The Hindu Business Line : Call centres moving into smaller cities

THOUGH the metros continue to be the major hubs for call centres, training companies such as Team Builder, the HR Services division of Parsec Technologies and Hero Mind Mine reckon that there is a large influx of international call centres into smaller cities such as Kochi, Ahmedabad, Bhubaneshwar, Jaipur and Pune.

The major international players who have moved into smaller cities are GE, which has set up shop in Jaipur, WNS in Pune and Mindslot in Bhubaneshwar. Apart from these, a number of international players have also moved to cities such as Jalandhar and Shimla. On the other hand, there are also a number of domestic players such as cell phone operators who have call centres in towns such as Meerut.

The major reason behind this, according to Mr Debasish Das, Business Head, Team Builder, is cheap infrastructure and manpower costs and lack of alternative employment opportunities in these cities. "The salaries for a starter in smaller cities are in the range of Rs 4,500 and Rs 5,000, vis-à-vis a starting salary in the range of Rs 9,000 in cities such as Delhi or Mumbai," he says.

Mr Ashish Gupta, Business Head, Hero Mind Mine, feels that HR issues are the dominant factors for call centre companies to venture into smaller cities. "As the metros are getting saturated, some companies are even going to places such as Nagpur to recruit manpower for their hubs in the metros, besides setting shop in those places where there is easy availability of manpower," he says.

A recent survey by the Natioanl Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) also reveals that cities such as Hyderabad and Kochi are emerging as attractive IT-enabled service (ITES) destinations, primarily due to rapid improvements in infrastructure (power, international bandwidth and urban transportation) and lower manpower costs due to lower cost of living and lack of alternative employment opportunities in these cities.

According to Nasscom, the ITES industry in India is experiencing the third wave of growth both in terms of geographical areas of operation and services offered. In the first phase, the industry was dominated by captive centres of large multinationals such as GE, American Express, and Swiss Air which set up operations in leading metros such as Delhi and Mumbai.

In the second phase, the growth of the industry attracted numerous entrepreneurs (in many cases, employees of multinationals who quit their jobs to set up their own ITES ventures), again in and around Delhi (NCR) and Mumbai (including Navi Mumbai).

The third phase of growth has been more geographically dispersed - - with new locations such as Hyderabad, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai, and more recently, Kochi emerging.

However, Mr Sunil Mehta, spokesperson, Nasscom, feels though a few companies are looking at smaller cities, it is too early to say that it is an established trend.

A major issue that comes to surface is the quality of manpower in smaller cities. Mr Das of Team Builder says that quality of the personnel is not really an issue as most of the call centre companies have their in-house training facilities. "However, we are also working with the Standardisation in Testing Quality Calibration (STQC) to develop quality standards for training agencies which we are going to promote in association with Nasscom," he says.

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Call centres moving into smaller cities