No BPO attrition here

ICE PEOPLE/ Prashant Sahni

What do you expect of a young and restless CEO of a BPO company who has a master's in finance from the London School of Economics and specialised in acquisition strategy while at Arthur Anderson?

You'd probably expect him to drive business growth at a frenetic pace. That's just what Prashant Sahni of Technovate eSolutions has done.

Sahni bought out the customer relationship management division of a travel portal in India in 2001 to set up BPO operations for ebookers, Europe's leading online travel company. Today, the company is a 900 people operation.

To be sure, Sahni, who was asked to head Technovate, wasn't too happy looking after a plain vanilla call centre business. So he quickly guided Technovate to grow from a transactional, single client BPO to what he calls a strategic BPI (business process innovator), catering to leading technology, insurance, financial and utilities companies in Europe and the US. However, he clarifies that ebookers plc remains a strategic investor and a major client of Technovate eSolutions.

A few months ago, Sahni, driven by the urge to improve the attrition rate in the company, decided to "turn the BPO business model on its head." "I wanted people to be committed to the vertical, so I decided to make them pay for what they were doing," says Sahni. Basically he started an IATA certified travel school called TravelGuru.

The school offers courses in the travel and tourism industry and trains its students for working in BPOs in the travel space. It also equips them to pick up jobs in travel agencies and airlines.

The 8-week course is rigorous for the students and paying for the company, claims Sahni. "It has benefited Technovate in many ways. There's a supply of trained people for the BPO operation "� and these people are paying for the training rather than the company bearing its cost, which is usually the case. We've also managed to control attrition in the process," says Sahni.

But its difficult to see Sahni rest on his laurels. He wants Technovate eSolutions to grow by 100 per cent every year. That may leave the finance whiz kid from an orthodontists' family with very little time to play the piano or tennis.