Uncertainty is an integral part of any business but US-based BPO firm Concentrix promises to improve the predictability and deliver guaranteed business outcomes with its analytics solutions

By Mohd Ujaley

Nobody likes uncertainty, be it an early start-ups or a large conglomerate. They all want to be predictable with decent accuracy about their future outcomes on the present investments. Unfortunately, there is no tool which guarantee this, but your odds will improve if you understand the data around you. And, this is what, business process outsourcing firm Concentrix, that had acquired IBM’s BPO operations in 2013 is now foraying into in the Indian market. With its recently launched business intelligence and reporting solutions (BIR) services, it promises to improve the predictability and deliver business outcomes.

According to the company officials, the business intelligence and reporting solutions is a very light weight, low capex service only solution that will ride on the existing IT infrastructure of an organisation. “We will ride on the existing data warehouse and the IT system to look up the data, create a hypothesis around it and make the prediction with almost guaranteed business outcome,” Anuj Kumar, global leader analytics, Concentrix told EC. Adding that last year, they took over a project where a life insurance company had a premium collection rate in mid-seventy only but with the proper combination of data analytics and BPO services, they moved up the rate from 75 per cent to 88 per cent .

In India adoption of analytics is still at nascent stage, however the country is moving in the same way, the way rest of the world is moving. All the MNCs that have come to India, their practices almost mirror what they are doing in major markets. Similarly, start-ups are also getting the same learning from their PE investors. Therefore, adoption of data analytics will matured gradually. “Overseas, most of the companies have organised their data. They have invested in data warehouse, storage technology, and have set-up internal business intelligence units. In India, we will see same thing. Indian companies will buy infrastructure, querying techniques, some of the front end tools and will set-up central business intelligence units,” explains Kumar, adding that most of the banks and large companies have already done that.

Basically in recent past, California headquartered Concentrix has enhanced its focus on four high value services – digital content creation and transaction, analytics, process transformation and consulting. Of this, the company expects analytics segment to deliver 15 per cent of its revenue in individual markets over the next 3-4 years and wants it to work as entry point to acquire new clients. Currently, the contribution of these four in the overall revenue of the company is very low as compared to traditional customer care work, call centre and accounting from where almost 85-90 per cent of the revenue comes.

Major demand for Concentrix’s business intelligence and reporting solutions (BIR) services is coming from banking, insurance, healthcare, retail including e-commerce & consumer packaged goods (CPG) sectors. But company is also reaching out to transportation, airlines and online travel companies. “For us India is the fifth largest market. As the way economy is moving and investment is happening, we see India moving to the fourth position within 3 years,” says Kumar, adding that some of the large telecom players, automobiles firms and insurance giants are already its clients.

Concentrix says, analytics is a 250-member team with majority of them working out of India centres and partly from Korea, partly onshore in North America and Europe. “We said two years ago that we will be investing around $8 million in the analytics segment which we have done,” claims Kumar.

(Anuj Kumar, global leader analytics, Concentrix)

Other than India being a significant part of its delivery unit, Cocentrix is also eyeing India for its growing technology demand. “There is huge potential in government vertical, especially in the area of managing payment, fraud, payment abuse, that all government find it difficult to manage, if took that alone, that would be very large which can be addressed with the help of data anlytics,” states Kumar.

Similarly, in the area of healthcare administration, patient record and clinical record management, company sees huge potential for data analytics. “Right now most of the focus have been on corporate sector but there are eminence potential in government sector. Over a period of time, we certainly want to look at the government business,” says Kumar.