8) India's Customer Relations BPO’s Looking to go Multilingual

An article in Business Line speaks of a recent development in India's technical and customer support industry. It is entitled: BPO’s are looking into tapping non-English speaking markets.

The Indian workforce, apart from being the largest worldwide, is also strengthened by a high level of English proficiency, making it an ideal spot for BPO’s specializing in the field of customer relations. One can deduce that since nearly everyone can speak English, the competition among employee’s lies in who can speak English better than most. This result in higher job requirements which could edge out applicants who are not so good in English, but are otherwise qualified from the perpetual job race.

The Indian workforce would definitely stand to benefit from such a move if it began to address the need for multilingual workers at the scholastic collegiate C level. Diversity in training would ease up the competition among the vast English-speaking population and provide a comfortable niche for workers with marketable proficiency in other languages.

It should be pointed out that as a rule, major tech and customer support companies already have divisions that deal with non-English speaking customers. The multilingual capacity of a customer relations company increases the chances of building a steady consumer base among its non-English speaking customers.

At the moment, non-English speaking telemarketers and support technicians are paid slightly higher than the majority English-speaking portion of the workforce. This, if anything, denotes the extra value they give to the company, if not their outright indispensability.

A venture capitalist with a special interest in a company's growth would definitely do well to promote any effort exerted by that company to broaden its consumer scope. As long as the ambition is feasible, and the existing resources are secure, there is no call to prevent the establishment of new infrastructure that would give the company a greater reach.

One very real danger is that the company will endeavor to expand while the current setup is not yet stable. The hype for expansion might blind an investor to the limitations of the current setup, and bait him/her into the sin of stretching it too thin, sacrificing valuable resources for the maintenance of the current infrastructure for the sake of this new project.

Certainly the market is ripe for expansion, but is the company ready to reach out and grab a piece of the apple, without losing balance?

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