KPO Services in India

KPO Services in India

Knowledge Process Outsourcing, or a KPO, is a form of outsourcing wherein an overseas client outsources a high-end knowledge process to the skilled workers in developing countries to obtain significant cost reductions. Unlike other forms of outsourcing businesses, KPO industry requires a specialist staff at the service-provider’s end.

Corporate clients in developed world seek outsourcing options as the cost of buying a domain expertise sees an exponential growth with years of candidate’s experience in their homelands. Also, the overall population of these nations being very low, finding and retaining an appropriate domain expert becomes a Herculean task. And if the requirement suggests having an in house pool of such domain experts, it becomes a haywire situation.

With advent of technology, the developing world offers some relief to the expertise-starved developed world. These nations, like India, offer a pool of English speaking, graduated domain experts. Moreover, due to the difference of currency denominations, this talent is availed by the developed-world clients at unimaginably lower costs.

It takes some time for these new workers to acquaint themselves with these foreign clients in terms of communication, understanding of business processes and requirements. KPOs are otherwise one-shot-two-birds situation for both, workers and corporate clients.

In terms of clients they offer huge pool of domain experts at unimaginably lower costs. In terms of workers, they offer a knowledge-oriented, white collar job with relatively higher stability and a fat pay package.

KPO jobs let their workers revive their core skills by exploring the leaps and bounds of their beloved domains that can be flaunted in their resumes as milestone achievements. Frequent foreign tours are yet one of the other bounties offered by the KPOs. In most cases, KPO jobs do not require workers to toil during the late night hours. It’s a knowledge process; client need not be served real-time! That’s one of the beauties of KPO.

KPOs in India

India is one the major players in world’s KPO industry. According to a report published by NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies), US corporate clients are expected to outsource their knowledge processes worth USD 17 billion by 2010, of which the Indian share is estimated to be around USD 12 billion.

Another report predicts that India will capture around 70 percent of the world’s KPO business by the year 2010. However, countries such as China, Russia, the Czech Republic, Israel and Ireland are expected to offer tough competition against India.

In near future, It is expected that high potential KPO will not be restricted to Information Technology (IT) or Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) sectors alone but will include other sectors like Business Research and Analytics, Intellectual Property related services, Clinical Research, Legal Research, Publishing, Market Research (Market research KPO), etc. In short, it has a potential to offer jobs to lawyers, doctors, chartered accountants, architects, writes and graphic designers.

In terms of costs, Indian KPOs offer reduction ratios of around 1:4th to 1:5th of what they cost in developed world. For example, a law firm may cost anything between $450-$500 per hour in the United States which can be done in $100-$150 if outsourced to Mumbai.

Recession-proof jobs:

Believe it or not, KPOs are one of the few service-oriented jobs that won’t be struck by the wrath recession. KPOs dealing with legal processes, medical and writing domains have infact witnessed increased activity when the other domains are busy reducing head-counts. It has happened because these domains deal with the basic survival needs of any civilized world and are hence continuously on-going.

As such in normal times, KPO salaries are easily around 25-50 per cent higher than those offered to the same domain experts such as Doctor, Engineer, Architect, CA, Lawyer, Biotechnologist, Statistician Economist, and MBAs, than what is offered in their conventional domains.

Challenges:

Off course, Indian KPO industry is facing many challenges of its own. Unemployable graduates, elongated training periods, high employee turnover and lax of overall data security are some of the major ones that they face have origins in the Indian way of living!

However, with soothing figure of 70% percent of the world’s overall KPO share the overall picture seems to go beyond positive for sure.