New Delhi: The ‘twisted-accents’ and the tele calling skills are no longer going to translate into rising salaries and bonuses for the BPO employees.
While rising rupee has impacted salaries of the Indian IT professionals, it’s the ‘underdog’ BPO lot that’s been hit the worst.
BPO margins have come down far more than IT margins due to the fall in earnings, says a recent report. IT companies will now try to get more work out of their employees by increasing working hours. The effort will also be to contain salaries, the report adds.
Mid and senior level executives in BPOs who were getting increments of 14-20 per cent will now get 8-15 per cent, says the report. The overall weighted average of increments may come down to 4-5 per cent.
Unlike IT professionals, where 30 per cent to 50 per cent of employees and are paid in dollars, the humble BPO executives are paid in rupee. In fact most call centres have 90 per cent of the operations in India which means even the billing resource cannot bail them out of the currency impact.
Software product companies, which have been doling out the biggest hikes, too are seen to be under tremendous pressure. They simply can't afford anymore the 8-10 per cent salary increases they have been giving almost on a quarterly basis.
BPOs are also seen to be working towards automating processes - to reduce dependence on people - and moving resources from voice to online, which is cheaper.
US customers are getting increasingly comfortable with chat and email to address problems. For Indian BPOs that's good because a voice resource is almost twice as expensive as an online resource.
With inputs from agencies
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