End of the India BPO story?

May 19, 2007 – 10:26 pm

Eclipse In The Middle Of Glory?  – from this week’s issue of Outlook India.(from next week, registration will be required) some the interesting facts  mentioned are

Puffed-up projections by consultants, followed by a steep cost escalation for manpower, infrastructure in last 2 years due to searing salaries, real estate prices
High rates of attrition coupled with low levels of staff productivity
Operational problems, lack of scale and poor morale are further hounding BPOs
Most MNCs are predicted to go slow on expansion plans and eventually exit
Source: Forrester Research, Zinnov
***

“More than 60% of companies’ (read mncs) captive (software and outsourcing) centers fail to meet expectations in India.”
A Forrester Research report
“…Over 75 per cent of the global IT initiatives worldwide are not as successful as they were initially envisioned.”
A Zinnov research report

The fact  is that Indian companies (especially IT related ) provide very poor customer service  and are very short sighted.  They rarely understand the customer’s problems.  They are only interested in saving a few dollars, they do not realise that an unhappy customer will not bother to complain, just spend thousands of dollars somewhere else.

Poor customer service is also the reason why most of  the large Indian companies deal with commodities, where prices fluctuate. Some of  the largest companies in India have non-Indian origins and little competition because their competitors do not offer comparable customer service.

On my last job, I was told by many customers, – “Your product technology is outdated, your prices are higher than competitors but while finalising orders we insist on placing the order on your company because of your customer service” . Many times the customer would make changes or mistakes, but we were told to accomodate the changes, treat the customer sympathetically. Orders would be taken at a loss initially, considering future projects from the customer.  These were high value projects – usually lakhs , sometimes crores of  rupees.  

I may be having high standards, but while dealing with Indian internet companies one of  the features common to all of them is their shortsightedness. They are only interested in extracting a few hundred rupees (or dollars) from the customer, they do not realise that an angry customer can easily spend their money elsewhere. And that is what most Indian website owners do, and the companies outsourcing to India are doing now. Low prices may help initially, but in the long term, how much you care for your customer makes a big difference.

By 2k7 | Posted in India, Internet, Search, outsourcing | Comments (0)

Net surfing hits small towns big time

May 16, 2007 – 6:30 am

Net surfing hits small towns big time

One of the reasons why there is such a boom is that BSNL which provides internet connection in the rest of India has very reasonable internet charges and unlimited plans. In Mumbai, MTNL does not have an unlimited broadband plan and most of the other ISPs are very unreliable, they take your cheque and disappear.

Most of the people I outsource work to are from small towns and cities, they tend to be more hardworking and sincere, working on major holidays and festivals. I had gone home after a long time last year. At the airport check in counter and security check, the one thing that struck me was how genuine the ladies seemed. Here many people you interact with are so artificial, you wonder why they are wasting your time .(That could be one of  the reasons I think Bollywood is so popular here, everyone watches movies to improve their personal acting skills!). In large metros, there are a lot of opportunities, so vendors generally charge a higher rate and are not very reliable.

Many large companies in USA outsource their work to people working at home with a internet connection, there are some companies that hire thousands of people . The materialistic aspects of Western culture have been quickly adopted by  certain sections of Indian society, but unfortunately few Indian companies adopt trends which could improve the life of many people in small towns.
 

 

By 2k7 | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Freelance online marketplaces

May 13, 2007 – 2:00 pm

Got a PC? Work for $20 bn market - article on IBNLive on freelance online marketplaces.

I had spent a lot of  time checking out these websites – Guru, RentaCoder, GetaFreelancer, Elance since some of  my websites are on related subjects. There is some safety in payment, but a lot of time is spent bidding on projects and the rates can be very low.

A lot of Indian freelancers could earn more if  they could work locally, but unfortunately very little money is spent on advertising online in India. Even the large Indian websites spend a crores on promotions on TV, and the poor Indian website owners get paid 50 paise/1 c for every targetted visitor they deliver to these websites. 

By 2k7 | Posted in India, Internet, Search | Comments (0)

Will .mobi websites be popular?

May 10, 2007 – 12:30 pm

Youngsters drive ‘dotmobi’ craze in India (the article in the print edition of Economic Times was completely different – maybe they split articles)

I suppose .mobi websites will become popular for products and services which people who spend a lot of time travelling use (and have high end mobile phones), but currently most of the domain names are purchased by domain investors. Since this is a new tld, the parking revenue is almost nil for most .mobi domain names.

When a new TLD is introduced, domain investors grab all the good domain names, recover their money by making a few high value sales. For .in, many good names have dropped recently, some have decent traffic.

.com’s continue to be the best best, received payment for my first sale on Sedo, more than 15 characters long. They were very prompt with the payment, I received it even before I was notified that the domain was transferred away. The transfer itself took more than 40 days, because the domain name could not be transferred away to another registrar within 60 days of registration.

With long domain names,while registering a domain, you feel it is good name, after a few weeks you wonder why you bought it. There is a limited supply of shorter domain names and people are less likely to make mistakes typing out the names. But for .mobi like most other gTLDs, most good short names are already purchased by domain investors. 

By 2k7 | Posted in domains, India | Comments (0)

Add Adsense, lose PR?

May 6, 2007 – 3:14 pm

Adding Adsense loses rankings? 

By adding Adsense to your webpages, you are providing Google all information about your website, how many visitors you have, from where they come and how long they stay at your website. Since information is shared between Googlebot and the Adsense bot, they also use it to derank your website.

I was observing changes in about 30 new websites (less than 3 months old), PR3 or above . The websites where Adsense  was not added, retained PR or got a higher PR, while websites where Adsense was added, the PR usually decreased or sometimes remained constant.

So for high PR websites, with traffic that does not convert (like Webmaster traffic with low CTR) or with low traffic, it is better not to put Adsense on your website. Many times only PSAs are shown, and you may be spending money to get traffic to your website. You can make more money selling text links or through affiliate programs.  

By 2k7 | Posted in Internet, Search | Comments (1)