In the past decade, the growth of the Indian BPO industry has been instrumental in defining India’s extraordinary growth story.

The industry in India as well as our key global destinations has seen a significant shift since its inception, as a primary low-cost destination for data entry and voice-based roles.

With close to a million people in India building rewarding careers with the BPO industry, the dynamic economic climate is expected to fuel further demand for the industry to not only deliver cost savings and but to deliver higher level of performance and results in form of innovation and business advantage thereby strengthening market positioning of the clients the BPO organisation are serving. Thus outsourcing as a discipline is expected to become even more sophisticated.

Over the last many years, the sector has seen a paradigm shift towards increasingly complex processes involving rule-based decision making and research and analytical services requiring informed individual judgement. The clients expect their service providers to create innovative solutions for their businesses moving beyond the ‘transactional’ services they provided.

With an increased focus on value added services as against standard back office operations in the Indian BPO space, there are immense opportunities for the new breed of BPO workforce. As the industry is looking at new markets for outsourcing servicing and exploring areas where outsourcing never existed before, it requires its workforce to have a mix of generic and high-end skills with a creative and solution focused mindset.

Many organisations today are also discovering the power of analytics to out-think and out-execute the competition. These market-leading companies see their ability to exploit analytics as their distinctive capability—the integrated business processes and capabilities that together serve customers in ways that are differentiated from competitors. In order to enable this shift, the hiring in the BPO industry has evolved from mass hiring to a more demand specific, job oriented recruitment.

As the world’s biggest BPO destination accounting for over 34 per cent of total global sourcing, India is slated to consolidate its position as the market leader for outsourcing services and would require an army of skilled professionals with qualifications in array of fields such as medicine, law, manufacturing, engineering, technology, business administration, chartered accountancy, pharmacy and actuarial sciences to enable it for the growth ahead.

These professionals will need to be skilled in aspects like foreign language skills, global business process knowledge, sales and marketing skills, research and business analytics in order to be successful in the field.

Employees in the BPO industry are increasingly managing complex pieces of work and are expected to not only deliver outcomes but also offer continuous improvement with a keen eye on the client’s profitability and success. They are also expected to continuously invest in their own skills and industry knowledge to be able to conceptualise and implement large-scale changes in their processes.

The new generation of BPO employees needs to have good communication skills, professional and cultural ethos to be able to collaborate with similar professionals across the globe, deep industry knowledge and a desire to learn and invest more towards building their careers in the industry. Over the next few years, the industry will continue to build a voracious appetite for professionals with deep industry skills and service line knowledge.

As it expands into new unseen fields, the individuals who have razor sharp focus, are flexible and agile, have genuine interest in bringing about change and are able to use their creativity and evolve their own and team’s capabilities to build, maintain and continuously evolve client processes enabling client partners achieve market-leading outcomes will become industry leaders in times to come.

Source:http://www.deccanherald.com/content/133890/changing-scenario-indian-bpo-industry.html