Ganesh Kapoor FAST FOOD RETAIL With a clutch of MNC fast food chains and home-spun ones emerging, fast food retail is in the fast lane.	Karishma Khanna CALL CENTRE/BPO From customer contact to telemarketing to medical transcription to claims processing to other BPO activities, India is really back-office to the world.
Anurag Jain DIRECT SALES From cell phone connections to credit cards to houses, India's aggressive direct selling agents sell, well, anything.	Gaurav Gulati ORGANISED RETAIL Organised retail is serious business, a good career opportunity, and the biggest hirer of them all.

Even as you read this sentence, 33 million faces, give or take a few thousand, are wreathed in smiles. Some are in call centres smiling into their mouthpieces. Others are in shops smiling at customers. And still others are in restaurants, trying their bestest to be chummy with diners who just want to be left alone. There are more, in other places, and they're smiling too.

Welcome to the frontline of India's great services boom, an explosion of employment opps very different from earlier ones. In the 1980s, India Inc. discovered the wonders that MBAs could work, especially in marketing departments. In the early 1990s, the financial services boom saw the salaries of Finance MBAs and chartered accountants zoom to stratospheric heights. And in the second half of the same decade, India's software services firms couldn't have enough engineers, never mind the hue. Now call centres, restaurants, fast food chains, direct-selling agents vending cellular phone connections, mortgages, and everything in between, and organised retail outlets are hiring graduates with no specific skills apart from those they can pick up on the job.

Not convinced? Check with Mumbai-based call centre Epicenter that hires 200 agents a month. Or cellular major Airtel that does 300 for its customer contact department. Or coffee chain Barista that expects to double its workforce every year. These are numbers that contribute their mite to the 33-million calculation (See The Arithmetic). These are also, at once, numbers that indicate the emergence of a new consumer class and the creation of a new social order where easy pickings could prevent graduates from working towards long-term career goals.

The Transient Affluent

Marketers can smell the money. Bajaj Auto's Pulsar, a muscular sub 200-cc bike with an extra-sized tank, is targeted at the very consumer segment. "When we launched the bike, we had in mind a consumer in his early 20s, with an income of at least Rs 10,000 a month, and who can easily opt for a hire-purchase scheme-it is service sector personnel that fit the bill," says the company's marketing chief R.L. Ravichandran. The realisation that customer jocks make good money, explains Rashmi Varma, an associate director at market research firm ORG-MARG, has redefined the concept of marketing to the young. Yesterday, companies would try and sell the young snack foods, all-terrain bikes, personal cassette players, and sports goods. Today, the same segment is the target of companies selling beer, motorbikes and scooters, and mobile phones. And, oh yes, companies aren't averse to selling entire lifestyles.

Most customer jocks stay with their reasonably-well-to-do parents and do not usually contribute financially to the running of the household. "Aspirationally too, this consumer has achieved the symbols of personal wealth that would have come to him in the late 20s," explains Varma. "He has leapfrogged into aspiring for cars and other trappings of wealth much earlier than he would have, say, five years ago." That makes the average customer jock an ideal target for a broad spectrum of products and services-"Primary membership credit cards, adventure tourism, online stock trading, photographic films, high-ticket electronic gadgets, mobile phones, computers, home theatre systems, bikes, personal finance, and music," as Ravi Kiran, Managing Director, (South and West), Starcom (a media buyer), rattles off breathlessly.

The action at the frontline of the services boom is reflected in product categories such as mobikes, fast food retailing, credit cards, and electronic goods, especially mobile phones and mid-end audio systems. "These categories have bucked the general trend and grown largely because of their young customers," says Sonia Pall, the Director of Client Services at research firm A.C. Nielsen's New Delhi office. Samsung India discovered this to its advantage. Its mobile phones are targeted at the "young at heart" 30-something customer, explains Anuj Kapoor, Head (Telecom), Marketing, but "last year, the youth segment of the market actually outstripped the industry's 100-per cent growth rate".

The high attrition rates-over 100 per cent in call centres and between 20 per cent and 25 per cent in organised retail-in these businesses has prompted at least one Mumbai-based researcher who wishes to remain unnamed to term customer jocks, the transient affluent. His hypothesis has them moving on after a couple of years, studying further, and re-entering the consumption mainstream as a more permanent consumer class with higher-paying jobs. Transient or not, they're affluent and marketers aren't asking too many questions.

Wake of the Flood

Will the Rs 1,00,000 crore shrivel up and vanish as the newly affluent transit? That seems unlikely. Customer jocks are part of the entire package services companies offer their customers. The restaurant business, explains Sanjay Narang of Mumbai-based Mars Restaurants-he runs 42 restaurants across Mumbai, Pune, and Chennai, including Dosa Diner, Just Around the Corner, Pizzeria, and Three Flights Up-is "no longer about food". "It's about the entire experience and that is why we keep hiring despite the fact that computers are used extensively in the restaurant business."

The rapid growth in the number of restaurants, fast food chains, multiplexes, and organised retail outlets has less to do with an expanding economy (India's economy has grown in the past few years but not by much) and more to do with changing lifestyles of the country's teeming middle-class. "Disposable incomes on the whole are actually down," agrees Mahesh Vyas, the Chief Executive Officer of economy-tracker CMIE. "It is a lifestyle change that is driving growth." Increased exposure through media and overseas travel facilitates the change and it manifests itself in the growing willingness to pay for convenience and comfort.

Even traditionally product-driven businesses are focusing on service add-ons that can act as differentiators in these trying times and attract customers. "Whether you are selling groceries or a financial product, you have to bundle it with a service today," says Subramonia Sharma, the director in charge of entrepreneurship development at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.

Neither of these-the changing lifestyles and the bundling of products and services-is a reversible trend. Both are delinked, at least in the short-term, from macro-economic factors that determine the growth rate of an economy. And while some customer jocks quit to go out and get an education that will help better their career prospects, most are happy to continue. The US, for instance, has more shop assistants than investment bankers or advertising execs, and that is the way it will be in India too.

The number of customer jocks, then, will continue to grow (See The Boom That Will Be). As will their contribution to the economy. So, why isn't everyone smiling?

All Dressed Up & Nowhere To Go

Meet Mumbai-lad Chetan Sharma, 23, a market researcher by qualification and a call centre executive by compulsion. A year ago, with no market research firm showing the slightest inclination to sign him on, he joined a call centre. The money was good: at Rs 10,000 a month it was more than double what he would have earned in market research. A year and a promotion later, Sharma now heads a team of 10 agents and earns Rs 14,000. But he's far from happy-for those interested in semantics, he is at best content in a very very unhappy sort of way. "I don't see a future in the call centre business," he rues, "and it is too late to start from scratch in any other profession." Late, at 23? Actually, it isn't but Sharma has reasons for staying stuck: "No other job will offer this kind of pay and the fixed hours, so I don't want to leave; basically, I have stopped thinking long term."

With most sectors of the economy caught in the grip of a near-recession, there are few jobs going.

Ergo, everyone from chartered accountants to electronics engineers competes with plain vanilla graduates for customer jock positions. And once they are there for a few years, they stay in the business-they can move companies yes, but few can switch careers without going back to school. ISB's Sharma believes that this could be because these jobs require few skills, "apart from being friendly all the time or learning to talk on the phone." K. Vijay Rao, the Chief Executive of Mumbai-based call centre Epicenter argues that agents in the US pick up cross-selling abilities across sectors but, without much pressing, concedes that "this kind of value-addition isn't happening in India today". That would appear to fit in very well with a growing school of thought that the frontline of the services boom creates many jobs but few careers.

Not everyone is willing to go with that argument. Ravi Deol, the Managing Director of India's own Starbucks, Barista-it boasts 130 outlets and will add 100 more in the next year-believes the pace of growth in the food retailing business will offer substantial growth opportunities to his employees. "Career progression is very important for these executives and the pace at which we are growing makes it possible for them to grow with us." And Bala Balachandran, professor of accounting at Northwestern Univ's Kellogg Business School and a long-time India watcher believes the Indian services sector is set to boom. "In the US, the services sector accounts for over 85 per cent of GDP today; 20 years ago, it accounted for less than 40; the statistics are clear as to where the bees are seeing the honey."

Both Deol and Balachandran are right. With some service sectors growing at rates in excess of 60 per cent, there is no dearth of career-growth opportunities. And high attrition rates have forced companies to focus on employee-retention strategies. These could range from creating "a fun at work atmosphere" as Atul Jhamb, the Chief Operating Officer of Airtel's Mumbai operations, puts it, or helping call centre agents acquire additional educational qualifications while still on the job as several call centres are trying to do. Still, as Epicenter's Rao admits, "Real retention is possible only when people see this as a viable career option." And that could take some time.

It's The Economy, Stupid

If this is to be a happily-ever-after story then other sectors of the Indian economy, notably manufacturing will have to grow. That would result in the growth of the overall economy, enabling customer jocks to grow laterally within their chosen careers (at the least, it would mean more money), or move into relevant roles in other sectors.

It would also keep employment opps at the frontline of the services boom going, creating openings for people who would otherwise end up in low-paying jobs elsewhere. Most importantly, it would ensure that there is enough opportunity for employment in other sectors to prevent professionals such as engineers and chartered accountants from turning to frontline customer service jobs.

None of this is happening today. Pratham Sen is an electronics engineer who graduated in 2001. With few jobs going, he signed on at a call centre. He quit a few months later to prepare for his MBA entrance tests. Today, he has signed on with another call centre while he waits for the results. "Almost 40 per cent of the agents at my call centre are engineers," says Sen. "And there are some chartered accountants too." Sen couldn't find a job because, presumably, the Indian manufacturing sector is in poor health. "Although these (services) sectors are growing, aggregate employment has stagnated and the manufacturing sector is laying off people," says CMIE's Vyas. "These sectors cannot make up for the loss of jobs in manufacturing-they can at best take the pressure off manufacturing for some time."

That could be one reason why the Rs 1,00,000 crore customer jocks spend every year hasn't had the kind of impact it should have had on the larger economy (the number, after all, represents around 4.3 per cent of India's GDP). The exact mathematical relationship between the two isn't known, but in the recent past, for every few services job created, a manufacturing job has been lost (although there is no causal relationship between the two).

The services sector will continue to grow in the short-term, and with it, the number of frontline jobs and the salaries on offer but over time, the absence of growth in other sectors of the economy will begin to take its toll. Salaries in services could stagnate, even fall. New jobs could dry up. And those wishing to move out of frontline services jobs could find no way out-much like call centre agent Sharma who claims he is stuck. No one wants that to snowball into an endemic sector-wide issue, but if the economy as a whole doesn't grow, that is exactly what could happen. The smiles are still very much in evidence in the frontline but they could soon vanish.

(Names of some customer contact personnel have been changed on request to protect identities.)

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