Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel (Part 2)

Tony: So, initially, the company was mostly Indian in terms of the delivery model, and you have now gone into multiple countries?

Amit: Ten years ago it was predominantly domestic, and there was very little happening offshore. Today, there is a mix of rightshoring or global sourcing. I am not saying 60 percent is done offshore; I am saying there is a mix. What has adapted in our organization is the leadership team. The president of our company is bilingual. Just a couple of years ago the only language spoken in the executive suite was English. Today, our top executives speak five or six different languages, and we have to because five or six different languages become relevant to us as a global company versus a domestic-only company. We have had to adapt our vernacular, our systems, our technologies, and our correspondence – both internally and externally – beyond one language to four or five different languages.  Our internal magazine was published in one language three years ago, and today we publish it in four languages.

Tony: What are the four languages you publish it in?

Amit: Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese. The reason we publish in Spanish is that Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in our network, and when you look at Mexico, Nicaragua, Chile, Colombia, and most Latin American countries as offshore locations, Spanish is obviously a major language. When you are speaking with our agents in Morocco, where we have several thousand people as an offshore destination, French is the language they speak; it is not just for our people in France.

As an organization we have changed substantially over the past five years, and the magazine is but one manifestation of how a company that had a domestic focus looks very different 10 years later. I know I digressed from a straight history, but based on your opening comments, I thought this was an interesting part of the conversation.

Tony: Absolutely. It is clearly one of the big challenges that companies have if they provide products or services on a global basis. Many companies operate on a global basis, and the questions of how one manages that efficiently and effectively, and what are the skill sets needed to do it, are not easy to answer. It sounds as though you are one step ahead of a lot of other companies in this respect. It is an interesting challenge that is also one of the key factors in whether a company succeeds or fails.

Amit: I have no doubt we learned the hard way, but I will give you an example. Andrew, who comes from a North American background, has extremely [deep] experience with North American contacts. We were looking to establish a presence in the Philippines, India, and in other countries, and a key challenge of doing that is understanding the local and North American markets. OK, we have this person, but how do we best leverage his skills? One of the key things we had to do was take the knowledge and expertise from places where we had a mature operation and put that into these secondary and tertiary markets. But we also needed to build expertise in these other markets because we couldn’t have Andrew there forever. You have to build that knowledge and expertise, and doing so does two things: Not only does it take the knowledge and expertise into offshore markets, but it also brings somebody with relevant experience in those offshore markets back to the home country.

Tony: If the person becomes the bridge across the cultures, this also helps to create more such bridges. But if you don’t have these bridges, ultimately you are just a bunch of flags on a map without any kind of connectivity. That kind of situation is very difficult to manage.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel
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