Center of Outsourcing in India WonÂt Be Answering the Phone
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Bangalore, where dozens of multinational companies have operations, will completely shut down on Wednesday as part of a protest over a border issue.
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India's chief outsourcing association has admitted there may be instances of U.S.Â visa abuse by Indian companies, but said the problems are confined to "small, fly-by-night operators."
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Offshore call centers are having a negative affect on customer satisfaction, according to the survey by the CFI Group.
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(InfoWorld) - Indian outsourcing companies have to move beyond low-cost services on an hourly-rate basis to offering complete services, according to an outsourcing consultancy. A model that is based primarily on the low cost of Indian staff will not be sustainable by Indian providers in the long term, as the cost advantage is eroding, said Dennis McGuire, chairman of outsourcing consultancy firm, Technology Partners InternationalÂ (TPI) in Houston, Texas. Large competitors like IBM and Accenture are also expanding operations in India to take advantage of low-cost staff, he said. âWhen I go to a restaurant, I want a chicken dish and not a rate-card telling me how much the chefâs time will cost me,â McGuire told reporters Wednesday. There isnât much risk, nor promise of great reward, in the current labor-cost arbitrage model adopted by Indian providers, he said. Indian service providers must make more investments in senior staff, and industry specific applications and tools if they want to win big contracts, said Peter Allan, a partner at TPI. They will have to develop industry-specific applications, such as a billing system for telecommunications companies, around which they can offer services to customers, said Siddharth Pai, another partner at TPI. Indian providers have been reluctant to trade current margins for long-term revenue opportunities because investors expect far higher margins from Indian service companies than from their multinational competitors, TPI said. Only recently have these outsourcers indicated that they are willing to accept total outsourcing deals that involve transferring customer staff and assets, Pai said. The reluctance of Indian outsourcers to address the lower-revenue domestic outsourcing business will also hurt them as the market shifts from plain coding and testing to higher-end transformation services, research firm Gartner said this week. Working on projects in India in these new areas would give Indian outsourcing companies the opportunity to prove their capabilities to customers abroad, said Partha Iyengar, research vice president at Gartner. Indian outsourcing companies such as Infosys Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services are attempting to go up the value chain into IT consulting and services delivered around their products. â They still donât offer the full array of services, and in applications they only have products in the core banking area,â Pai said. However,Â business is still strong for Indian outsourcers, according to data released by TPI. Of the number of contracts greater than $50 million awarded last year, the share of Indian service providers went up to 11 percent from 8 percent a year earlier, according to the consultancy. Their share of the total value of these contracts went up to 7 percent from 4 percent a year earlier, it said.
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Frustrated by sub-par, outsourced customer service and technical support? Would you be willing to pay a premium for onshore service?
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Company hasn't said when the device will be available.
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ERNST AND YOUNG&#39;S the Global Information Security Survey is just the latest to survey senior management&#39;s cluelessness when it comes to IT and are far too trusting when it comes to Indian outsourcing, it alleges.
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Workers striking over a regional border dispute bring Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, to a standstill.
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Hold the line Foreign IP Telephony firms such as Skype and Yahoo! will not be able to sell their services to Indian businesses under a proposed government clampdown, The India Times reports.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Indian chief information officers (CIOs) are finding it harder to recruit staff because of large-scale hiring by the countryâs outsourcing industry, a Gartner researcher said Monday. Indiaâs top IT services providers, focused on the global market, are regarded as the best employers, and get the best IT staff in the country, said Partha Iyengar, research vice president at Gartner, in a conference call. Indian user organizations are hence finding it very difficult to attract and retain technical staff, particular in the middle management, Iyengar said. A large number of Indian and multinational services companies have set up services delivery operations in India, and hire staff by the thousands each quarter. The problem for user organizations may only get worse as outsourcing companies start hiring business line managers as well to build their vertical industry expertise, Iyengar added. As large Indian outsourcers grow in revenue by 30 to 40 percent each year, they will hire business managers from the banking, manufacturing, and retail industries, bringing business knowledge that can be integrated into their services offerings, he added. This movement of business managers from the user industry to outsourcers will make it more difficult for CIOs to complete projects, as companies will have fewer business staff available to participate in the project, according to Gartner. India is fastÂ emerging as a key marketÂ in the Asia-Pacific region for outsourcing contracts, according to outsourcing consultancy firm, Technology Partners International Inc. (TPI) in Houston, Texas. Of the total value of contracts awarded in the region last year, Indian customers accounted for 24.8 percent, TPI said. That puts the country ahead of China with a 4.4 percent share, but still behind Australia at 32.4 percent and Japan at 26.8 percent, Peter Allan, a partner at TPI said Monday. Faced with shortage of staff, Indian user organizations are looking to outsourcing IT functions. But Indian outsourcing companies have not shown great interest in this business, as they are more focused on more lucrative business abroad, Gartnerâs Iyengar said. Multinational service providers like IBM andÂ AccentureÂ have bagged some of the larger contracts, but that still leaves a large number of Indian companies with smaller outsourcing contracts, who canât find a good service provider, Iyengar added. Indian IT spending is growing at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.8 percent, the highest in the Asia-Pacific region, to over $36 billion by 2009, Gartner said. This increase comes from rising expectations from businesses for IT to play a larger role in growth, efficiency and competitive advantage, it added.
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The rise of the Indian rupee against the U.S. dollar is affecting Indian outsourcers.
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NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Call centers and agent positions in the US, a hot-button sector in the jobs outsourcing debate, will continue to migrate in the next few years
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An early end to International Business Machines Corp.&#39;s contract with JP Morgan Chase &amp; Co. reveals how mega information-technology outsourcing deals are falling out of favor, with both IT services companies and their customers.
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Close on the heels of the&#160;appreciation of the Indian rupee against the dollar, Indian outsourcing companies are grappling with a new problem -- uncertainty among U.S. companies about a recession has made these companies delay finalizing their IT budgets.
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Annoyed customers forced to endure several hours without e-mail capabilities.
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ROMAN Catholics who cannot find the time to pray can phone a new call centre where someone will do it for them.   Manned by a team of 200 volunteers on a rota basis the "call centre of the faithful" is staffed from 9am until 11pm. And at night there is an answer machine.
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A dispute over water rights has caused outsourcers to tell their staffers to stay at home because of expected trouble and even violence from protesters.