French customer experience major Teleperformance Group would double its workforce in India to 1,80,000 in three years and make significant investment as it had embarked to grow its global revenues to more than 10 billion Euros by 2025 from 7 billion Euros reported last year, founder and CEO Daniel Julien said in an interview.
“We plan to make India the global centre of excellence of Teleperformance. Today we are 4,20,000 people globally, including 90,000 in India. We plan to double that [the headcount in India] in three years. You can imagine the investment that we will make here,” Mr. Julien said.
He said India could be among the best places in the world to look for talent to serve the developed markets of U.S., U.K., Australia and Canada, “but the reality is that India has all the potentials to serve all English-speaking countries. So, for us India is critical.”
“We are in India not because it is competitively priced or due to the size of the talent pool, but we see a lot of quality at par or even better than the rest of the world. This is why we are very bullish to invest so much in India in the coming years,” said Agustin Grisanti, Global COO, Teleperformance Group.
According to Mr. Julien, the company’s cumulative investment in India till 2025 would be 2 billion Euros, including 1 billion Euros invested in the acquisition of Intelenet Global Services from Blackstone in India in 2018.
Stating that the Group had seen several global economic crises in the last 44 years, he said the impending global recession would not have any major impact on the operations.
“Our industry is somehow counter-cycle. We may have some pricing pressure and budget reduction in terms of quality of service but it would be compensated by increased business volume. When companies need to reduce cost, the best solution is outsourcing, offshoring and rationalisation,” he said.
He said during tough times, companies do spend the extra money to retain customers and to sell more and this benefits entities like Teleperformance.
Earlier this week, Teleperformance opened a large centre in Mohali and its second phase would open in the coming months. While a big centre is coming up in Gurugram, a relatively small centre will be set up in Pune. Large work spaces are planned in Hyderabad and Indore.
“We are deliberating to set up two mega campuses in two cities of India in the next three years which will have space for 10,000 people, and additional space of training academy, leadership academy. Our vision is to make these our flagship campuses globally,” said Anish Mukker, CEO, Teleperformance India.
The company has opted for looking for talent in tier 2 and tier 3 cites especially hiring women who may work for long tenures. “We are taking employment where it deserves to be. We want to attract more diverse talent,” he said.
“We are rated as one of the best places to work. For women we are a great place to work. We are trying hard to get access to the talent that finds meaningful ways of working and we feel passionate to serve the community we operate in,” he added.
