India’s outsourcers battle for customers in a cloudy universe
Still on top but heeeere comes China ...
Posted in Management, 27th March 2013 06:31 GMT
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Can China catch up?
Although it could be a good fit for global firms looking to service their APAC operations from its shores, Gartner’s Roy argued that China is at least 6-7 years behind India, with no guarantee it will be able to close that gap as long as India can mature incrementally.
“It’s pretty clear India is top in terms of the attractiveness of offshoring there because it is a very mature location for IT services delivery. It’s not just about available IT skills but the whole ecosystem of support services,” he argued.
“For example, workers often need to work in shifts to cater to various time zones, which means workers need ferrying from home to the office at odd hours. This may sound like a low-level activity but in the overall scheme every small thing matters.”
The Philippines is another rival location getting a lot of attention, especially in areas like back office processing and contact centre work. The annual ranking of the top 100 global outsourcing destinations by outsourcing advisory firm Tholons, released in January, placed Manila and Cebu in the top ten, both improving on their position last year, with the capital in third spot.
Forrester principal analyst Frederic Giron told The Reg that the country had caught up strongly with India in terms of its call centre capabilities thanks to strong language skills (Philippinos' English accents are often easier on American ears) and cultural fit with Western clients, but it isn’t as strong in higher value services, which is where India can flourish.
“India has more equity research analysts than London and New York combined, which is an interesting proof point that skill levels in the country have improved quite a bit,” he said. “I see providers in India focusing on higher value add – consulting and architecture, that type of task. This gives those firms an edge over other destinations like China.”
It should also be noted, as pointed out by IDC research manager Mayur Sahni, that Indian providers are somewhat insulated from the growth in the Philippines because they themselves have “ sizable setups” there for business process outsourcing operations serving global and local clients.
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COMMENTS
Thanks...
and a byword for getting things done well
Thanks, seriously, I haven't laughed so hard in ages!
My own experience of Indian engineers is this:
Outsourced performance was rubbish, they could provide all of the paperwork but never got things done properly, and had a high turn-over of those actually doing the work (which is always a BAD sign).
Worked with a USA company who had hired an Indian engineer and he was great, language no real problem and knew his stuff.
The difference? In the first case they pay peanuts, in the second they paid a good salary. I guess that is how you get & keep good staff...
Forgive me for not shedding too many tears over India, whose entire model focused on undercutting local services, being undercut by other countries. When you play that game be prepared for someone else do undercut you.
I'm not entirely sure India offered "getting things done well and at a price western nations struggled to match", only the latter half of that rings true. India has a huge number of intelligent, well trained individuals. There are also cultural and language barriers, not to mention a significant distance involved which can introduce barriers. For a long time India has been a byword for getting stuff mostly done cheaply to reduce opex and get that bonus & promotion.
I'll be glad when they bring jobs back.....
I work as a service engineer for a large datacentre kit supplier. When the company first kicked off outsourcing they kept the jobs in our European call centre but because after a few months they reckoned that the Indian one was only x% worse they started letting people go here.....
But within a few months after that the quality of support we got from wipro started to go downhill, seriously downhill. Time to fix went through the roof. So they sent someone over there to investigate.
ALL of the first bunch of guys who had been trained up and who were not too bad in fairness had moved on. We had trained them well .... too well, and they had fucked off to the other offshoring companies for a big pay rise and now ALL the people answering the phones were all only partially trained and been in the job for a few months.
When they looked into it, they found that this behavior is endemic, the Indian callcentre staff get trained up and with a few months experience under their belts they move to a competitor for 20%+ pay rise every 6 to 9 months.
Last i heard, the yearly cost of the Indian callcentre is within 15% of the cost of European callcentre that it replaced but the time to fix is 40% higher and while you might have been waiting 10 minutes in a queue before, now when you ring you are guaranteed to be waiting more than an hour.
Starting to go the other way
I know of at least one company who is planning on bringing all their support & customer service back to the UK from India & Eastern Europe. They told me it may cost a little bit more in the short term (though not as much difference as it used to be) but the improved customer service will more than account for that, same with the other functions currently off-shored.
The new Office:
