India's BPO regains lost ground
Outsourcing to India has reached a frenzied pace that it’s viewed as the land of plenty for employers and employees alike. Truth however is that behind the callmaster/phone-littered desks of the call center industry looms an impending employee crisis. The business processing outsourcing (BPO) industry, which includes among others, the booming call center line, faces a medium-term concern in gaining and keeping the qualified workers.
This presents a contrast to the software development outsourcing industry. India’s software outsourcing has managed to keep up with the demands of the international IT scene with competitive engineering colleges, in-house trainers, and private institutes dedicated to advancing skills for this field. The BPO scene however has been left behind by an exponentially growing demand for call center services and many others.
Late nights, stringent security checks and foreigner abuse have discouraged Indian workers from going into, or even staying in the call center industry despite higher-than-average rates offered. The scandals created by data theft incidents have caused people manning both ends of the lines in the call center industry to be more cautious of the people admitted into the once-prestigious ranks of night crawlers and callers.
In response to this, the Call Center Association of India has joined hands with the Confederation of Indian Industry to launch training initiatives to address worker quality issues. A standardized training package is in the makings to include English improvement, accent neutralization, computer proficiency training, etc. NASSCOM has heeded the industry’s call as well with ‘assessment and certification’ programs aimed at raising employee quality. All these are aimed at cutting costs, ease wage pressures, and keep the industry and the clients safe from cyber criminals.
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