If you’re not fluent in English, but good at vernacular languages and customer skills, don’t worry, we have a job for you. Riding on the growing desi market, BPOs like HTMT, Firstsource and Infovision are aggressively recruiting people with regional language skills. According to Firstsource domestic business-head Sanjeev Sinha: “With large companies catering to domestic market, aggressively moving into smaller towns and rural areas, there is a robust demand for regional language skills and English from BPO firms.” Says InfoVision president Aditya Gupta, if a customer speaks a regional language, the call centre is expected to handle it.

“This is true in South India where a centre has to be able to handle all four languages. Most of our agents know three languages i.e. Hindi/ English and a regional language,” he says. While BFSI and telecom verticals are the forerunners in this trend, other segments like consumer durables expect customer support in eight languages.

HTMT, which employs over 6,000 people for its domestic business, services in over 19 regional languages. Apart from Hindi and English, the top languages are Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali and Punjabi. Unofficial estimates peg the number of professionals handling calls in the vernacular at 30,000-50,000. This figure is bound to grow rapidly. Apart from Firstsource, HTMT and Infovision, other companies which deal with regional language work include Aegis BPO, MphasiS and Tata SerWizSol.

Says Madan Padaki, Director of MeritTrac, a skills assessments firm, “The metrics are the same. We test for things like fluency and grammar. Companies are looking for the same qualities as that for people for international level and we test them for analytical, numerical and keyboard abilities. Only the cut-offs and selection criteria may be different.” Mr Padaki’s company is conducting assessments for a couple of BPOs in spoken Gujarati and Bengali on a pilot basis. Seeing the demand, MeritTrac is developing tests for 6-7 other languages including Telugu and Tamil. Source: Economics Times