Valueshore

Certainly, the U.S. and European markets are the big sharks to real in, but clearly China is on its way as an aggressive and strategic competitor by first winning on its regional home turf.

In the voice BPO segment India has already conceded to the Philippines who is projected to surpass its revenues later in 2010. This concession, mind you, is not based on some amicable truce between these two markets – rather, the Philippines has outcompeted India with a superior voice product. Of course it’s not taking these big punches to the face by staying on the ropes – it continues to respond by attending to what it should have been obsessive about from the beginning – managing the quality of its human capital per this post from Knowledge@Wharton.

However, Girija Panda, Chairman of Tata Consultancy, Asia Pacific, argues in this other Knowledge@Wharton Interview that India and China are actually on different roads to a common destiny. We’ll see.

India has also become masters – almost American-like in creating and spinning new segmentation acronyms to project its leadership in these quasi-new segments. A case in point is Knowledge Process Outsourcing or KPO. It continues to do well in the segment but the Philippines is again snapping as a Black Mamba by winning the largest KPO/LPO outsourcing deal secured by Integrion’s £583 million deal with Cameron-McKenna.

Latin American is well positioned to exploit the KPO niche but small wins thus far define the region’s tepid approach to the segment. This week we also discovered that there is a CCS outsourcing segment (Contact Center and Customer Service), according to this post from Global Services.

Is this not already defined as voice BPO? My research colleague said, for all his years in global service research he’s never seen the term CCS. This, it appears is another US$300 billion market. I’m being funny here, because this is simply call center outsourcing or BPO voice.

While I love what India has done to fundamentally create the sector, it needs to double its seriousness in attending to the core quality of its service product portfolio. In our new hyper-competitive economic climate – it snoozes – it looses. A decade ago it had 70% of the outsourcing market. By 2008 it was down to 48% and at the end of 2009 its market share sat at 42%.

Like England, France and Italy – venerable soccers stalwarts – who went home early in the recently completed World Cup, India has to go back to the drawing board and honestly look at its service product and make the necessary adjustments to continue winning in the Future. If it does not, competing locations and companies would certainly be doing it for them by projecting the favorability of their service product, companies and locations to India’s – particularly China