Competitive Advantage Case Study

Domestic BPO Market: Next Big Opportunity for Indian BPO Companies?

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Abstract:
For over a decade, India had emerged as a significant global player in business process outsourcing (BPO). Its favourable time zone difference with the US and European countries and an abundance of low cost English-speaking employees helped multinational corporations (MNCs) to outsource low end back office operations to India. Gradually, many captive and third party BPOs were set up, which graduated higher up the value chain. However, competition from other countries, backlash to outsourcing in developed economies and recession in global markets were some of the challenges faced by Indian BPOs. At the same time, India's huge domestic market - with diverse linguistic requirements across the country, focus on core competence by local firms and availability of voice and non-voice based BPO infrastructure - presented huge opportunities. It remained to be seen whether the BPO companies could tap the domestic BPO market potential as a viable revenue source and hedge against international markets in the years ahead.

Pedagogical Objectives:

• To examine the evolution and growth of the Indian BPO industry.
• To analyse the risks and challenges faced by Indian BPO vendors in international markets.
• To examine the current scenario of the Indian BPO industry in the global BPO market.
• To analyse the challenges for Indian BPOs and also strategies viable to overcome the challenges.
• To elaborate on the emergence of the domestic BPO market in India and also the key trends in the domestic market.
• To examine the scope of the domestic BPO market.
• To bring out the major differences between the domestic BPO market and the international BPO market.
• To analyse the opportunities and challenges for BPO firms in the domestic BPO market.
• To analyse the critical factors for the success of BPO firms in the domestic BPO market.

Keywords : Business process outsourcing (BPO); Domestic BPOs; Offshoring; Nearshoring; Voice process; Non-voice process; Back-office operations; Verticals; Horizontals; Service level agreements (SLAs); Offshore BPOs; Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO); Sarbanes-Oxley Act; Third party BPOs; Recession.