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Due to economic recession many professionals made a shift in their careers. Out of all professions there have been many who have joined call centers. Call centre industry has been employing thousands of professionals as it is billion dollar industry. A call center can be defined as centralized office that is established to provide wide variety of services such as customer service, telemarketing, survey, collection and technical support.
A career in BPO is best suited for fresh graduates, retired persons, home makers and college students. Anyone who has studied till high school level can apply for a BPO job. BPO also provides various options for engineering graduates, management students and students pursuing higher studies. To get a job in call center one should have good communication skills, workable knowledge of computers, good presence of mind and ability to strike a conversation.
According to National Association of Software and Service, during the year 2002-05 the domestic call centers employed people at compounded growth rate of 60 percent which was 3, 52,000. Again the number s grew in the year 2006 that marginally touched to 3, 65,000. It is predicted that BPO sector will see a job growth of 6, 00,000 over the next two years.BPO job opportunities will be created at various levels especially at the entry level since the skill set and the qualification needed at this level is not very high.
A number of top companies in India are hiring. Mobile service provider like Bharti Telecom has outsourced most of its non-core business functions to four major players of BPO industry. These are Hinduja TMT, IBM Daksh, Teletech Services and MphasiS due their ability to provide best BPO services. The other major business process outsourcing units in India include Reliance, Infocomm, ICICI and HDFC.
The top BPO players in India have a sizeable chunk of foreign business and have substantial domestic business. The other players that have sharper focus on domestic BPO services are Orion Dialog, Sparsh, Magus, Infovision, Solutions, Customer First and Mobilink. To sustain the competitive edge of business environment most of the BPO’s prefer to recruit professionals from marketing, sales and hospitality background.
Some call centers also employ freshers from college, retirees or house wives. BPO also recruit part timers however, for specific sectors that require technical expertise professionals from relevant industry are recruited. Some of these sectors are finance, design, animation and specialized call center services. The selection criteria in BPO’s focus not much on education background but on intelligence quotient. The whole range of verticals is coming up in this sector, telecom being the most important one. The other sectors are banking, insurance, healthcare, entertainment and media.
The domestic BPO’s generally paying less than the international ones. Another interesting segment here is the industry intelligence, the sector that mainly involves understanding and analyzing of different business establishments and market research. The salaries in domestic sector are at least 1.4 times less than in international sector. In domestic sector the call center agents do not work at odd hours or with a foreign accent. This gap is not going to remain long, thorough research is being carried on to follow a bench mark while setting the salaries for these two sectors.
The last important point is that anyone who wants to work in BPO sector should know that what type of call center fits your personality. No matter what type of call center you choose to work with there are advantages as well as negative points associated with it. If you have the zeal and the motivation then you can get a BPO jog for yourself.