New Delhi, Nov 13 (IANS) With around 500 firms sending out promotional messages or calling up for bill payment reminders, the domestic call centre market is seen growing 33 percent per year to top $6.82 billion by 2013, says leading global market research and analytics firm IDC.
This apart, the domestic call centre industry, now estimated at $1.62 billion, will also evolve into a third party outsourcing relationships from the existing model where such work is largely done by companies themselves.

“This implies that rather than merely running isolated processes for customers, business process outsourcers would also engage more deeply to identify and transform core business processes to add greater market value in the creation and delivery of end products and services,” IDC said.

The industry currently offers a wide range of services from customer care to research. Banking, financial services and insurance segment contributes the lion’s share of 37 percent to revenues, followed by telecom accounting for 25 percent.

Other verticals such as services for energy utilities and companies in food, auto, aerospace, consumer durables and government contribute 17 percent to the revenues, while travel trade segment contributes 8 percent.

“The domestic business process outsourcing (BPO) market shows promise of growth, especially in such verticals like banking, financial services and insurance segment and telecom in the short term,” says Arpan Gupta, a senior analyst with IDC India.

“The concern areas for the industry that services overseas customers — such as rupee-dollar volatility, rising infrastructure costs in Tier-I cities, over-dependence on North American and European markets — are expected to have minimal impact on the domestic sector.”

Once some mega outsourcing deals come through and players start offering more services in regional languages, the industry will be able to achieve the growth target over $6.8 billion over the next five years.

Non-English call centres in Tier-II and Tier-III centres, providing services to telecom and aviation sectors at a lower cost will add to the growing industry, said the report.

However, higher training costs in such cities and lack of availability of an adequate talent pool continues to be an area of concern for players, the report added.

Voice processes in the Indian domestic BPO market contribute 55 percent to the overall domestic revenues while non-voice market makes up the rest.

“As the industry enhances focus on Human Resource Outsourcing (HRO), Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO), billing and high-end analytics, the BPO market would see a gradual shift from Voice processes to non-Voice processes,” said Gupta.