Much has changed for Mumbai-headquartered WNS Global Services in the last five years. Its ranking among peers has fallen down from top to third position between FY 2005 and FY 2010, as per IT industry forum Nasscom. In the last four years, the revenue growth rate too has fallen from 30.5% to 5.8% today?while the Indian BPO industry is growing at 16%. And Keshav Murugesh, the 18 months old CEO of the country?s third largest pure play BPO is getting ready to get the glory back. ?We are realising that clients want to interact in a format that is vertically aligned. We are now offering domain experts, analytics and transformation which makes us far more relevant to the clients than we were ever before,? he says.

Murugesh knows what went wrong. ?Two years back, as a company, we were not nimble enough to understand the market trends that were emerging and that we needed to be far more relevant to clients in terms of business strategy to seize all the new trends. We probably did not do a good job at that time. But in the last 18 months, we have refocused on strategy, execution and have corrected that quite well,? he reveals. The refocus that the WNS CEO refers to is a combination of adding new verticals, concentration on organic growth, expansion into North America, investing in marketing sales personnel and entering the domestic BPO business.

WNS does significant work in the autoclaims business too, which has been suffering in the recent past due to volume pressures in the UK. The revenues from this segment declined 5.4% in FY 2011 to $369 million. It shows the revenues from this business under ?revenue less repair payments? and does not include it in the total revenue and year-on-year growth rate. Murugesh took over as the helm of affairs when Neeraj Bhargava quit in February last year. The latter left the company with decreasing net income and acquisitions still to be digested by the BPO firm. Since then, Murugesh has been on his toes.

It is natural for WNS to have huge dependence on the travel vertical as it started as a BPO captive of British Airways. And there is often debate about WNS having lesser verticals as compared to industry leader Genpact or other BPO arms of IT companies.

Murugesh explains how he has added new verticals: ?After I came in, one of the key decisions we took as a team was to go the market vertically aligned. We chose to go to the market with different specified sector verticals as opposed to just horizontals like finance and accounting (F&A), customer service or research and analytics which were seen as verticals earlier.?

The new verticals that WNS has invested in significantly during this year are shipping and logistics, and healthcare vertical? which the company believes will start delivering much outcomes in the next three years. After Murugesh joined, the company has an equivocal focus on six verticals?travel, insurance, banking and financial services, retail & consumer packaged goods, healthcare, shipping and logistics.

Travel and insurance verticals still give WNS 55% of its business and others like healthcare, BFS and retail are too small with revenues less than 10%.

Previously, too much happened too soon for WNS in terms of inorganic growth, industry analysts opine. The company did six acquisitions between 2006 and 2008 including the grand acquisition of Aviva as an insurance client. This was the biggest client of rival EXL Service prior to the acquisition and did get WNS a lot of insurance business. But at the same time, the net income of the company was constantly declining due to huge investments. It came down to $3.7 million in FY2010 from $9.5 million in FY2008.

Nowadays, Murugesh is changing how the BPO major has thought in the past. ?As a company, we have traditionally done a lot of acquisitions. Now there are strategic changes and transformation happening at the company. And we are much more focused on the organic growth. You acquire for capability, geography and sales personnel. In our case, a lot of this investment has been made organically?nothing pushed us towards an acquisition in recent past.?

Nasscom vice-president Sangeeta Gupta feels, ?Inorganic growth has played a very important role for disruptors like Genpact, TCS and Cognizant to achieve top rankings in the BPO charts. However, other players too did acquisitions, but the strategic outlook might have lacked.?

WNS? major market has been Europe and UK which gets it 60% business and the tough European conditions in the past had affected the company?s growth there too. Looking forward, Murugesh is considering North America to diversify. ?We have invested significantly in North America which is the most exciting market. Our biggest investment in sales team recently has been in North America and I am very excited about it. We are looking at Asia Pacific, India and Australia too.? He is confident that in mid term, the US revenues will start increasing, but the Asia Pacific revenues will increase in long term.

WNS has invested the maximum in North America when it comes to marketing salesforce. ?We now have 66 sales people split almost evenly between hunters and farmers. This total is up 60% from 41 when I joined WNS and 15% from 57 at the time of the last quarter. We have plans to expand this team further and we expect the number of client-facing personnel to increase in this fiscal year as we bring additional talent on board,? tells Murugesh. He reveals that the net additions are significant, but what is also important is that the mix has changed with over 60% of the sales force having joined in the last 12 months and almost 40% in the last six months, as the company is injecting fresh blood into the sales team. However, the company?s total headcount in the US and Europe is only 60 and 699 respectively. The total headcount across countries is close to 22,000.

Interestingly, Genpact and TCS, the two BPOs that are ahead of WNS have less than 10% of their business from voice based services. But WNS gets a solid 20% from voice and customer service is a strong horizontal for the company. Murugesh has no plans of shrinking voice based revenues. ?We have to focus on end-to-end solutions and go across their value chain and the voice business is important for that.? As the industry is maturing, some analysts consider voice business to be low-end work, but the jury is still out on the same.

There is another area where analysts feel that WNS has missed the bus. While the smaller players like Aditya Birla Minacs, Serco acquired Intelenet are already sitting on high volume domestic BPO business and bigger players like Genpact has a dedicated team and target to capture this space?WNS is still planning to enter the Indian market. Murugesh says, ?We cannot ignore the domestic BPO business. We will enter with a focus on 2-3 key verticals?travel, insurance and banking. We are not focusing on government deals like competitors.?

Diversification into new customers has always been a concern for BPOs as they tend to stick to old customers that give volume business. And Murugesh realises this. ?Based on new strategy, our existing are giving us more business. Thus, in short term, the penetration with existing customers will increase. But as we bring new clients, this will change.? At present, the top 10 clients of WNS get it 55% business.

All said and done, a ray of hope is already shining for WNS. The firm saw a modest profit of $0.7 million in the June quarter this year, compared with a loss of $5.8 million last year. It will be intriguing to see how Murugesh?s formula brings back the glory to WNS.