The BPO industry though originally conceptualized around the modern cities are slowly but surely making advances toward the villages. As rural call centers mushroom in parts of South India, we take a look at what drives such an idea. Read this article to know how rural BPO has made its footprint in Indian subcontinent.
The limelight of the Indian BPO industry was hogged by major urban areas of Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, NCR and Kolkata. The concept of a BPO in the extensive villages of this country was not conceived till recent times. But time as always has changed and the spotlight has shifted on the BPOs operating from the rural areas.
The process of establishing call centers in the rural areas had started some years back with some IT giants opening up call centers in the villages of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Till then the biggest deterrent in going rural was the lack of technological infrastructure but this is no longer the case. Other factors working in favor of this movement are the rising cost of urban workspace and high attrition rates experienced by the BPO industry. Furthermore, the global economic slowdown has forced companied to cut down on their costs and the low wage rate in the rural areas provides the perfect cushioning for these firms.
While the recession is making the multi-nationals to look for domestic markets, it is the latter that is driving the rural BPO revolution. Also the rural BPO scenario is not ready for full-fledged international markets as they lack the necessary exposure. But they are fast catching up and will soon challenge their urban counterparts. As the interaction between the rural masses and these companies get frequented, the development of their skill sets will suffice the existing BPO companies.
Also the attrition level at the rural call centers is lower than the urban ones. This feature has been attributed to the fact that the people come from the same villages and show far greater commitment towards the company. They seldom engage themselves in hopping form one job to another. Thus a rural BPO enjoys the luxury of working with the same set of customer care professionals and this helps in better relation between the management and the employees. Earlier the rural contact centers mostly dealt with data entry jobs. Bit with time they have started off with regional voice processes along with some low-end voice-based international processes.
The major hindrances in moving the call centers to the rural areas are the high operational cost of training and providing constant source of power. Industry experts believe that although infrastructure can be created, one needs to invest heavily to develop human resources required for the BPO industry to flourish in rural India. Also, good trainers turn out to be unwilling to move to rural areas thus creating a dearth of quality training for efficient business process outsourcing. The second operational cost deals with providing adequate power backup. Rural areas experience around 6-8hours of power failure every day. So to ensure the smooth functioning of the contact center one needs consistent power backup.
Apart from these minor glitches, the rural BPO industry is bound to thrive, thus addressing a major socio-economic problem inherent with the country. With all these developments India has rapidly achieved the status of being the most preferred destination for business process outsourcing for the companies located overseas. This is due to the availability of huge English speaking crowd and state-of-the art infrastructure.
With the flourishing of business process outsourcing units more and more companies from the west have established their contact centers in India. This is has also helped the rural BPO to make its roots strong and providing employment to the rural youth.
source to this post: BPO Goes the Rural Way
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