Staff keep moving on in Indian call centers

Sufia Tippu
Tuesday, 23 May 2006 20:36

IT Industry - Market

BANGALORE: Sheila Shah, known as Jumpin’ Sheels amongst her friends, is known for switching jobs. Since 2002, she had moved from five jobs – one call centre to another – three cities in all.

This itch to move is not an unusual one. Shah and hundreds of call centre agents are on the move and constantly looking for better prospects – though the prospects would just be marginally higher at $ 25-75 per month.

Today, the Indian call centre industry, already filled with turbulence with the huge numbers it is hiring, is now feeling the pain of these constant jumps in its employee base.

The Indian call centre industry popularly known as business process outsourcing (BPO) or IT-enabled services (ITeS), is estimated to touch $6.3 billion revenue in 2005-06.  According the Nasscom- McKinsey Report 2005, released in the early part of this year,  this is expected to cross $25 billion by 2010. This is part of the total Indian exports of software and services which is at $30 billion this year and expected to exceed $50 billion in 2008.

Over the past three quarters, BPOs have been on a massive hiring spree and according to Nasscom (national association of software and services companies), an apex body that tracks the Indian software industry,  the headcount has doubled from 220,000  in 03-04 to 410,000 in 2005-06.  Companies like Genpact (formerly GE Capital International Services) recruit about a 1000 people on an average per month while others average around 350-500 a month.

Today, Genpact has the highest number of employees at 15,000 in India followed by Wipro BPO at 14,000 while others such as Convergys, WNS and IBM Daksh , Dell and Intelnet  have an employee strength of around 10,000 each.

Every large BPO is hiring continuously – Genpact plans to recruit 12,000 more people by the end of 2006. Intelenet has similar plans to hit the 35,000 by 2009 while others also have figures that range in thousands of employees.

Mohandas Pai, former Infosys CFO and now member of the board and director- HR, Infosys says, “Economic opportunities are much higher now. When people have more choices to make, it is but natural to look after their own interests and when there is a huge demand, people do keep moving.”  Infosys has its own BPO arm, Progeon which has about 7000 employees and is recruiting regularly.

Call centre executives are increasingly realising the fact that this industry can offer unique career growth opportunities. It provides basic graduates exposure to a spectrum of verticals like banking, insurance and other financial services, retail, hospitality, healthcare, logistics etc. “There is no other industry which makes a a fresher a team manager in 18 months,  an operations manager in 2-3 years and an unit head in 5 years and group leader in three to five years – this is based on performance of course but still the opportunity is there,” explains Raman Roy who was had founded Spectramind which was acquired by Wipro Technologies about three  years ago.

Although the IT services industry has about 10-15% attrition, the call centres throw up an unprecedented figure of 30-40% attrition. Call centre chiefs do gripe about the ongoing attrition phenomenon and the costs that go with such high attrition rates. It costs a company $1000 to train the agent and Genpact spends $10 million and over 1.5 million man hours on training.  But today companies are learning to live with it.

But does this impact the bottom-line when there is a continuous stream of people leaving and an equally continuous stream joining in??

“Not really. We always build in the attrition into our revenue calculation – so that there is no major impact to our bottomline,” says Infosys’ Pai.

Genpact’s annualized agent level attrition rate has been 30 per cent in the tech support division and 33 per cent in collections. “We believe that this is at least half the attrition in other parts of the BPO industry outside of Genpact,” says Piyush Mehta, Head, HR, Genpact.

We have been able to maintain this low rate of attrition by investing heavily in selection, career development, training, and in overall people practices. We employ an array of HR tools to address the professional and personal, long-term and short-term concerns of our people. We also have in-house team of certified trainers who coach employees not just in areas like client processes, product and compliance, but also soft skills such as leadership and decision-making. For the new recruits, there are dedicated courses for honing communication, interpersonal relations and etiquette.

And, does it impact the quality of the work that is being done in India?

“There is no real reason to complain because we have proven processes- even when it comes to training. Moreover,  we are seeing a shift from voice-based work to more back-office kind of work in most of the Indian call centres and because of this we are not having any real reason for complaint,” says Vikram Talwar, CEO, Exl Services, which has about 6000 agents in its north Indian centre at present.

On the high attrition rates plaguing the sector,  Noshir Kaka, principal partner,McKinsey and Co, believes that a  `public-private partnership' is needed to face the BPO sector's manpower challenge. “"Every year, about 70,000 jobs are added and the main challenge is how to attract and retain enough people. It requires a holistic approach,” he said.

Interestingly, Genpact, which employees the highest number of agents today  had developed a mechanism to find out reasons for attrition on the basis of 30 key variables based on data from 3,000 employees. This eventually helped the company a reduction of 12% direct cost amounting to about $3.3 million.