The BPM (business process management) and back office operations of IT and ITeS firms have taken a hit due to the lockdown.
The BPM and IT services firms in India, considered to be the back office of the world, are affected owing to their inability to offer work from home solutions because of
concerns of their clients, especially from the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) segment, about losing sensitive customer information.
Though it is not clear how much of the revenues of the IT and the ITeS companies have been affected due to the lack of work from home solutions, IT majors like Infosys, Wipro and TCS, besides those companies that are solely into BPM, have many
BFSI clients from India. For some IT majors, the BPM segment is around 10-15 per cent of their total revenue. A clear picture of the revenue impact may emerge only after the lockdown is lifted.
Although a few states with outsourcing hubs have classified such services as essential, work from home will remain the primary solution amid the ongoing pandemic. The back offices will continue to work with relaxed non-disclosure and other privacy rules to figure out the best possible way in this situation of uncertainty.
“With lack of access to essential databases and reliable high-speed internet at homes, this lockdown has immensely affected the outsourcing industry which handles a range of critical activities for the world, like trade settlements, air reservations, and insurance claims. The impact is visible on the quality of services for industries that cannot afford even a split second latency, in addition to facing a reduced number of working staff, and immensely affected business continuity plans in India,” Rajiv M. Ranjan founder and chairman, PaisaDukan.com, told THE WEEK.
Experts say that though BPM and back office work involves both voice and non-voice services, it is primarily the voice services that may have been mainly affected due to the lockdown.
“There is critical and sensitive customer information that needs to be accessed by a BPM employee while addressing queries from a customer. This information could be related to an insurance policy or a customers bank account or related to some credit and debit information, and is generally available to the BPM person through a desktop in the centre in a very secure environment. Such kind of information cannot be accessed in a work from home (WFH) environment. Back office non-voice functions can be accessed from a WFH environment through a VPN. Most of the Indian IT companies have BPM centres in the Philippines and that is also reeling under lockdown and their BPM revenues may have further been hit due to that,” said Amit Chandra,vice president, HDFC Securities, Mumbai.
Meanwhile, a few BPM companies are coping with the lockdown with work from home options despite a few initial transitional challenges. For BPM company Omega Healthcare Management Services, the initial phases of the lockdown was hard as it came barely without any prior notice. “We each had our challenges in responding to this stringent measure required to tackle the situation at hand. Organisations like ours operate in secure work environments with strict adherence to several compliance requirements of the larger healthcare industry. WFH is a new mode of operation for us. But we lost no time in getting things underway. Today, we have migrated 95 per cent of our operations to work from home,” said Dr. Guruvayurappan P.V., senior vice president, HR, Omega Healthcare Management Services Limited.
