Cognizant BPO Operations to go Live by November

Bangalore-based Cognizant Technologies, the latest among software companies to announce its foray into BPO, expects its operations to go live by the middle of November. "We are keen to begin soon because if we are not able to go live by middle of November, we shall have to postpone it till mid-January after the holiday season in US is over," said Raju Bhatnagar, head, BPO operations at Cognizant and former head of E-Funds India. 

Cognizant, which is focussed on banking, financial, insurance and healthcare sectors, will also offer its BPO services in the same verticals. The company has just finalized the real estate for its new initiative and expects the center to be up and running by the middle of October. It also expects to snap its first client soon. "Client acquisition is not a major issue since we have an established base of customers who know about our deliverables and the quality of service," said
Bhatnagar. 

Initially the center would have a capacity of 150 seats. Gradually as business ramps up capacity will also be increased. It is a challenging proposition in BPO operations to ensure optimum utilization of its centers. While it is a gamble to anticipate capacity and invest, it is equally important to be able to ramp quickly as soon as client is acquired. This year has seen most top ranking software companies announce their foray into the BPO space since it has synergies with the existing offerings.

With the new offering, companies can now position themselves as an end to end service provider from products, solutions and support. For BPO start-ups client acquisition proves to be one of the most critical stumbling blocks, which is not going to be an issue with software majors with substantial client base

Balaka Baruah Aggarwal