Outsourcing: Sandip Sen, President And CMO, Aegis (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sandip Sen: So, after starting to stabilize the U.S. operations, we realized another thing, which was again different for a BPO provider. We realized that there was a large domestic provider in India, and because India is an emerging economy – it was growing at a fast rate – we also acquired a couple of companies in India that were very strong in domestic business. One of the companies acquired was a company I had started and set up called Customer First. We rapidly became India’s No. 1 domestic call center also. In fact, today we have close to 20,000 people in Indian domestic operations.

The first thing we did was to consolidate and grow the U.S. operations. That is a continuum that we do every time. Second, we looked at the large domestic business in India, which other major BPO players were not doing. And third, we said, Let’s have a truly global delivery model. Let’s be everywhere the customer wants to be. And, through a series of acquisitions, which we subsequently grew further because of our organic sales engine, we acquired a very large company called People Support, which gave us a huge footprint in the Philippines. Today, we are one of the largest call center oblique BPOs in the Philippines. We acquired a company called CCN, which is now Aegis South Africa. We acquired a company called UCMS, which is now Aegis Australia, and we acquired a company called Actionline, which is now Aegis Argentina. This, of course, happened over a a period of years, but as a result of these acquisitions, we now have a truly global delivery model. We can tell the customer, depending on pricing, availability of manpower and skill sets, and the kind of work they do, that we have the ability to place it onshore, which is in the U.S. nearshore, we have a center in Costa Rica and offshore, which could be India, the Philippines, South Africa, Argentina, and so on.

Coupled with the acquisitions, we also started building up the sales mechanism. So, today we have a very large sales team of close to 100 senior salespeople. They started mining and building accounts in each of these regions. Again, we will look at something from overseas. So, if we are in South Africa, we will look at the business which comes in the U.K. primarily and also the U.S. If it is the Philippines, we look at the U.S. business, but we will also grow the local market, wherever possible. We, today, are a very large local player in South Africa, and our policy then helps us to sweat our assets much better, gives us better shift utilization. Finally, it kind of hedges against a number of risks, because we have a multi-country, multi-geography as well as a multi-audience, which is both domestic and international. This is what we kind of applied over the last few years and currently our goals are – and this was publicly stated so I can tell you them – by 2012 to be a billion-dollar company and to be able to be straddle as many regions as we can.

Sramana Mitra: Would you talk about your customers? I think you said you had 150 customers. Would you talk about what kind of customers, what kind of BPO work you do for them, and where the customers are located?

Sandip: Sure. Essentially, we started as a BPO of a company, which is still 70% of our work, doing what we call customer life cycle. Can we handle the customer end to end, wing to wing? That is from the time the customer enters the system to the time he or she leaves it. In other words, let’s say we work for a customer such as JPMorgan – which is a customer of ours but I am giving that as an example – what we like to do for them is customer acquisition inbound sales, telemarketing, and so on. Customer activation is how we activate the customer. Let’s say I wanted a credit card. I have gotten a credit card in the mail. How do I activate it into the system? How do I become a customer? Second is the entire realm of inbound help desk, which is customer care, billing queries, complete resolution, then cross-selling and upselling. There is retention management, loyalty and retention, which I call sales, which means keeping the customer within the system if he wants to exit. Collection – we are a very large collection shop and database management player. This really is what we call our customer life cycle, and we do this for five major verticals.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Outsourcing: Sandip Sen, President And CMO, Aegis
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