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. >>>

Outsourcing: PV Kannan, CEO Of 24/7 (Part 1)

Sramana Mitra: Hi PV, welcome to the Outsourcing series. Would you start by introducing the company?

PV Kannan: Sure. I will start by describing how the company was founded and what led to the creation of it, would that be helpful?

SM: That would be perfect. >>>

Outsourcing: Lalit Dhingra, President Of NIIT Technologies (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana Mitra: But that is true about TCS as well. TCS also has insurance clients, and so does Wipro.

Lalit Dhingra: The difference is when you run and you compete, somebody wins, right? I am losing only because somebody says I want to give it to a larger vendor. That means I want to talk to only billion-dollar plus companies. We lose that. Each time, I get a reply from the customer that says, You guys know what you are talking about. That is the difference, and that gives us satisfaction, because that keeps me focused on the middle of the pyramid. This is where I am. I am telling the customer the right thing,  and the customer understands it. This may not be true for TCS. It may not be true for Infosys also sometimes, but what we are trying to do is say, We understand. Proactively, we can tell you where all the solutions are going to be. >>>

Outsourcing: Lalit Dhingra, President Of NIIT Technologies (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: One of the things about domain knowledge is that in IT-specific projects, the data structure is specific to that business. So, you do need an understanding of the business to even define its data structures and workflows.

Lalit Dhingra: That is correct. That is very straight business. But if you want to add value, how will you do it if you don’t have the domain [knowledge]? We don’t know what these guys are looking at. At present, the Virgin America website has gone through three stages. We know exactly what they are attending it to, and how it will change to bring them more value. You are right from the IT perspective. Yes, we need to understand the workflows, data structures, and everything to go into it. >>>