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?

PVK: No, they are in Bangalore and Hyderabad. So, I think that’s how it has  shifted out. Generally, if it’s a U.S. client, more B2C, more nontechnology-based, it is almost 100% certain that the work will be placed in the Philippines if it is going off shore.

SM: What kind of business do you do? What kinds of customers do you have? Which industries are your biggest segments? How does your business align with that work force?

PVK: We are a business that is truly globally from both sides, not just the delivery side. Of our clients, less than 55% are in the U.S. The rest are spread around Canada, the UK and Australia. You have all kinds of industries, but our primary focuses are cable, telecom, financial services and retail. Our clients tend to be the top three and top five in each of these verticals, in each of their regions. That is our client base in a nutshell.

SM: Would you talk more about the business model?

PVK: We charge by the transaction. It is basically what the unit of work is. If anyone goes to our client’s website, and the first system or unit is finding an answer for you. Whether it is automated or a human was involved in a phone call, you will pay a different [rate], depending on what happened.

SM: OK, and these automated [services], the places where you provide automated support, are those on your systems, on your technology?

PVK: That is right.

SM: Would you talk more about that? We talked about the human agent portion, your portion after the work force and your strategy. What role is technology playing in your business and what do you have, from a technology point of view?

PVK: Essentially, technology is a predictive platform that sits in the cloud. I think we discussed in the beginning of the conversation about how we leverage data  what you are trying to do on the website. So, in that example, let’s say you are on a website as an existing customer. You are looking at a banking statement or your teleco bill. If our predictive algorithms say that you are likely to have a question about an SMS charge that you incurred while you were in Mexico, then our platform will kick in and say, Would you like to understand this charge better? Most people would say yes, because that is what was going on in their minds. It is a learning engine, so when you say no, then we learn how to ignore people like you in the future and what is said about you that made you say no. If you say yes, then we’ll give you an answer which may not be right in the first instance, but then you may connect with a human agent. We’ll learn from that conversation to say that is what we must start and go back and feed it into the automatic machine. That is what I refer to in a blending technology in traction and learning from that. At present, no other system does this.

SM: So, as a result, you are creating and improving a knowledge base.

PVK: We don’t call it a knowledge base because it is not a static answer for the entire world, which will work if it is, for example, a driver issue or something like that. Again, I want to make it very clear we don’t make it support as a line of business. I think a lot of what you are referering to with the use of experts and stuff like that comes into play more in technical support. We are trying to solve problems such as, Why do so many people call? They can change their address on the website. Why are so many people calling us?  The reason they are calling is to ask, Hey I got my cable box attached to this and this, and now how do I sort it out? Or it is about a specific issue. So, you have to keep drilling it to what we call the levels of details where we can take one consumer as an individual and say, Your issue is not just obstruction of change of address because you are moving. It is about a family of four within a cable of set-top boxes, and two of them are in the new set-top boxes, the third one would be a different thing, and then one of them is attached to a broadband plan, and that level is where the data [is] assigned.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Outsourcing: PV Kannan, CEO Of 24/7
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