The Hindu Business Line : `Voicing' differences

About 60 to 70 per cent of our effort goes towards recruiting, training and retaining 15 per cent of our employees," says Sridhar Krishna, Chief Executive Officer, MM Imagine Technologies.

MM Imagine Tech handles the outsourcing operations of Tranquilmoney, which provides solutions to healthcare providers and manages their third party receivables. Krishna explains that the 15 per cent that demands so much of the company's attention is the call centre operations or the `voice' segment. The rest is `non-voice', which refers to transaction processing, an example of which would be insurance claims processing, which does not require real-time interaction.

This disconnect seems to be prevalent in the industry. Lakshmi Narayanan, Chief Executive Officer, Cognizant, says one possible reason could be that where there is a clear-cut career path, managing employees becomes so much easier. In voice, there is a relatively slower career path, whereas non-voice would employ qualified professionals in the field - such as chartered accountants. Sridhar Krishna agrees, saying that almost all his employees in non-voice are college graduates and many have engineering or MCA degrees.

"The non-voice-based work includes accounts receivables analysis, securitisation, deal structuring and servicing, besides simple data capture work, most of which requires domain knowledge," he adds.

Perot Systems, a company whose BPO operations consist of document management, data entry, transaction processing and call centres, has about 80 per cent of non-voice operations, according to Vardhman Jain, Head-BPO Operations, Perot. He says the company currently has nine resources focusing on recruitment of which two resources focus on call centre recruitment.

This is a more favourable ratio than smaller companies, possibly because the company has automated a large portion of the HR process, including recruitment, performance management, and payroll, for instance.

Jain agrees that the non-voice segment is easier to handle, but adds that a complex set of factors get into play — night shifts, income, social strata, spoken English skills and acceptability of working in night shifts with parents, especially for female candidates.

Apart from the concern that parents express, a person who works at night misses out on a lot of social interaction outside the office that leads to restlessness and dissatisfaction at work, says Krishna from Imagine. Ambika Krishnan, Head-Performance, Management and Strategy, Repcol India Ltd, a global financial services firm that specialises in debt management, says, however, that many companies these days conduct non-voice processes during the night to add a competitive advantage even though there is not a critical requirement to do so. Repcol, for example — which has about 5 to 10 per cent non-voice - would look to provide real time non-voice services as a supplement to the voice services, which would necessitate the non-voice segment to work a night-shift as well.

Another reason for the divide between voice and non-voice would be that the addressable employee demographic would typically be from a higher strata of society as far as voice is concerned, according to industry sources. Jain from Perot says it is partially true that voice talent comes from a higher strata of the society, but points out that the determining factors for good English speaking are reading habits and life experiences rather than monetary factors.

Recruitment is probably the biggest differentiator.

According to Krishna from Imagine Technologies, the number of candidates who get rejected for poor English speaking skills is very high. He says that while the quality of college graduates - and therefore potential non-voice employees - is very good, very few of them can speak English fluently with or without a strong vernacular accent.

He adds that many people who speak good English are not interested in a job that is predominantly at night.

This is counterbalanced by the fact that remuneration is higher in voice BPO. Jain says that as a ballpark, voice process compensation is anywhere between 15 and 30 per cent higher than non-voice processes.

He adds, though, that even within non-voice processes, a strong degree of vertical specialisation is needed, which comes with the educational background, training and experience. "Quite often, the assertion that call centre jobs pay more than non-voice processes is not true," he says.

Moreover, as Ambika Krishnan from Repcol says, the HR challenges with both voice and non-voice employees are pretty much the same, but it's just that voice employees are more vocal about issues such as pay, incentives, growth, working hours and working environment.

abhinav@thehindu.co.in

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