Business process outsourcing (BPO) starts with understanding the processes and culminates in improving those processes. Most of the challenges of BPO vendors, hence, come directly from what kind of processes that they are trying to execute.

Some of the processes are directly dependent on the vertical industry. They are often called by the name of the vertical. For example, healthcare provider services, does indicate that one has to handle processes such as medical coding, billing, and collections. Similar is the case with publishing services.

On the other hand, there are processes that are common across verticals. Customer service or telemarketing is something many B2C businesses carry out, more or less in similar manner. These, naturally, were the first processes to be outsourced, and hence, are more mature. Also, more often than not, work on the principle of scale and often commoditized.

While selecting the segments to focus on, we had a simple challenge—whether to write about the most prevalent segments or to write about the emerging segments. But keeping on line with the spirit of the issue—understanding the industry—we decided on the latter. Except for some numbers, we would have added very little to the understanding of the industry had we written about customer service or claims processing.

We took up five emerging segments, one dark horse segment, and one segment that is under threat. The emerging five are receivable management (a horizontal across many industries), healthcare provider and payer services (industry specific), tech support (largely industry specific but including enterprise helpdesk as well), airlines (industry specific), and HR (horizontal across many industries). We included publishing services as an afterthought. Here was some BPO services that was happening much before the term was coined and yet, many in the BPO industry know little about it. And finally, telemarketing, a service that is prevalent, but whose future is in question because of the DNC regulations in the United States. One area that we almost write on but could not get enough information in time was equity research, a fast emerging opportunity.

The nature of the segments are different; so are the way they have been presented here. For example, in somewhat established segments like tech support, airlines, and telemarketing, we have tried to provide numbers. In new segments like HR, receivables management and healthcare, we have tried to show the opportunity. And in publishing we have just introduced the segments to get the message across that this is being done at a grand scale in India.

Some of these segments, we have covered in detail in the past issues. Some others, we will, in future. Yet others may emerge and the next year’s list may look completely different.