All BPO Processes are not created Equal... Some are more equal than others

When we talk about price competition to BPO companies in India coming from China, Vietnam and Cother countries, it is not always an either/or, black and white situation.

BPO processes vary significantly in skills needed. Some are subject to price competition severely and many are not.

The BPO business is a very fluid business. In India, the BPO business keeps changing all the time. What you see is the net gain after all the increases are adjusted for all the decreases. This is where paying attention to what business processes are vulnerable to price competition, pays in spades.

Doing Windows 7 support over the phone and chat is an incredibly skill and language intensive process. If you are not good technically, and not reasonable in your English and Cultural skills, you are not going to do well.

No country will approach India in doing these kinds of processes any time soon!

However there are hundreds of data entry processes or processes where a scanned document is on in one display, and a Financial application is accessed through Citrix in another. The job is just to read the name of the vendor and fill in the details for payment or enter orders from scanned order sheets.

These kinds of processes will the most vulnerable for price competition. They don't require that strong a set of language or conversational skills.

Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities in India have ramped up with people and cost structures suitable for this kind of work, but the infrastructure in China in their Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, especially in the Western Part of China may provide a viable competition for these kinds of processes.

Shoring up and making sure that even with these processes, the Quality, Measurement and Improvement aspects are paid constant attention to can fend off competition from lesser expensive countries. By showing that you are adding value beyond just the cost is key here.

Sometimes, we just get carried away with Black and White thinking. Reality is a lot of shades of gray and only the net effect matters!