WNS says closing in on domestic BPO deals

Keshav Murugesh has won investor confidence within the first 100 days in office as group CEO of WNS, as the rumours of stake sale have died down. In a conversation with DNA, Murugesh shared his roadmap for WNS, while maintaining that even the best of ideas in the world needs to be marketed.Excerpts:

At the recent Nasscom BPO Summit many executives were talking about talent crunch. What is it all about? Why all of a sudden?
It’s not actually talent crunch. In terms of actual numbers India produces enough graduates. If you see the statistics, India produces 3.5 to 4 million graduates, 10% of these graduates are engaged in this business. The crunch is in employable numbers. Of the 4 million graduates we are getting 10%, that’s a huge number. Every company will tell you — we interviewed 100 people and got only one person. That means 99% did not make the cut. We are worried about that.

BPO jobs have become quite a craze among students and unskilled graduates who have a grip on spoken English. So what talent are we talking about?
India is past that stage now when we said we just want some basic qualification to wow the world. Now it’s different. So what do we need in terms of talent? First is good spoken English. Second is the person has to have good presentation skills. Third thing is he must be commercially savvy, that is he must understand what I am doing and how is it impacting my clients’ client. Fourth is some amount of strategic orientation. In addition to these, if we can get people who understand business domains that would be very useful because BPO today is no longer about just reducing somebody’s cost.

We had of course started with that objective, but now and especially since the downturn clients asking us to lead their business. See every one is talking about stress, Europe is in stress, North America still has not emerged from recession, and India we are talking about talent crunch. It is counter intuitive. Everyone in the world is now saying that talent is required to reduce cost, to come with game changing ideas that ensure revenue continuity. They want to be led now. They are no longer interested in giving you the next work order. They want people who tell them these are three things that you do and your cost is down by this percentage and topline is up by this percentage.

So are you looking at consulting projects?
To some extent yes, actually all of us are to some extent working like consultants. We have to be that way. And this has to increase. If you look at the headroom for BPO business, the addressable market is $300 billion and what are we offering now, roughly $30 billion. There is that huge gap. So there is some reason why we are at that stage. We have to broaden our offerings.

But that seems to be quite far as at present your voice business is very high…
True and now process business also brings considerable percentage of revenue. But the most exciting part of WNS is that most of my clients are so under penetrated which means we have such huge scope to grow.But we need people who can lead the customer. We need people who can cross-sell, who can take part in the client’s strategic planning session and tell them that your business is stretched and these are the things you should do. If you have people like that then this industry’s potential is beyond imagination.

So at the ground level you have to position yourself as a consulting firm…
We are using the consulting word may be a bit more frequently here. That may not be our focus. Our focus is to deliver greater value and lead the customer. To do that I have to be like a consultant, I have to be like a BPO, I have to be like a service provider, whatever it takes. So you need to have learning and development processes in place, you need to have business domain skills in place, you need to have tremendous functional capabilities in place etc. So if you are looking at 20,000-25000 people in an organisation then may be about 1,000 think like this. I am saying what if I have 15,000 such people then the ability to penetrate existing clients increase.

So are you investing in creating new capabilities?
From a WNS perspective we are focusing on our existing businesses. Insurance travel, banking and financial services we are very strong. We are looking to see what are the new offerings we can add. We are introducing thought leadership in our horizontal offerings like research analytics, accounting, etc. Then we are looking at investing in new spaces where we should be in. There are two or three logical businesses that need help during recession. There are huge customer bases that they handle.

So you will take those customer database and do research and analytics?
Yes there are so many things that you can offer. After retail logistics and transportation is another area. There is huge scope for offering new services. Third is all governments are under public debt. They are looking at ways to reduce cost without compromising services to citizens.

Are you looking at the domestic BPO market?
Yes we are looking at it. We have not given any shape to it. We are talking for some potential deals. We will have some strategic planning discussion in July and will take some decisions relating to India. But the way of delivery and operation in India will be different.
Source: DNA
http://www.dnaindia.com/money/interview_wns-says-closing-in-on-domestic-bpo-deals_1396493