Housewives, dropouts new BPO choices

CHENNAI: What''s the best way to retain talent in BPO sector, which is witnessing a high attrition rate of 45 per cent? Employ housewives and school dropouts. Many BPO firms are increasingly finding success in retaining housewives, dropouts from schools and colleges and sons/daughters of farmers for the mundane BPO job.
Unlike young grads who worry about growth opportunity to shift jobs, housewives are satisfied with the monotonous task.Another emerging trend is companies are taking data jobs to homes.
‘‘For 2 years, I was sitting idle. Now, I am working in a BPO firm engaged in data entry and scanning documents to electronic images, says 30-year old Vijayalakshmi.
Top domestic BPO players are resorting to non-poaching pacts with outsourcing firms to prevent people movement. While this strategy has worked for some, MNC BPO firms have found success in training unskilled people for data-based BPO jobs.
Take US-based Lason Inc which offshores integrated data service out of Chennai for providing services to healthcare, banking, credit card, legal and e-publishing to Fortune 500 companies.
‘‘We train any human being who could see and type. We have a large talent pool among housewives,'''' says Pradeep Nevatia, MD. ‘‘We have single digit attrition.''''
Company executives say there is less attrition as they go in for ordinary people whose don''t mind doing mundane tasks.
Lason outsources basic data jobs, while the employees concentrate on client facing activities, quality control and value addition. More than half of the workforce in production shops comprises housewives. IT experts say this model will soon be embraced by many mid-sized software companies. ‘‘The future of work will be very different from what we see today, says an HR consultant.