Chennai best destination for highend BPOs

Chennai best destination for high-end BPOs

PRESS TRUST OF INDIA Posted online: Tuesday, March 01, 2005 at 1925 hours IST

CHENNAI, MARCH 1: After being chosen by top IT firms for setting up of their development centres, Chennai is now emerging as the most preferred destination for high-end BPOs in Financial services, healthcare and other back-office services for multinational companies too.

Companies like congruent solutions (back-end services for California-based retirement funds), Secova eservices (hr service provider for US clients), Lason India (data processing for healthcare and Financial services clients

in the US) and Office Tiger (outsourcing of creative works) have set up centres to gain from Chennai's "quality talent pool and infrastructure".

Stanchart, Eserve (Citibank), ABN-AMRO and World Bank have also chosen the city for their back-office functions.

"In our view, Chennai has a large talent pool with varied skills. With a large workforce engaged in various back-office operations, our experience is that it is easier to acquire talent in Chennai than in other centres," said V Chandrasekharan, co-founder and VP (technology & infrastructure), Secova eservices.

Chennai is also a city known for its education quality, better work culture and lower cost, he said.

According to Bala J Raman, co-founder and President, Congruent Solutions pvt Ltd, India has been successfully transforming itself from a destination for technology-oriented project to an ideal location to execute complex projects.

"People in Tamil Nadu traditionally have had an excellent work ethics.Some strong attributes of Chennai is the professional approach towards work by employees," he said.

Compared to the low-end call centres and tele-marketing works, high-end BPOs require high level of specialisation, domain knowledge and hence higher salaries.

"Typically, low-end BPOs have a low priority of people retention because from a long-term perspective, it can become expensive to retain people as there is a constant value-add such as training and salary hikes," said Lason India's HR head Jyothi Menon.

"With a vast number of educational insbreastutions in Tamil Nadu, the state's talent bank is the richest in the country," she said.

R Chandrasekharan, Managing Director, Cognizant, which recently entered into a BPO deal with Pharma major Pfizer, said it was an attractive destination for horizontal BPOs in areas of finance accounting and high-end equity research, financial modeling and financial analytics as it boasts of a large pool of chartered accountants, chartered Financial analysts, commerce, accounting and economics graduates.

"We believe voice-based call centres and horizontal business processing in areas such as revenue, accounting, payroll processing and benefits administration will see volume growth, while high-end vertical BPOs will not be volume-driven but largely value-driven," he said.

Bala J Raman of Congruent said high-end BPOs provide expertise in particular niche that calls for professionals send and experience in that field.