Do as software did

The Indian BPO (business process outsourcing) sector is faced with a quality issue, after a few widely publicised foul-ups. This failure rate, say industry experts, is small and well within the usually acceptable limits.

The problem is that those adversely affected by the offshoring of jobs are out to make the point that destinations like India cannot ensure quality.

The result is that the Indian BPO sector has to live under a glare of publicity, with its rare failures being blown out of proportion. This has denied it the time any new practice would need in order to become robust.

Training, which holds the key to future quality, is already a Herculean task when the business is experiencing exponential growth. The challenge before the sector now is to become synonymous with quality.

Slipping up on quality is much more costly for BPO work than for software development. A call (and it is mostly call handling work so far) has to be answered promptly and there is little scope of undoing the damage done by a mishandled call.

In contrast, a software developer gets time to revise and eliminate errors even if he has to complete and send back the task before the client's office opens the next day.

As it happens, virtually no quality foul-ups have come to light in the execution of far more complex BPO jobs involving the handling of entire processes, like preparing tax returns or working loyalty programmes.

To tackle the issue, the Indian BPO sector can usefully take a leaf out of the approach that the software sector adopted in its early days. It is now well established that the world came to Indian software for cost but stayed back for quality.

The leading software companies were able to deliver quality by adopting global benchmarks of quality as quickly as they were evolved. The Indian software sector was in time able to sport quality certification badges in larger numbers than many of its counterparts in the mature economies.

Of course, a Microsoft does not need an SEI-CMM certification to establish its credentials. But the need to acquire quality labels in order to arrive eventually put most Indian software businesses on an altogether different plane.

They thereby became extremely process driven and second to none in the way they went about their work. Obtaining a certification can be a marketing ploy but if you go through the whole exercise, you will have adopted an efficient system at the end of the day.

The Indian BPO sector has therefore to raise the bar ever higher on quality. An outsourcing operation cannot fail if the people on both sides handle the entire process systematically. Most foul-ups result from hurried or insincerely handled migration.

Departmental heads who have to supervise the offshoring of their departments often do not have their heart in the job. A herd instinct has also developed in the mature economies, with managements that have done too little outsourcing till now being under pressure to make up for lost time.

The Indian service provider has to guard against all this, as it is he who will be left holding the baby.