Ahead of e-commerce sales season, BPOs in hiring mode

Back-office firms have beefed up teams at centres across India to handle the expected growth in customer interaction during the festive sales of ecommerce firms.

Global e-tailer Amazon is looking at doubling its business during the festive season. Flipkart, with a war chest of more than $4 billion, is set to penetrate deeper and grow business three times in the period, when nearly 40 per cent of the country’s retail sales is transacted. A third player, Paytm Mall, backed by Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba, is also using the festive sales season to capture market share.

These e-commerce firms are also aggressively focusing on engaging with customers. For this, they are depending on the expertise of back-office firms that have worked with global customers. At least two business process outsourcing (BPO) companies have confirmed their plans to add thousands of customer service executives and professionals with other expertise this year.

HGS said it has added another delivery centre in Indore, which is dedicated to providing high-quality customer experience for an ecommerce giant and its consumers. The company has since July hired about 350 customer support professionals for the new centre. It is expected to have a workforce of more than 800 Hindi and Englishspeaking undergraduates and graduates from nearby areas by the end of this year.

“This is aligned to our strategy to create tangible differentiators to help make our clients more competitive across customer experience functions,” said Partha DeSarkar, global CEO, HGS. “We are excited to expand our presence in Indore as its rich talent provides a great potential for scale and complements our expertise in delivering higher value to clients.”

More than 40 per cent of the growth is expected to be driven by e-commerce, digital wallets and other new-age companies and a good portion of the new talent would be deployed for such clients, said Sandip Sen, global CEO, Aegis Ltd.

Aegis plans to hire nearly 5,000 this year to cater to the increasing demand for premium business from e-commerce, new-age and telecom companies. It currently has about 25,000 employees and 80 per cent of them cater to domestic clients as of now.

“About 5,000 people will be added this year. Domestic premium business, as opposed to domestic mass business, is growing. While 40-45 per cent of the growth will come in from new-age companies, 20-25 per cent of the growth is expected to come from premium businesses of telecom companies and the rest will be from financial services,” said Sen.