Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel (Part 7)

By guest author Tony Scott

Tony: Are you moving toward even more of the secondary and tertiary locations in the countries in which you are operating? In the Philippines and India, are you moving more into more rural areas and setting up the infrastructure there to be able to support what you do, or are you looking for places where there is a tier 2 city that has the infrastructure and enables you to go in? How are you dealing with that? Is it both ways, or is it one way?

Amit: That is a good question. There it is bit of both. Actually, there is a third component to it. We are looking at locations that I would call rural, because no doubt you call them rural in India and the Philippines and in many of these countries, there is really not very much you can do there. “Secondary city” is probably a better categorization.

Rural, of course, is much more of a concept that is prevalent at the moment in the Western world: the United States, the UK, and so on. But it is a combination of both: looking at Indian locations that have the available infrastructure and labor force, and we help develop it or it is semi-developed. I will give a lot of countries credit; they have done a lot of great things. The Philippines, India, and some Latin American countries have done a great job of building the infrastructure to attract this kind of work into more remote locations. The third component is looking at other countries and locations around the world that also might have relevance.

Tony: And are you looking at other countries and bidding to set up locations in those countries? At the same time, do you see it as both an opportunity and potentially a threat because your competitors are doing the same thing?

Amit: We look at it as an opportunity because we always go back to the concept of relevant labor arbitrage: It is not one size fits all. As I mentioned, we sell through individuals.

The strange thing is, you have someone who says, I do not want X country but I am comfortable with Y.  I do not want this part of the world, but I am comfortable with that part of the world. Specific to that and an example of that was last year when we had been having conversations with folks in Latin America. The economic development people in Nicaragua came out and said, Hey, we have infrastructure, we have a labor force. We are keen to get somebody like you in here in a short span. I would say that in the past three or four years, Nicaragua has probably been our fastest-growing country for English into the United States or bilingual and English to the United States. Today we have two sites there, right, Andrew?

Andrew: And a couple of thousand agents. One of the neat things, as the world continues to globalize, is what made Nicaragua not a great place to be in the 1980s is what makes it a fantastic place for call centers. Thousands of people left, and now they have come back. In Nicaragua today, on average 75% of our agents and management have either lived or received their educations in the United States. So, it is an incredible alignment of great bilingual capabilities – and we are in the same time zone.

Amit What is interesting is that we first took there a client that did not want to go to India; it was one of those “I need someone close by, I need to get there quickly, I don’t want to go offshore.” And trust me, this client has a very strong labor cost imperative. It goes back to that two things: relevant labor arbitrage that selling to cultures and selling to people, the company culture.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel
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