KPO – A step ahead of BPO

Flexibility and speed are critical. For example, in Business Research, customers are asking vendors to run projects from a few thousand US dollars upwards and expect complex global and multi-lingual research projects to start after as little as 15 minutes after the requests have been made. Supply Side Perspective of KPO: People, Quality, Differentiation and Marketing KPO is centered on professionals possessing the right skill sets. Therefore, access to a large, high-quality skill pool is a precondition for successful KPO operations, captive or third party.

For this reason, KPO operations are likely to emerge in countries with the highest educational standards, providing a large number of highly qualified professionals (Engineers, MBAs, PhDs, CFAs, Lawyers, etc.) such as India, China and Russia. India is likely to capture about 70% of the market for KPO, but the challenges will be significant. The ingredients of successful KPO are recruiting and training the right professionals, providing consistent quality over time, improving productivity to or beyond Western levels and successfully marketing the services to skeptical customers.

Setting up successful KPO companies, captives and third-party vendors, is very difficult and there are significant barriers to enter have been reflected in the past and the huge list of unsuccessful entries clearly reflect this. KPO companies are professional services companies and not white-collar factories. Therefore, world-class people development processes are at the root of successful KPOs. Developing professionals faster and better than anyone else will translate directly into better quality, productivity, retention and success in the market place.

Meritocracy and true employee care are only a few elements of such a philosophy. Recruiting the right people is critical and requires significant hiring, building brand equity at the right schools and in the open market. Successful players can attract better people. The interview-to-offer ratios of successful players are about 25:1 and the offer acceptance rates are as high as 80%. One of the Best practices in KPO is the huge investment (about 15% of the total work time) and developing skills sets such as, functional skills, cross-cultural skills, as well as managerial skills.