ICICIOneSource, a BPO firm, has said that it would be ready with its call centre in Malad, a Mumbai suburb, by early 2004.
The centre, the fifth in the country and the first in Mumbai, will have a capacity of 700-1000 seats. About $8,000 per seat has been invested in this centre.
The company, which has doubled its headcount in the first six months of this financial year, currently has more than 4,000 employees on the payroll.
Ananda Mukerji, chief executive and managing director, ICICIOneSource, said, "This staff size puts us among the top-three players in the BPO space and ensures that every company that comes to India for offshoring has us on its radar. However, a lot of the growth in business volumes is coming from ramp-ups from existing clients."
In the next 3-6 months, the company plans to ramp up the headcount to above-5,000 mark by hiring 200 employees per month.
Besides the Mumbai centre, the company is also looking at additions to its four existing centres in Bangalore.
As to whether this sort of ramping up is creating a serious backlash in the US, Mukerji said ICICI OneSource has not seen any impact, both from existing or potential clients.
"If anything, the offshoring bus to India is only swelling and gaining immense momentum. Companies are continuing to proceed or accelerate with their plans of offshoring to India."
"On practical grounds, there is nothing that Indian companies can do to stop this agitation. What we need to ensure is to reinforce and strengthen the offshoring thesis by improving upon SLAs (service-level agreements), move up the value curve and deliver customer delight. As an industry, we need to ensure that we get to deliver best in breed solutions from state-of-the-art delivery centers. We will need to ensure that any bottlenecks to growth (infrastructure, people and resources) should be addressed and risks adequately mitigated," he added.
Mukerji expressed happiness over the way in which companies have adopted themselves to these bottlenecks.
"A viable strategy that has been adopted is to offshore work that accrues from incremental business growth. What this means is that companies do not disturb their existing platforms but move jobs that would have otherwise been created in these countries to India. A pilot project enables them to test offshoring and verify results and also sets the stage for acceptance of offshoring within its ecosystem as a natural and expected outcome."
"Another strategy adopted is not to replace retiring employees with new jobs in the same country but to replace them with offshored jobs. Overall, companies will need to develop plans that address issues of the backlash. They will need to figure out ways of improving productivity of existing employees and explore ways of redeployment," Mukerji added.