Outsourcing: Ravi Pandit, Chairman And Group CEO, KPIT Cummins (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Where are most of your customers, and where are most of your operation? Would you talk a bit about customers and how your company is organized geographically? >>>

Outsourcing: Ravi Pandit, Chairman And Group CEO, KPIT Cummins (Part 1)

About KPIT Cummins
A public company listed on the BSE and NSE, KPIT Cummins helps clients to develop domain-based intensive technology solutions for manufacturing corporations with special focus on automotive, transportation & manufacturing, energy & utilities, and defense & government.

About Ravi Pandit
After studying at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Ravi Pandit began his career as an accountant. He has spent more than three decades in information technology and, with his team, has built KPIT Cummins.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Ravi, and welcome to the Outsourcing series. If you would, please set some context for our readers and me about KPIT Cummins. We don’t know that much about the company, so we need to understand first what you do, what your business is, where you are, what size you are, the scale of your operations, and so on. >>>

Outsourcing: PV Kannan, CEO Of 24/7 (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Now, switching to the topic of entrepreneurship, you know this industry quite well. You have not just been 11 years with 24/7. You have also been in contact center technology for a much longer time.

PV Kannan: Yes.

SM: Would you point out some entrepreneurial opportunities for our audience? Around the world, entrepreneurship is booming right now. Assuming that you are speaking audiences in Malaysia, Spain, India, the U.S., Latin America, and so on, point them toward some opportunities. If you were a starting entrepreneur today, what kind of things would you look at? >>>

Outsourcing: PV Kannan, CEO Of 24/7 (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: This has been very insightful thus far. What other trends are you seeing in the outsourcing call centers?

PV Kannan: Just to put it straight, we are not really in the pure outsourcing business. We don’t compete with the classic outsourcing companies on work. If someone says, I need 500 people in location X at this price, 24/7 will not bid on that work. I want to make that clear. We are not a classic outsourcing shopper from that perspective, but we are an outsourcing shop just as much as any technology-enabled services companies such as ADP, First Data or any of those ilk. We go in and say, Look you have a problem, you are thinking about the problem in such a way, and you are dividing it up among people and just getting other  people to subcontract someone or run it in-house. Then you buy a bunch of technologies and you try to put all of them together, but at the end of the day, you don’t solve the problem because the problem is that consumers want quick answers in whatever modality they want to engage in. Some of that is left out of the picture. If you want to solve the problem this way, we want you to think about it in this manner. >>>

Outsourcing: PV Kannan, CEO Of 24/7 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So, the work that you do in the Philippines is more cultural support than technical support.

PV Kannan: That is exactly right, and it has to be individualized, because you don’t care about how the world solves it. It is about my problem and how are you, as my partner, are going to fix that. And that answer may or may not be relevant. That is why we don’t use the term “knowledge base.” Knowledge base should be about nailing the problem in the most perfect form that can be used by anyone with the same problem. >>>

Outsourcing: PV Kannan, CEO Of 24/7 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where in Latin America do you have centers?

PV Kannan: We are in Guatemala and Nicaragua.

SM: And there are 4,500 people in the Philippines, and the 3,000 people in India are all in Bangalore? >>>

Outsourcing: PV Kannan, CEO Of 24/7 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: My hypothesis is that there is going to be level zero customer support that will come in and be inserted before any contact center representative touches a customer.

PV Kannan: Yes, I think that has been happening for a long while. It has become more easy to do it, but – I’m probably betraying my age here – but if you remember CompuServe, they used to have forums for all the Microsoft products, and Microsoft has been a company long before there was this idea of social. They have a consumer company, and creating a forum to engage in any discussion was part of that. To help sort out any problem whether it is simple or complicated, has become more easy with the marriage of Google plus all those forums, to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn groups, and so on. I think that the trend has been there for a while. It is more accessible and more powerful. >>>

Outsourcing: PV Kannan, CEO Of 24/7 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Yes, very good. I am going to start drilling down on a variety of points. In the course of the 11 years that you have been in business – and I think I got it right – you work only with B2C companies right? This is a B2C company. >>>