Dr. Alok Aggarwal
The erosion of salary differential, rising attrition and deficiency of certain important skill sets such as managerial experience and domain expertise are some emerging human resource challenges that are likely to reduce India’s competitive advantage in the ITES sector over the next five years.
The demand of professionals in the ITES industry will outpace supply by 2009. Number of graduates available for every job in the ITES sector will reduce from 4.7 in 2003 to less than 1 by FY 2009. This will limit the pool of talent available for recruitment in ITES industry. Rising salaries and the cost of attrition will further aggravate the problem by adding to the costs. According to industry experts, the cost of attrition is about 150 percent of the annual salary of
an employee. These problems faced by the ITES industry could result in Indian’s inability to provide quality services efficiently.
In order to overcome these challenges, Indian ITES industry needs to take some necessary steps such as educational programmes catering specifically to the ITES industry. This would help build the required talent base for ITES industry. Companies in the ITES sector can also contribute their share to this by offering in-house certifications and liaising with educational institutions such as schools and undergraduate colleges for specialized training programmes. Attrition should be dealt with by having ‘loyalty scorecards’, and non-poaching agreements.
Indian ITES industry needs to employ effective policies to execute above suggestions. Otherwise, new offshore destinations are not lagging far behind and catching up fast in the offshoring
India has enjoyed the status of being the most preferred destinations for offshoring of IT enabled services (ITES). ITES industry comprises business process outsourcing (BPO) and knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) sectors.
Indian companies have received ITES work from some of the major US and UK based companies such as GE, American Express, Citicorp, Microsoft, Standard Chartered, Convergys and HSBC. Increasing Indian exports in this sector prove that India has created a brand for itself among its US and UK based clients. The total number of jobs in the Indian ITES industry is expected to increase from 180,000 in FY 2003 to approximately 1.8 million in FY 2010. Indian offshore service providers offer a variety of services to their clients. Figure 1 provides the break-up of Indian ITES exports by major service lines for the past few years.
The competitive advantage of an offshore services delivery location can be assessed on four dimensions, namely ability, efficiency, scalability and sustainability. India’s human capital has helped it prove itself across all these
dimensions:
1. Ability: India has emerged as a source of highly skilled human resources for ITES industry. India, with its large pool of trained, English-speaking personnel, offers huge cost benefits to clients of these companies. Today, India stands second in the world, in terms of the availability of scientists and engineers; the first being US1. According to NASSCOM, India produces 2.4 million graduates every year, out of which, approximately 330,000 are from the engineering stream. In addition to that, India also produces 40,000 graduates from various fields of business management. According to statistics given by UGC, 12,000 doctorate degrees are awarded each year in various fields.
2. Efficiency: India derives its efficiency from low cost, improved quality and round the clock services. Offshore service providers in India are cheaper by 30-40 percent, compared to their US and European counterparts. Offshore Indian companies deploy best practices in process re-engineering, leveraging technology and process capability certifications such as Customer Operations Performance Centre (COPC) and Six Sigma. The world’s first and all five of the world’s PCMM (People-CMM) Level 5 organisations are based in India2. In business process management, India has the largest number of COPC-certified contact centres outside the US and Canada. Moreover, India’s geographical location gives a 10-13 hour time difference from various time zones in the US. This, coupled with the use of high-speed telecom infrastructure, has enabled India to offer virtually 24×7 services at a fraction of western costs.
3. Scalability: Indian offshore service providers have attained the capability to scale up or scale down their operations based on the requirement of the client. With the increase in offshoring business, Indian companies are ramping up the number of professionals on bench. Most of the companies in the BPO sector in India are hiring at an aggressive rate. According to news reports, Wipro Spectramind, the BPO arm of the IT major Wipro Limited, was adding 1,800 employees to its existing headcount every month3 in 2004. This trend is expected to continue in 2005. Secondly, infrastructure is not a major constraint in scaling the operations as most BPO companies are operating in multiple shifts and, as a result, are able to ramp up their capacity at relatively low capital costs. Many BPO companies set up offices with a buffer in seating capacity. This helps them increase or decrease the workforce without any negative effect on productivity.
4. Sustainability: The presence of a skilled, young and large workforce, coupled with other macroeconomic factors such as high rate of unemployment, makes India a lucrative destination. Favourable government, physical environment, the “India” brand, etc. are some of the macroeconomic factors that have helped India retain the competitive edge in offshoring.
Despite the phenomenal growth of the Indian ITES offshoring industry, it is facing some significant problems, which would result in India losing business to other countries. Some of the problems faced by the Indian offshoring industry
are:
As shown in Figure 2, the demand will outpace supply in future and affect the scalability of the industry. This will also reduce the quality levels as less number of graduates will be available for employment, thereby reducing the level of competition. Moreover, as ITES companies extend offers to only 5-10 percent of applicants, thus selecting the right candidate will become a massive challenge in the years to come. Secondly, a reduction in the supply-demand ratio will also result in an increase in wages, affecting the ability to deliver at lower costs.
India’s edge, as a cost effective destination, will also dilute in future. Rapid growth in offshoring is creating a shortage of qualified labour force and may result in retarding India’s potential, in terms of cost competitiveness. Cost arbitrage is expected to reduce due to the following reasons:
Higher salaries are constantly reducing the potential cost savings of the companies and in turn, their efficiency. They are also depleting the scalability of the organisations because it is becoming more and more difficult for smaller players to scale up or to maintain large bench strength. With the rise in salaries, companies are forced to keep their average utilisation to near 100 percent. Such a situation places both scalability and sustenance under question.
Most industry experts are of the opinion that salaries will continue to rise in the next few years with the industry growing at a fast pace. It has been observed that while salaries are stabilising in the US and Europe, Indian employees are enjoying considerable salary hikes. According to Hewitt Associates, India reported the maximum percentage hike in salaries in service sector in 2003 (Figure 3). Within the service sector in the country, it is the employees of the ITES sector who boast of the steepest salary hikes of 15.4 percent, which was almost 20 percent in
2002.
The recent appreciation of the Indian rupee is making things quite difficult for the export industry. This is more so for ITES industry where the import intensity is low and firms earn in dollars and incur costs in rupees. Such a trend will have an adverse effect on India’s ability to sustain itself as an offshoring destination. Historically, the Indian rupee has mostly depreciated against the dollar. However, in the last few years, this trend is reversing, as depicted in
Figure 4. The rupee appreciated to 43.5 against the USD in April 2004 and, at present, its value is fluctuating in the range of 43-45.
With the Indian GDP growth projected to be above six percent in the coming years, INR is poised to continue this upward trend. The continual growth of offshore exports will bring down the deficit in the balance of payments for the Indian economy as a whole. This is likely to result in the appreciation of the Indian rupee with respect to other major currencies, similar to the recent trend with the USD. Economists expect the USD to further depreciate by around 2.5 percent every year. If INR appreciates against the USD, the cost differential will reduce further and this will result in reduced gains from offshoring services. Figure 5 represents the effect of rupee appreciation on cost differential for three different scenarios of exchange rates.
If rupee continues to appreciate, together with rising salaries, it will result in increased costs for ITES companies in India. Increased costs will result in higher prices for these services, thereby reducing the cost efficiencies of their US clients. Consequently, client attrition will increase and Indian companies will have fewer clients to serve. We expect that this will result in a major shakeout in the Indian ITES industry and Indian service providers will be forced to close
operations.
Attrition not only dilutes the quality of services provided by an offshore vendor, but also raises doubts about the scalability of its operations. This section analyses the trends in attrition and assesses its impact on the offshoring industry.
Call centres and customer care centres experience the highest attrition rates in the offshoring industry, where job opportunities are aplenty and the skills required are low. While attrition ranges from about 15 percent to 70 percent, it averages in the range of 20-40 percent for most ITES companies.
Attrition rates also vary with the level of experience. According to a study carried out by Team Lease, an executive search firm, the attrition rates at the entry level in the BPO industry are approximately 53 percent, while the rate of attrition at the middle manager positions is 25-27 percent. Exit barriers are typically higher for companies that require certain specific skills in personnel (technical qualifications or higher degrees).
Attrition affects the following capabilities of ITES companies:
Attrition places direct as well as indirect financial burden on companies. According to industry experts, the cost of attrition is about 150 percent of the annual salary of an employee. Attrition directly contributes to the rise in offshore wages. This occurs when companies increase salaries in order to retain talent or offer a salary hike of 15-20 percent to prospective employees. These costs associated with attrition put pressure on the profit margins of the Indian vendors and might undermine the quality of services offered to their clients. Furthermore, there is a constant need to
re-train employees, who have been poached from or have worked in other processing centres; this is already proving to be a challenge for many players in the BPO space. Given an environment fuelled by competition to hire talent, companies are also ending up spending a lot on retaining their senior, experienced employees. These costs, which can be attributed to attrition, might expose the offshoring vendor to high risks in times of declining billing rates. This will in turn affect the vendors’ ability to provide services efficiently at profitable prices. Furthermore, vendors are also expected to face dips in productivity and efficiency as the new staff takes time to acclimatise to the organisation. There is a quality dimension to this argument as well. Frequent job-hopping results in poor project management ability and lack of domain expertise. This, in turn, causes delays and cost over runs and longer ramp up time, all of which contribute to lower quality and poor customer satisfaction.
Attrition might lead to a scarcity of domain and managerial abilities, which in the long run would adversely affect a vendor’s ability to alter the scale of operations. In many cases, attrition leads to a vertical movement in the industry, where individuals get promoted a rank or two above their current position. This is especially true for the call centre industry. However, since a majority of the entrants are graduates, who do not have any management background, they are ill-suited for middle management. High levels of attrition also reduce the availability of domain-specific skills.
Due to the frequent shifting of jobs, a person’s movement on the learning curve is also slow, i.e., people who shift jobs repeatedly will have a lower understanding of the domain in comparison with their counterparts who stay in their positions longer. This is because they spend more time in learning about the new company and its policies rather than enhancing their understanding of the industry. To counter this effect of attrition, many companies prefer to maintain an excess supply of labour, thereby increasing their costs. Such processes are expected to affect these
companies’ ability to scale operations in the future.
The sheer availability of resources does not guarantee quality. There is a definite lack of qualified middle-level managers in the Indian ITES industry, which, if neglected, can have a severe impact on the sustainability of a company’s operations. The lack of managerial skills in the hierarchy cannot be filled overnight. Due to this imbalance, the attrition rate and wage levels amongst this band of professionals are increasing continuously. As a result, the industry will either witness dilution in the quality of the workforce hired (not enough skilled middle managers are available) or shrinking profit margins. We conducted an analysis on the hierarchical structure in various sectors in the offshoring industry. This is shown in Table 1.
We estimate that India will have a workforce of 1,809,000 ITES professionals by 2010. We estimate that out of this, approximately 139,000 would be required at ‘team leads/project leads’ level and 25,000 would be required at ‘team managers/project managers/process managers’ levels to sustain operations. This is shown in Figure 6.
Inadequate domain experience is another impediment in India sustaining its competitive edge in the offshoring industry. With the shift from BPO to KPO, companies are finding it all the more difficult to offer field-specific services.
The demand-supply gap is forcing companies to hire undergraduates. India’s advantage in high intellectual capital is under pressure owing to this demand-supply gap. The lure of the BPO industry and the huge salaries have seen a large number of students dropping out of colleges and opting for jobs instead. This trend, a temporary solution as of now, could snowball into the lack of qualified manpower 5-10 years down the line. The percentage of students opting for higher studies is already very low in India, and this trend can take away the advantage of skilled labour in no time.
As companies begin to offer premium services in the offshoring domain, the requirement for middle level managers with the right domain expertise will take a huge leap. People shifting their job profiles have also made the situation very grim for domain-specific work. According to Health-IT World, “the slow pace of offshore adoption in the healthcare industry is due, in part; to the fact that many IT service providers lack the necessary domain expertise.” India also lacks core competencies in various areas such as HR outsourcing. For instance, according to sources, Exult, a US-based firm that provides human resource services to companies, wanted to outsource end-to-end HR- related work to a third party, but was unable to find an Indian company with the requisite expertise.
The demand for personnel speaking languages other than English is growing. Experts feel that English is no more the lingua franca of the BPO sector. Multi-lingual processes are the natural progression for successful BPO players and an essential part of expansion to new markets. Indian manpower, at present lacks multilingual capabilities to offer offshoring services to non-English speaking regions (German, French, Spanish, Italian, etc.). This may limit India’s entry in these lucrative markets.
Indian ITES industry has grown and established itself in the country in just a few years. This is because of the right location, availability of right pool of graduates and the competitive prices that the vendors have been offering to their clients. However, the country may lose the competitive advantage that it has enjoyed till now among various offshore destinations. Rising costs, high levels of attrition and the lack of the right skill sets are among the primary human resource challenges that are reducing India’s edge in offshoring. India’s reduced edge in offshoring may reflect in the following in the coming years:
Inability to provide high quality and domain specific services
Inability to provide services efficiently
Inability to scale operations
Indian offshoring industry needs to take the situation seriously and take necessary steps in order to retain the competitive edge that it enjoys at present. We suggest some steps in this section:
Till now, there is no educational programme catering specifically to the ITES industry. The education system should incorporate appropriate training for an expanding offshoring industry. National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) has already started working in this direction and with the expansion of BPO industry; it is planning to introduce a common certification for different skills and knowledge required by the industry.
Companies in the ITES sector can also contribute their share to this by offering in-house certifications and liaising with educational institutions such as schools and undergraduate colleges for specialized training programmes. Some management institutes have already started conducting special workshops and courses that cater to this sector.
Moreover, the industry associations such as NASSCOM should take proactive measures in branding the ITES industry for greater acceptance among graduates.
Attrition should be dealt with by having ‘loyalty scorecards’. Such scorecards would be a measure of employee loyalty and can be centrally recorded by Indian government or industry associations. These scorecards would enable recording of employment details of professionals and graduates working in the ITES industry and would be a reliable source of information on the employment record of these professionals, thereby helping them select the right candidates. Such a process will also promote company loyalty among Indian youth.
Secondly, companies should have non-poaching agreements in the rapidly expanding ITES industry. This will help the companies retain their trained employees and also help them reduce the costs related to attrition.
If India is not able to employ effective policies to save its ITES industry, other offshore destinations are also coming up in the race to grab their share of the offshoring pie. Countries such as China and Philippines which were lagging behind India have started offering offshoring services to their clients in the US. Table 2 considers the case of BPO sector and compares the labour costs in the BPO sector and demographic factors for some key offshore BPO/KPO
locations:
Blog Written by
CEO, Chief Data Scientist at Scry AI
Author of the book The Fourth Industrial Revolution
and 100 Years of AI (1950-2050)
