 |
|
INDIA'S burgeoning call centres and business process outsourcing (BPO) companies are facing a shortage of middle-level managers as the industry doubles its scaling up operations to meet outsourcing contractual requirements. Growing at nearly 40 per cent annually, the industry has already hit the radar screens of Fortune 500 companies for cost-effectiveness and quality. But the big challenge for the fledgling $1.5 million industry is to face up to the mid-management shortage in the next couple of years. The search for talent-skilled in people management, process-driven and reasonably tech savvy-is making the industry try to attract managerial staff from hotels, travel firms, airlines, courier firms and even consumer goods companies to meet the challenge. "Middle level management is a serious issue in the industry. Call centres and BPO companies have been promoting people with just two years or even less experience from within and investing heavily in training," Vybhav Tiwari, CEO, iSeva India, told IANS. "BPO services are mission critical, real time operations. It is not easy business, but big business with higher investment than IT services. They need persons who have done it before, managed persons and resources. A single point failure in IT services may still be tolerated, but never in call centres and BPOs," Sridhar Mitta, managing director of e4e labs, told a meeting of The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE) here. Given the industry's nascent stage, it is the middle management starting from team leader upwards that is becoming a matter of concern for human resource departments across call centres and BPO companies. About 15 to 20 call centre agents report to a team leader (TL) and about 10, sometimes more, team leaders report to a team manager. "Call centres require high quality work and, therefore, higher quality supervision. And the middle level management is really the backbone of the company," says Prashant Sankaran, head of human resources at Digital Globalsoft, which has a technical support centre. "There is a fairly significant gap in the industry requirement and availability. The problem is time is short and the training is rather heavy. The bottom line is people management and (being) process driven. Technology, as somebody said, is not rocket science, so it can be taught," says Aashu Kalappa, head of human resources at ICICIonesource, formerly customerasset.com. "There is no real answer here to the problem of shortage," says Vidya Subramaniam, head of human resources at Axa.abs, a Fortune 70 French insurance company whose BPO operations for Britain and Australia are handled from India's tech capital. "Internal growth is considered the best option. The rate at which scaling up of operations is taking place is making the industry look at other sectors like the hotel or travel industry for people and operational background," she says. "But they don't
bring processes and, therefore, training to get a better understanding
of the domain becomes important. And this is done in a time crunch that
makes processes crucial and critical. This is more so in the call
centres than in the BPO companies because we (the latter) are cut away
from customers," says Subramaniam. The industry is spending on an average Rs.1,50,000 for a dozen weeks to train persons from within as well as laterally to meet the sudden spurt in business. Roughly five new centres
open every month in India, according to one estimate. The industry is
expected to generate revenues of $ 2.2 billion in 2002-03. |
||||||
 |
||||||
