Hard-selling BPO

India may be the back office to the world, but as a career option the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry has increasingly been losing its lustre.

"BPOs in general, including the bigger names, still face a huge perception problem. Good candidates don't see BPOs as a career option," says Rahul Singh, managing director and chief executive officer of the Rs 331crore e-Serve International.

Perception, or rather the lack of it, wasn't good news for e-Serve when it started drawing up expansion plans following Citigroup's growing stake in the company. Between November 2003 and 2004, Citigroup gradually increased its stake in e-Serve from 44 to 90 per cent.

This meant that e-Serve had to handle new business from Citigroup global operations. For instance, it recently acquired Citigroup USA's call centre functions and had to set up a separate centre with a seating capacity of 2,500 in Goregaon, Mumbai.

Given the new processes e-Serve will be handling, the company needed to hire at least 1,000 to 2,000 more employees. "But the major task at hand was attracting a better quality of talent and not just quantity," says K S Kumar, head, human resources, e-Serve International. To this end, the company launched three new recruitment initiatives over the past one-and-a-half years.

The initiatives were partly based on the findings of a survey commissioned by Ogilvy & Mather in December 2003 to research image problems with BPO. The survey revealed that many e-Serve employees did not feel proud to say they worked in a BPO.

It also suggested that BPOs were not just sources of pocket money but also a stop-gap arrangement for graduates. In short, a BPO job was considered a low-challenge, dead-end option.

As a first step towards correcting this image, e-Serve started raising the standard of entry-level recruitment. Last year, it appeared on the campuses of Sydenham School of Business, Welingkar Institute of Management, SIES (South Indian Education Society) Business School and ICFAI. As a result, there are over 1,000 MBAs in e-Serve's employee base of 7,400 (there were none in 2000).

The next step was harnessing the power of referrals. Referrals are an important recruitment source for most BPOs, including e-Serve, because such recruits require a shorter recruitment process and less hand-holding. Most referral recruitments, however, tend to take place in a haphazard way.

In August 2003, e-Serve launched a structured employee referral programme called "Company of Friends", which ran for three months. "We decided to take it on a larger, official scale and even branded it," says Kumar.

Under the scheme, if a minimum of three candidates referred by an employee were selected, the employee won a cash prize of Rs 25,000. The company is unwilling to reveal the number of recruits that it employed though the programme, but employees say it was a significant number.

The bigger step, though, was to address the issue of uncertain career growth. To tackle this, e-Serve instituted nine bands or levels of growth in 2003. "The idea is to offer employees a clear, unambiguous growth chart," says Kumar.

In the BPO industry, every employee wants to grow extremely fast in terms of designation or money in the same organisation. Otherwise he may switch jobs.

But there is a limit to how many agents can be promoted to team leaders and how many team leaders or managers a firm can accommodate at one point of time. So in the band system, employees are appraised every year and classified into various bands based on their experience and performance and skill improvement.

An employee may remain a project leader or manager for over three years but he will keep upgrading from, say, band 2 to band 4 at the same time. So he will still feel motivated to perform well.

Still, employee turnover remained the biggest problem. While the industry is accustomed to annual attrition rates of 50 to 60 per cent, e-Serve claims a 10 to 15 percentage points lower attrition in case of its call centre and 5 to 10 percentage points lower attrition for back-office operations.

e-Serve decided to focus on the reasons for this level of attrition, especially among women employees who form 47 per cent of the employee base. (Though it's not a dominant majority, in the BPO industry, women above 25 are known to stay at the same firm for at least one or two years longer than men.)

For instance, e-Serve observed that a large number of married women left because they couldn't handle long shifts in addition to household chores. Many women also worked only to earn a supplementary income. Accordingly, in mid-2002, the company introduced a flexi-time option.

e-Serve then decided to work on the finding that a BPO job was perceived as a stop-gap arrangement. This was the main reason for attrition among graduates (who accounted for nearly half the workforce).

This year, e-Serve tied up with ICFAI for a three-year MBA programme for its employees. Currently the 40-odd employees who have enrolled for the course will attend classes on the weekend. The top 10 performers will get their entire fees reimbursed.

Research also revealed that e-Serve was clubbed with other call centres despite that fact that close to 70 per cent of its work is focused on Citigroup's back-office operations.

So in October 2004, the company launched a Rs 6-crore advertising blitzkrieg on billboards, print ads and radio, targeting the young graduate and using its employees as models.

The campaign positions e-Serve as a career and empowerment choice with the tagline "Power to lead". e-Serve, thus, becomes the first BPO firm to invest in such a high scale of mass media advertising. "We had to build an employer brand," says Kumar.

The strategy seems to be working. "e-Serve has been pro-active in directly tackling all apprehensions. Other BPOs are only advertising through their recruitment ads, but there's a limit to how much you can talk about your firm in a recruitment ad," says a consultant working with industry lobby National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom).

Kumar claims that the number of direct applicants has increased by 10 times, and at least 10 per cent are post-graduates and 3 to 5 per cent are even MBAs.

Competitors acknowledge the utility of e-Serve's initiatives. "The campaign should have a good rub-off on the entire BPO industry in terms of perception improvement," says Radhika Balasubramanian of Intelenet.

It's not just the campaign that seems to have impressed competition, e-Serve has spawned emulators too. Intelenet, for one, has tied up with NMIMS this month for a part-time MBA programme for its employees and may extend its referral programme on a larger scale.

Wipro Spectramind is experimenting with a flexi-time scheme too. Clearly, e-Serve cannot rest on its campaign to serve the purpose for too long.