Teleperformance draws on talent, growth, and opportunities from India

The Euro8.4 billion business process management and omnichannel customer experience firm is betting big on India to build its mid to senior leadership roles, even as it looks to increase its India presence to more than 20 per cent of its global headcount in the next two-years.

At present four key roles are being held by Indian managers, this includes Bhupinder Singh, president of transformation, Dev Mudaliar, global CIO, Sidharth Mukherjee, global CDO.

Daniel Julien, founder and CEO, Teleperformance in his recent visit to India said that he wants to place the country as the center of the company’s development activity. “India is important not only because of the cost arbitrage but also because of the access to talent. Our global headcount is 420,000 and of that almost 90,000 are in India. This will go further up in the coming year,” said Julien. He further added that the only challenge so far has been bandwidth issues, but hopes that the 5G roll out will ease that too.

“India is great from talent, growth, opportunities. The only hindrance for us has been the bandwidth issue. The sooner India gets onto the 5G network the potential of opportunities will just explode,” said Julien.

The company has already begun to gear up its operations in India, other than being a centre which sources more global businesses, but it will also drive the company’s digital and analytical offerings. Teleperformace is aiming that the digital and analytical segment will ramp up to be a 5,000 members strong team in a few years.

“The technology, analytics and process excellence or TAP as we call it is at present around 1,700 people team which we expect to touch 2,000 by the end of this year. But what is important to note is that 70 per cent of our new business that we get involve transformative component work done by this team,” said Bhupinder Singh, president, Group Transformation, Teleperformance.

Teleperformance is a unique company among the BPM segment as it still has a strong presence in the voice call centre operations. Rather 70 per cent of its revenues still come from voice-based services. Julien still believes that voice is of a significant importance to customers.

“Voice is not only about providing information but also connecting emotionally. It also builds trust. So globally 70 per cent of our business is voice. Though in India we do more non-voice work simply because voice capability that caters to markets of US and Europe are much better in Philippines and South America,” he added.

He also added that voice is back in focus due to the surge in video communications, “5G hence is a huge opportunity for us to bring together high quality voice and video together,” he said.

What makes Teleperformance different from several BPM players is its India focus. Not only is India one of the largest geographies for servicing global clients, but India is a huge market as well. This is due to the acquisition of Intelenet, which had acquired Sparsh BPO, one of the largest players in the domestic market. In the first half of 2022, India operations generated Euro264 million (around Rs 2,143 crore).

Anish Mukker, CEO, Teleperformance India, has big plans for the operations here. First is the headcount which he wants to take to 100,000 by the end of this year. Add to this the focus will be to ramp-up non-voice offerings from the current 40 per cent to 50 per cent. “We expect Indian business to grow 25 per cent year on year, but the non-voice business will grow by at least 40 per cent,” added Mukker. For this the company is also ramping up its presence in tier 2 and 3 cities. It recently opened a office in Mohali.

Indian is also significant in the company’s stated target of becoming a Euro 10 billion company by 2025. When asked if the current business environment will make the company and board rethink the target? “We are confident of the target. 2022 is already towards the end. Yes, these are challenging times but when developed countries are under crisis they tend to offshore more and look at building efficiencies,” said Julien. Business Standard