It is no more about entry-level basic work for village employees. Small-scale rural BPOs are catering to international clients and cream of the top domestic customers by offering niche services such as email and chat-based help desk, GIS-based mapping, content creation and social media marketing

Ajay Chaturvedi, the founder and chairman of HarVa Rural BPO, is a busy man these days. He is hunting for a multi-purpose middle level manager who is good at marketing, sales and content development for various clients. ?We are moving up the value chain in terms services offered to various customers. We have won 4 international clients in the last six months. I need people at the middle level management to understand client needs and get work done from the village employees,? says the 36-year old entrepreneur, who founded HarVa in 2008 and today the enterprise employs 100 personnel. HarVa?s expertise is all knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) related work including data mining.

Last year has been crucial for the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry with the US economy reviving and the domestic market picking up. In the process, rural BPOs which started in 2006 have realised their potential and no longer stick to the entry level work. They did begin their centres by offering digitisation services including data entry and data conversion. But today, these centres have climbed the ladder and are now offering various services such as email/chat-based help desk, basic processes in the BFSI space, content creation and validation, GIS-based mapping services, transcription and localisation. Some trend setter rural BPOs like HarVa, Ruralshores or Desicrew definitely have the first mover advantage in this shift towards more elite work being done out of non-urban areas.

Raju Bhatnagar, who is the vice-president, BPO & Government Relations at IT industry forum Nasscom, says: ?There are a certain set of rural BPOs which had an advantage of being set up early. And it was easy for clients to further give their high-end and complex work to such BPOs. Clients were willing to experiment with their old rural vendors. I personally know of 5 to 6 examples in which these rural BPOs also cater to international clients.?

A different client story

?We just cannot look at entry level work now,? says Ashwanth G, co founder of Desicrew BPO which has 250 employees and five centres across Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Ashwant boasts how this rural chain is now different from what it was in 2007. ?The testing period for knowledge based higher-end work had started in early 2008, but results started to show sometime in mid-2010.

We now provide QA support to a leading global internet portal, transcribe engineering lectures, translate content into Indian languages, metadata management & design e-learning modules. As a part of our enterprise service domain, we provide human resource (HR) process support to a leading IT firm.? In the insurance vertical too, it is just not about data entry; Desicrew also handles discrepancy management and caters to 3 of the top 4 insurance companies in India.

Ashwanth recalls that his company initially started with doing data entry and digitisation work. ?There were few who wanted to experiment with our model. Some clients gave us projects involving customer query response through SMS, plotting geographic data on online maps, compiling data through secondary research. On executing these projects successfully, we grew to realise our teams were capable for handling more knowledge based tasks, provided we give them strong training,? he stresses. Now, clients view Desicrew as a strategic part of their operations, as against a remote team handling entry-level tasks.

Same is the case with HarVa, explains Chaturvedi. ?We used to do basic data entry work in 2009 which involved medical transcription and mining census data for government of Haryana. But as clients realised our potential, the work flow is different.?

Today, HarVa does calender management for law firms. New processes in the company?s portfolio are mining of advertisements, HTML tagging and social media marketing. ?We cater to big corporate brands like Lenovo. In the last six months, we have also won four international clients in London, Hong Kong, US and Canada. We are doing more sophisticated data mining,? he notes.

Talent training and women domination

It is a debatable topic whether village people are capable of doing high-end work or not. Surprisingly, the rural BPO population is women dominated and in some cases even stretches to more than 65% of the total company headcount. Moreover, some of the BPOs like HarVa and Source for Change are all women BPOs. Reason being that it is easier for educated women to work near their villages. As it is, they are not allowed to go out to the city to do a job.

It is a win-win for both women as well as BPO vendors. ?The primary problem for BPOs today is the rising attrition cost and not the rising real estate cost. We recruit only women in our call centre in the villages and thus we are located inside the villages. This helps us fight the attrition problem,” says Chaturvedi.

Ashwanth from Desicrew claims that 65% of the employees in the company are women and of them, 90% women are graduates. The salary paid to these women ranges from Rs 5,000-6,000 at entry-level and stretches to Rs 10,000-15,000 as they move at higher levels.

Take the case of Source For Change, an all-women rural BPO, which aims to employ 500 rural women by 2012, as per Nasscom data. In 2007, Source For Change set up an ?all-women? rural BPO, supported by one of the renowned business houses of India. According to the company, the premise was that when a women in a rural area is employed, then its is much more likely that the compensation would benefit the entire family. The BPO, currently employing 25 women, provides services such as forms processing, transcription, data imaging and formatting and document archival and retrieval. It has catered to 11 different clients in three years of operations which also include three international clients.

These BPOs usually have a longer training period for their employees, but this necessarily does not mean a costlier training period. This is because the running cost in rural India is very low. Nasscom president Som Mittal says, ?The ability of the people to get trained in rural areas is excellent. They have delivered well in the past. They started with data entry work and have been bright. Now they are taking it forward to more complex processes.?

The rough road ahead

The picture is not as rosy as it seems. Chaturvedi captures it aptly, ?The concept of rural BPO will not work, the idea of adding value to rural India will work.? One needs to understand that the rural BPO model has very less margins. This is the reason why most MNCs and big companies shy to invest in them. Xchanging is the only MNC having a rural centre and even the top IT-ITeS companies have not taken many initiatives, apart from their CSR activity.

Due to low margins, the survival of these BPOs also becomes tough and many of them have got acquired in the process. Recently, HarVa acquired Drashservices and SourcePilanai. And the company is looking for two more acquisitions. These acquisitions are in the domain of market research, consultancy and medical transcription.

The second issue is finding middle level management to manage these BPOs. Educated workforce is needed to be an intermediately between high-end client and the village employees. This seems to be a challenge. ?I am not able to ramp up the rural operations beyond 100 employees since I don?t have middle level management to orchestrate the processes,? says Chaturvedi.

Technical issues are bound to haunt rural locations. Som Mittal notes, ?The two critical aspects which need to be resolved in the rural BPO space are better connectivity for voice processes and a power back up. Through broadband connection being provided in various villages, the issue is being resolved to an extent.?

However, 90% of the BPO work still happens in the top 6 metro cities. Thus, there is a long way to go in terms of work being flowed down to rural BPOs. ?By breaking processes, even the top companies and MNCs should start rolling down more work to rural areas as these regions have immense potential,? concludes Mittal.