Saw this on TechCrunch.
The companies software allows call centre workers to work from home and has a performance tracking system that routes calls to the best performing workers.
I had heard the CEO of GenPact in India saying they were exploring these kind of solutions for India.
Maybe there are startups in India focusing on this space. It seems like a good space to focus on. Comments ?
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The incumbent in this space could be this one – http://www.teamlease.com/
Says on the front page that they are India’s largest temping company.
– Santosh
Hi Sanjay,
Can we discuss an idea. We are looking for angel investment. my email id is mohitis@gmail.com . Will wait to hear from you.
Thanks,
Mohit
Good idea but probably premature for India. The quality of bandwidth, power and other assorted infrastructure in India makes it a pain to have people working from home. We’ve tried it with developers ( a non-real time position) and frankly have not had success in places other than Bombay. Monsoons esp. wreck havoc on infrastructure in most B and C grade cities. Having mission critical activities done away from the highly controlled call center environment would probably be very stressful. cheers,
I work with a company that provides voice and data processing workflow solutions for BPOs and companies, largely on UK customers. Legal and medical transcription in the UK is actually farmed out to homemakers and part-timers in semi-urban parts of the country, which can be uploaded, checked, rated and reassigned in case of problems.
Now having this would actually reduce costs in the US and UK by redirecting work to lower cost alternatives *in the same country*. The idea here is – voice transcription is usually better understood in the same context, and with a little training, we can make most people do this from home.
Can this work in India? Let’s see. The big kahoona of the IT industry happened in the late 90s, so I’m guessing many of the engineers would be having kids now. This means a huge number of educated people are going to elect to stay home, but have the talent to work in fairly skilled jobs. Shouldn’t be voice – because if babies are around, they will perhaps affect the voice experience.
Now, what else? How about “chat support” that many customers need? And back-end work – like transcription, claims processing, data processing, equity research and such? (Okay, different skill set but this is the long tail of BPOs) I think there are two hurdles:
1) Training. Process fundamentals are one, and individual company operations are another. But training infrastructure can be created on the web again – through conferencing. Set up a Skype call with video streamed out – and get trainees in. Record the calls for archived views. Needs software to manage.
2) Checking quality. Data processing and transcription etc. need a workflow engine to check and rate people. Chat based stuff needs an engine for online monitoring.
Both the above needs good software that does not yet exist. Opportunity?
If anyone wants to discuss this further, mail me – deepakshenoy [att] gmail. I like this idea, and am getting more enthu as I write.