a Tier 2 city.

How is Aegis taking forward its operations, and which are the verticals you are focussing on? Where are the opportunities for next phase of growth?

Sandip Sen: We are global in the global sense of the word. We kind of "follow the sun" as we call it. We have operations in Australia, Philippines, India, and in Sri Lanka. Africa we are in South Africa and Kenya. We also have presence in the U.S. and in Central America. We have about 40,000 people in all these locations.

The important paradigm for us is what we call customer lifecycle management. In this we look at processes from the time the customer comes into the system to managing to customer service to customer retention to collections to customer data analysis. And within this paradigm of customer lifecycle analysis we are doing a lot of work for telecom, financial services, healthcare, travel and entertainment