The pandemic forced upon us a wave of change in how we work; this has also opened new doors for offshore outsourcing.
The severity, suddenness and scale of COVID-19 pandemic had forced employers across the globe to adapt to new working conditions. Lockdowns quickly gave rise to massive adoption of the concept of work-from-home. While some industries were ready for remote work from even before the pandemic, many industries struggled to cope with the new ways of work. However, this process accelerated digital transformation in work as we know it for almost all industries. Terminologies that are now known by almost everyone could not have been comprehendible by many with traditional mindsets; this includes terms such as remote work, work-from-home, work-from-anywhere or digital nomads.
As the severity of pandemic lessened many employers opted for more traditional styles of work. Calling in employees back to office, or shifting to a hybrid model of work is the mainstream way forward for many employers in western countries now. However, employees in these countries often protest such calls for return to office. Those employers who shifted to a hybrid model or still relied on remote work, turned to employee tracking technologies for ensuring productivity during remote work [1].
Two other major trends that are also shaping the future of work, both of which started as the pandemic ensued, are the Great Resignation followed by mass layoff across the tech industries [2]. Both these trends indicate massive changes to work culture in developed, as well as developing, economies. While rise of Artificial Intelligence is another vital development in this arena, it is still too early to comment on how the advent of AI will affect work culture.
Given these great forces of change acting on work culture, businesses across the globe are waking up to the idea of embracing outsourcing as a viable alternative to in-house team management and to incorporating outsourcing within their overall business models. While global giants of outsourcing such as Accenture, Cognizant, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) or Infosys have Global Delivery Centers across the globe, providing both offshore services and on-site, onshore services through delivery centers located near the western clients, smaller Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies mainly rely on offshore services provided over the internet to make their business model work. As the onset of mass adoption of remote work has been proven to be a workable model for businesses, these organization are now pen to providing outsourced works to smaller BPO companies located on the far side of the globe. If a process can be carried out by an in-house employee sitting in his or her home, that same process can be outsourced to cost-effective BPO companies, even if they do not maintain Global Delivery Centers like the more established counterpart of theirs.
In this context the term “IT Enabled Services” or “ITES” comes into play. Any conceivable process or service that a business encounters which can be transmitted via the internet or information & communication technologies, can be offshore outsourced, and these processes or services can be termed as IT Enabled Services. That is, since these services can be transmitted via the information technology, these are termed as being ‘enabled’ by IT. By this definition, we can say part of BPO services which can be conducted remotely are known as ITES. Since, many of the processes which were previously thought to be implementable only through physical presence of the workforce have actually been conducted via the internet during the lockdown phases of the pandemic. This has broadened the scope of ITES to a much greater extent. Furthermore, these ITES can be serviced by even more cost-effective small and medium sized BPO firms in developing countries such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam or Philippines, rather than only by the big names such as Accenture and TCS. This has also opened the scope of Small & Medium Businesses (SMBs) located in developed economies in North America, Western Europe and elsewhere to participate in this amazing revolution of outsourcing in the era of remote work, since their service providers now need not be overwhelmingly larger than themselves. This provides superior customer service and boutique attention to detail for SMBs, as the smaller BPO firms have that thrust to prove themselves and cater to even the minutest of request of their SMB clients.
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