The Rise of the Indian Multi-National BPO

Pramod Bhasin, President & CEO, Gecis Global

At Gecis, which provides Business Services & Technology Solutions for global clients, our customers demand end-to-end services across an expanded universe of products and offerings, combined with domain knowledge of their industry, and adaptability to their geographic locations. A one-location strategy will not work for global clients. As customers increase their understanding of the value BPOs bring to their business, they are demanding that BPO companies become their strategic partners to build globally integrated systems for all their processes. Customers are no longer satisfied with services provided by third-party vendors on a case-by-case basis. They want the ability to easily visit their offshore providers, meet with their teams and interact with management as business partners.

Need to Globalise

India has been an ideal location for BPO services for many reasons, including:

• Low-cost talent pool
• Native English speakers
• Supply of a highly educated workforce

While this advantage is not going to disappear overnight, we need to recognize the following:

• Annual compensation increases are making talent more expensive (especially in Gurgaon, Bangalore and Hyderabad where BPOs are flourishing)
• Increasing demand from customers located outside English speaking belts
• Other nations can also offer low-cost, highly-educated work forces

While India still forms the core of most BPO service delivery capabilities, having a global platform enables servicing the world's business centres without being on the other side of the clock. It allows quick access to customers across regions, increasing customer interaction and touch points. Having a local presence means having the ability to attract talent for processes or functions that require specific linguistic, cultural or contextual knowledge that a person from Gurgaon or Bangalore would not have. In addition, it provides customers greater comfort and confidence when off shoring critical, high-value processes. Most importantly, from a business continuity point of view, having a global delivery platform is the right thing to do in order to mitigate geopolitical, economic and natural-disaster risks for your customers' processes.

Gecis' Global Delivery Platform

At Gecis, our nine global operations centres and additional customer-service locations in North America and Europe allow us to serve our multinational customers. We currently have 25% of our team located outside India.

• India - Business is spread over five cities, including Jaipur and now Kolkata, attracting the best and the brightest nationwide
• Americas - Mexico operations allow us to provide near-shore services to our North American customers, including document scanning, document management, handling of white mail - things that are neither possible nor cost effective to do from India, as well as providing Spanish voice services
• Europe - Expanding European platform out of Hungary and soon Romania allows us to service our European customers in over 15 languages ranging from Spanish, French and German to Polish, Norwegian and Arabic
• East Asia - China operations provide language and contextual knowledge that is essential for customers in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and China

Providing Seamless Delivery

Our operations work together to provide seamless delivery to our customers. We provide end-to-end customer support for processes like Finance & Accounting or Collections. For example, we process and scan documents in Mexico for a customer. These documents are then used by our teams in India, China and Hungary for Finance and Accounting or Collections support. In addition, for the same customer we provide voice support for their global locations from all four of our regions depending on the language needs. A caller requiring Spanish gets routed to Mexico, while the one in English goes to India, Japanese to China, and French to Hungary. Our customer gets seamless service and never feels the routing of work and processes that we do.

Expanding Your Geographic Footprint

There are a number of factors we at Gecis consider when looking at new locations. First and foremost, we consider the investment side of the equation:

• Salaries
• Hourly billing rates
• Facilities
• Transportation
• Training

Customers always initially look to gain from the cost arbitrage of moving their processes to an offshore provider. On the non-cost side of the equation, we consider:

• Infrastructure availability and capability
• Geopolitical situation
• Overall economic conditions

At Gecis, we strive to move beyond merely providing our clients with the benefits of cost arbitrage. As we learned being part of GE, world-renown for its integrity and management practices, we drive customers' processes to Best in Class. To achieve that, we look for locations that can deliver high quality talent, essentially the raw material of our industry. We consider:

• Number of annual graduates (college and advanced degrees)
• Attrition rates
• Training time requirements
• Attendance track records of associates.

In the end, we work to deliver the best team and value for our clients.

Making It All Work

A global delivery platform must provide customers with a seamless, end-to-end solution - otherwise the value proposition for customers is lost. In recent discussions, a global auto manufacturer needed its service provider to work with it across all its regions (North America, Japan and Western Europe), as well as across processes. We were able to present a global delivery solution that provides the immediate benefits of cost arbitrage and ongoing benefits of improving their processes to Best in Class, all the while impacting the bottom line in a way that more than justifies their investment.

At Gecis, our preferred model of working with customers is through such a strategic, global partnership. The key to being successful across multiple geographies is to ensure:

• Common internal processes, management and metrics
• Single point of contact for the customer
• Flexibility to move workload based on business needs
• Optimisation of cost advantages across delivery platforms

Having a global delivery platform is no longer a luxury but a necessity for ITES-BPO companies to service customers effectively.

Source: NASSCOM's Handbook - ITES-BPO Industry - 2005 Background and Reference Resource