Riding Over the Tsunami of Disruptive Technologies

As the outcome based IT sourcing model is gaining momentum in the larger IT services space, can its sibling, the BPO industry be left far behind? BPOs have begun to react to the changing market dynamics, and adopting newer models aimed at better business or process outcomes.

India has pioneered some unique innovation in the BPO space-like the rural BPO, which has ushered new opportunities for people residing in non-urban areas. As we look at the evolution of the Indian BPO industry at this point in time, the available statistics points towards a booming industry. For instance, on a combined basis the Indian IT-BPO industry crossed a magical figure of $100 bn in revenue in 2012 and it is expected to grow around 11%-14% in the near term.

As the Indian BPO market continues to grow, to sustain the pace and momentum it needs to re-invent and cash in on some of the disruptive technology trends that's shaping the industry. For instance key trends like cloud, mobility, social media, analytics, and collaboration et al are changing the way enterprise services are designed and delivered, and they are impacting a range of BPO processes as well. As much a challenge they pose, they are creating new revenue streams and opportunities for BPO vendors as well. If we look at the outsourcing market dynamics, offshore penetration levels are estimated to be around 11%-13% for BPO and for IT services it's in upper thirties. So clearly there is good room for growth, and newer transaction and back office jobs will help drive further growth.

It is in this backdrop, the Globalservices-Dataquest BPO Summit 2013 was held recently and key speakers from the BPO industry deliberated on the changing BPO industry dynamics and the paradigm shifts taking place in this space. Among the delegates present, Arindam Dutta, worldwide director business analytics and general manager, HP, APAC and Japan said that BPOs need to focus more on risk management and offer enhanced customer services. Meanwhile, Jhonson Varkley, director, contact center sales, India and Saarc, Avaya touched upon five trends-social, personalized, multi-mode self-services, new browser based technologies big data, and speech analytics and how its impacting BPO and leading to offering new customer experiences.

At the end of the event, the speakers arrived at consensus in terms of the way forward for the BPO industry. They felt that the industry to transit to its next growth orbit, needs to adopt several best practices and deepen its expertize in the newer and emerging areas. The key areas the industry needs to focus are many-developing new products and services, building a robust sales engine, using operations, delivery excellence to drive growth, and growing inorganically through systematic M&A route are some significant areas.