The central government has relaxed the norms on voice BPO

New Delhi: To strengthen India's position as a global outsourcing hub, the central government has made voice-based BPO guidelines more liberal. The government has bridged the gap between local and international units of BPOs, allowing interconnectivity between all types of OSP centers. This will reduce the burden of compliance on the companies in the industry and increase the efficiency of their operations. Simply put, other service providers (OSPs) will be allowed to use telecom services to provide application services, IT services, call center services or any type of outsourcing service. They do not have to build separate infrastructure for this.

These rules will allow companies, and especially airlines, to provide services across the globe and locally with the help of a voice-based center through Common Telecom Resources in India.

In addition, the removal of restrictions on data interconnectivity between the BPO centers of the same company will make it possible for the group company or any other company to do better resource management in the BPO.

The rules for using wireline or wireless broadband to connect customers to remote call center agents in any location have also been significantly relaxed.

All these measures will result in massive cost savings and a significant increase in the capacity utility of the BPO. It will also increase efficiency. With it, India will emerge as a major hub for IT enabled services.

India's BPO industry has an extraordinary potential of ૫ 4.5 billion (Rs 4.5 lakh crore) by 202. The new standards will have far-reaching consequences and BPOs will continue to have uninterrupted connectivity.

Prime Minister Modi tweeted that the OSP guidelines were liberalized in November 2020 to promote our BPO industry and have now been simplified. This will reduce the burden of compliance on the industry and help our tech industry. These OSPs will now be self-governing and will no longer have to provide details to the telecom department on a daily basis. They will have to maintain their call data record, usage data record and system log of all customer calls for a fixed period of time and subject to data security norms, said Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.

The new rules allow OSP's remote agents to connect directly to centralized appboxes using any technology, the official statement said. They range from broadband to wireless or wireline. India's IT business process management industry was worth ૬ 4.5 billion in 2015-16 and employs millions of people.