Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Monday, Feb 02, 2009
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version | Audio | Blogs
Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Monday, Feb 02, 2009 ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version | Audio | Blogs |
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eWorld
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Interview Info-Tech - Outsourcing Talk innovation
Adith Charlie Sujit Bakshi is President, Corporate Affairs, of telecom solutions provider Tech Mahindra. In an exclusive interaction with eWorld, Bakshi talks of the Mumbai-based company’s strategy of managing its BPO outfit in these troubled times. Excerpts from the chat: What initiatives has Tech Mahindra put in place to tide over the current downturn, especially in the BPO space? Today, most of the BPO vendors are either charging their clients on a per call basis (for voice-based business) or on a per transaction basis. Due to transaction-based pricing, customers in many cases end up paying for the second call as the vendor did not close the first one well. Hence, we are now telling the customer that he will be billed on the number of his customers that place a call with our BPO outfit rather than the total number of calls that we receive. In short, telecom customers of ours are able to arrest the uncertainty surrounding costs by leveraging the integrated IT & BPO approach. How is the integrated IT & BPO approach benefiting you in this downturn? There is a lot of competition these days in the retail side of the telecom business. Hence telecom companies are compelled to change their marketing schemes very frequently. In many cases the IT and BPO engagements are sliced between two or more vendors. If a telecom company hits the market with a new marketing scheme, the IT vendor is asked to make changes in the IT stack to accommodate the new pricing mechanism. The changes are then sent for the client’s approval; once the approval is granted, it is sent to the BPO vendor who then writes a new script and trains his people for the new marketing plan. By the time the whole cycle is completed, the marketing scheme becomes redundant. That is where we step into the picture and ask the client to give us both the IT as well as the BPO engagement. If we have both engagements, when the client asks me to change the IT stack, I will ask my BPO guy to sit with my IT guy and write the new script for BPO. The moment the IT stack is approved, my people on the floor are ready to take the call. This reduction in the cycle time is gaining a lot of traction with our customers. How much of your BPO business has been impacted due to the current downturn? I would say that 70 per cent of our business has not yet been impacted. When it comes to BPO related to customer services work, technical services work, things continue unabated. However, projects involving retrospective analytical work are being put on the back-burner. That is the area where we are feeling the impact. How much of multi lingual work does Tech Mahindra specialise in for clients especially in continental Europe? We have a centre in Belfast with 400 seats that can support multi lingual work. Though we have the capability, we have not yet started doing so from Belfast. For a couple of customers, we are providing skillsets in French, Italian, Spanish and some other languages, but out of India. In multi-lingual projects your billing rate is higher, but the resources employed are more than two times costlier than English speaking people. Tech Mahindra posts 12% growth in quarterly profit More Stories on : Interview | Outsourcing
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