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.

There is also a time trade-off, which we need to remember. Depending on where you are as a consumer and how much time you have on your hands, you would go to the site, and in your eagerness to learn more, you pick up the phone or go to the website of the client and then you will reach out to someone. But the quickest, fastest way to get a question answered is still to go to the company that created the problem for you. But if you have time and you want to understand the history of the problem, get some interesting viewpoints, and find an unbiased opinion that is going out, then social becomes interesting. But you have to remember the time investment.

SM: Yes, but the kinds of technology I am talking about, companies are making it easy for their customers to work with expert customers who are fielding these questions and empowering the expert customers with knowledge bases and so on and so forth. They are already knowledgeable and they put them and tidy them into the databases and such. Let’s move on to other issues I want to cover.

PVK: Sure.

SM: So, you said you have about 9,000 people?

PVK: That is correct.

SM: Would you tell me more about what is happening around the world? One of my observations is that the geography of outsourcing is shifting, and the call structures are changing, and I am sure that Bangalore is not your most profitable call center or contact center anymore. Would you speak about that? Where are you located? What are the cities you are in, what size of operations do you have in those cities, and what is going on in the call structures and the dynamics of the different regions?

PVK: I am going to shock you because this is the commonly held misconception. Bangalore is the cheapest place to run a call center, not the Philippines. The Philippines are actually more expensive, and Latin America is even more expensive. I understand that is kind of how everyone in the media views the shift from India to Philippines, that it’s a matter of cost. It is not; it is a client preference to do business in the Philippines rather than in India.

SM: What is driving the client preference?

PVK: The client preference is because they truly believe that the country is more suited to the American consumer, so it is not a trend that is equally applicable to each country or region. If you look at the UK as a base for our clients, our clients in the UK still have a strong affinity for centers in India. Unless it is a technical support application, most of the other categories are general customer service, taking care of issues and the other [things] relating to the consumer is more important than solving a problem  The Philippines to be the best location. From a split perspective, our largest call center is in the Philippines. We have half of our employees there.  Bangalore has close to 3,000 people, and the rest are in Latin America.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Outsourcing: PV Kannan, CEO Of 24/7
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