India – Page 13 – DECISION STATS

Indian Outsourcing :Opinions on–Why Bad Experiences

some of the recent reasons are-

1) Inadequate transition times – Transition is done faster and faster due to keeping less bench strength , while prices and competitions seem quite competitive.

2) Cost vs Quality tradeoff – Cost tradeoffs will lead to quality tradeoffs. The expectation on client side is we negotiated a hard mean deal , but we still should get the quality had we been prepared to pay more. Not true.

3) Scale and Type of process- India will offer huge scale for time to come as rural Indians get call center opportunities. This is a recent trend to cut costs and yes rural Indians will have worse accents. Complex processes will still come India’s way but here the Chinese will be more formidable competitors as they can’t master the english accent but do just fine on the spreadsheets and maths.

4) Global delivery — Most big Indian BPOs now deliver from India AND Europe, AND Asia (including Indian BPOs with Philippines and China centers, and South American. Like Baskin Robbins , you will choose among the 31 flavors of delivery centers and expect to pay accordingly from same company.

5) Pragmatic expectations – After millions of hours of interaction, people of different cultures have realized the difference in communication, and assertive behaviour .eg Please do this immediately is different In India and US.

6) I am more worried about the outsourcing (value creation actual vs expected, political sensitivities, long term exchange rate and inflation mechanisms ) and voice industry (with better automated voice recognizability ) than about India in particular.

7) And yes attrition is a concern , but actual reality is attrition helps keep costs low by churning out experienced voice agents with newer boys who stretch more than the shift (Indian outsourcing remains unregulated and labor is non organized ).

I wont take the name but as a Manager I was told to encourage attrition in the name of performance just to keep the Operating margin up.

8) A case study is attached for Indian BPO IPOS (which are mostly owned by Western Investors) and another article written by me on Indian call centres.This should give you more insights than you expected to happen https://decisionstats.com/2007/indian-outsourcing-company-plans-to-take-american-investors-for-a-ride/”

Outsourcing Analytics:Maintaining Quality

1 use an instant messenger like skype so people dont exchange too many emails and can clarify things in a two minute call

2 stick to SLAs. if someone didnt design the SLA ‘s correctly have weekly metrics report. weekly team meetings and monthly higher up review meetings help.

3 Insist on offshore quality management like ISO 9001 or Green Belt, which are the default in It services.

4 insist on an attrition or team retention clause in your SLA. team members leaving will be biggest drop in your quality.

5 Have once a year on site trips . helps the training and the bonding too. its cheaper for off shore team members to fly on site , because the have lower actual costs.

6 have penalty clauses in SLA, insist on free credits for missed deadlines or bad quality project, its only fair..

7 always have an exit clause which specifies that offshore vendor will pay for transitioning process to newer member and have a liability clause too, its mostly taken care by their insurance company

8 Having a wiki helps in documentation , insist on all codes,logs to be sent to you with comments so as to review how the project was completed rather than only when something is wrong

9 trust in god, but lock your vendor’s contract

Company Analysis: Google Finance

By using Google Finance, we can easily compare the stock performance of a particular sector.

For e.g. The current example shows that India’s outsourcing companies are not really great in terms of returns to post IPO investors, but probably good retuns for investors who came in early.