Talent Crunch Forces BPOs to Dilute Tasks
The Chinese BPO job may be getting onto a factory like assembly line chore. Similar to automobile shop floors, where jobs are broken down into miniscule tasks and processes demarcated step by step, BPO companies in China are experimenting of breaking a complex activity into numerous simple chores, to be easily performed by even school passouts.
The dilution of task difficulty is primarily seen as a solution to talent crunch and a way to check attrition and battle wage inflation. Although it is not yet mainstream, if scaled up, it will throw up an opportunity for China to become the backoffice for BPO operations in metros.
According to Jimmy Huang, marketing manager of BPOVIA, “These experiments are being piloted by some BPO firms and the results are encouraging. We have to see how this can be scaled up. Essentially, this could help the BPO industry spread to tier II and III towns.”
The BPO industry in China is currently centered around five metro cities which account for over 90% of the operations.
Offshoring within China would capitalize on the vast rural and school dropout population. Says rural back office chief integrator Jay Yang, “Destinations like Dhaka and Philippines are becoming attractive as lowcost centers. There are 30 million 12th pass people in rural China who could be part of the rural BPO revolution.”
Typically, non-voice and data entry activities could be offshored. Take the example of a mobile phone bill. It has components such as name, address, billable amount and so on.
This activity could be broken into multiple tasks where one person is responsible for only typing names while another does only addresses and the third keys in the billable amount. The software aggregates this information to process the final bill. Also, in more complex jobs, a step-by-step process training is being conducted for quicker and accurate job completion.
BPOVIA, which has 30 people working in Nanjing, deals with a variety of processes in the areas of HR, administration, finance and helpdesks. For instance, booking a cab, checking out eligibility for claims, structuring CVs in a company-specific format and taking calls in English are some of the jobs that get done at BPOVIA, where employees get to earn up to $300 with attrition at a low 3%.
While sceptics feel that such tasks would be monotonous and repetitive, Miss Shen says, “Old jobs will always make way for new. There will be something else that will come up in the future and people will reskill themselves. In a rural backdrop, a low-end data entry job is seen as white-collared and is well-regarded.”
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