Automation to shift style of work in BPM industry

The industry has a total employee base of 1.1 million people and is known for higher levels of attrition, almost 25 to 30%

The kind of work and people being absorbed at various business process management (earlier termed as BPO) firms will now become more complex as the industry has started employing higher levels of automation, cognitive intelligence and robotics into the process. Indian players admit that almost 15-20% of the business is now automated.

The industry which has a total employee base of 1.1 million people and is known for higher levels of attrition, almost 25 to 30%, says there will be no major job cuts due to the process of automation but a change in roles of employees would be more value added than ever before.

The BPO industry has been one of the earlier industries to adopt technological advancements by introducing Interactive Voice Response, which enables computers to interact with customers. The industry now says that 15 to 20% of the business is now automated using various technologies as they start focusing more on digital, platform and social media based services for their clients.

"To reach the $50 billion mark, we will have to grow. The industry is innovating using RPA and automation and robotics. These are not new concepts to BPM industry. However, now there is a shift in the customers, the clients now want value added services from the industry," said Keshav R Murugesh, group chief executive of WNS and also BPM council chairperson at Nasscom.

Nasscom announced that the goal for the BPM industry is to reach $50 billion by 2020. Currently the industry is at $28 billion with a growth of 10% in last year. While, Nasscom had projected a growth of 8%.

BPO sector has been dealing with automation for quite some time, with the implementation of IVR. The other example of automation is in healthcare sector where insurance vertical has seen the maximum level of automation. In the insurance sector, almost 85% of the work is automated as it helps companies achieve the primary goal of saving money for clients through a computerised measure.

What this also means is that the quality of hiring in the BPM sector is going a notch higher in the work they handle due to this shift. "A guy who use to reply calls for booking tickets, will no more do that. He will now be doing analytical work as well as complex functions. By complex functions I mean, booking 10 tickets at 10 different locations for a single customer at a particular distance from the airport with certain room specification. In such cases human intervention is necessary," said Sandip Sen, who is the Global CEO of Aegis.

All this shift however, is not happening at the cost of people. Aegis plans to add at least 5,000 more in India and 3,000 more employees globally in the next one year. Sen said that while there will be a marginal job cut due to the automation it will be insignificant as the focus will be training and equipping the existing jobs in subjects such as analytics and data science.

Similarly, Pavan Bagai, who is the president and chief executive of EXL, said that typically if 30 to 50% of the work is automated then the company will check the relative proportion of people or employees that contribute to this percentage of work. He said that will be much lower and those there will be marginal job cuts only.

"Even in the last four years, the revenue growth of companies and the industry has been much faster as compared to the manpower growth," added Bagai.

To meet the demand for people with a different skill set Nasscom is trying to tie-up with colleges to introduce subjects such as data sciences as a part of the curriculum.

"With automation, the whole industry is going to revolutionise. We will need a lot of people trained in data science, analytics, big data etc as they will now be looking at value added services for the clients. Nasscom council is trying to push colleges to introduce these as a subject so that more people are trained for the job," said, C P Gurnani, vice-chairman of Nasscom and chief executive, Tech Mahindra.

With e-commerce and newer telecommunication business and banking and financial services increasing the domestic demand has also gone up. Companies are hoping that the higher demand from the domestic players will help them achieve the $50 billion goal faster.