Call centres in India to grow 65% in 2007-08

New Delhi, Feb 13 (UNI) Domestic call centres' revenue is likely to grow by 65 per cent in the current fiscal to touch Rs 8,500 crore, a study says.

The survey of the captive and third party call centres done by Dataquest further says this estimated growth is up from 42 per cent recorded in the previous year.

The industry posted revenues of Rs 5,200 crore in 2006-07 with the captive call centres, which service a company's own clients, contributing nearly 70 per cent at Rs 3,598 crore.

The outsourced call centre industry (those servicing the needs of third party clients) posted revenues of Rs 1,602 crore.

Of this, the organised players (those employing more than 200 people) contributed Rs 1,097 crore, while the revenue from the unorganised players added about Rs 505 crore.

Of the total work force of over 280,000 people in the domestic call centre industry at 2007-end, 130,000 were employed by captive call centres and over 150,000 by the outsourced industry.

Top 10 outsourced players employed 71,645 people and contributed 749 crore, that is about 47 per cent of the outsourced industry, according to the survey.

The study reveals that the telecom and the banking and financial services industry (BFSI) together account for 80 per cent of the domestic outsourced call centre business.

Almost all the telecom major players--Bharti, Vodafone, BSNL, Spice and Idea--have outsourced their call centre services.

But these two sectors appear to have a very different approach to the services they are outsourcing. While telecom players are outsourcing largely inbound customer service, the BFSI segment prefers to keep customer service in-house only giving out telemarketing services--a mix of cold calling, sales queries and loyalty selling.

However, it is the private sector banks that have taken the lead in outsourcing with ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Citibank, ABN Amro, HSBC giving out a lot of business.

But the survey notes that India's largest bank, State Bank of India, too, has begun outsourcing recently.

Dataquest Chief Editor Prasanto K Roy said, ''Government and citizen services are growing rapidly, and this presents a high potential market in the coming year. As the market enters a phase when players will have to rapidly scale up, the industry needs to focus on attracting, retaining and developing manpower.'' UNI SAA MP HS1441