championscott

Search and Social Media: What Has Changed?

Kevin Kernan — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:10:24 +0000

Search and Social Media: What Has Changed?

The short answer is “everything.” For those of us in the search business, we realize that our industry is changing in ways we couldn’t see or even imagine 3 or 4 years ago. For boards and hiring executives who haven’t yet incorporated their personal experiences and company positions on the use of social media into their talent development and hiring processes, you will limit your ability to attract the best talent until you do so, and worse, your best people are looking at companies who have already done so. For candidates seeking new employment, it can be a slippery slope if you’re not careful. You need to do two things: polish the story on how you’ve effectively used social media platforms to develop relationships with your customers…not your customers’ employer, but your customer – the individual and/or groups of individuals who buy and use your products or services. Secondly, you need to show how you have successfully communicated in realtime on topics of interest thru your social media network: customers, suppliers, partners, and even competitors – and be specific about what the business benefits or lessons learned were.

You might say that you are in an industry – financial services, healthcare, or avionics – which is highly regulated and limits use of or access to social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). My only question is whether or not you employ anybody under the age of 30? Because if you do, you have a social media presence, you just might not control it, or even know what it is. This doesn’t suggest your employees are tweeting about company confidential data or violating PCI requirements, but when your employees have a social media presence, this says something about you as their employer since after all, you hired them.

Anybody reading this article has the ability to find any company’s social media presence in minutes provided you have internet access and can spell…well, you don’t even need to spell well. The point here is ‘get ahead of the curve and drive your social media presence.’ Step up and engage in the dialogue which is on-going and defining your company. Recognize that your high impact marketing messages are not likely created by you. As Barry Libert (author of Social Nation: How to Harness the Power of Social Media to Attract Customers, Motivate Employees, and Grow Your Business) says repeatedly in his book, most companies are not even involved in the conversations that their customers are conducting on these new platforms. David Meerman Scott (author of Online Marketing & PR) conducted a survey of the Fortune 100 to determine which have a “social media signature” and engage in realtime conversations using social media platforms. Interestingly, the 28% who responded positively (yes, in realtime), have seen an increase in share value over the last 36 months, and those who do not have a presence and/or didn’t respond at all, have seen a decline in share value over the same period. I don’t think any shareholder is expecting the creation of a Facebook page to immediately increase the dividend performance and change the overall financial profile of any company – but the data is interesting…and accurate!

So, what does this have to do with search, or more specifically, hiring top talent? It’s easy, there is a rapidly expanding cadre of top execs who not only “get it,” but they have the experience, the results, and creativity to succeed with the new platform. Every search firm, employer, and job seeker can talk about their social media presence at some level, but understanding how this has created differentiable competitive advantage and most importantly, quantifiable results, is absolutely critical. Look at companies like TriNet, Vocus, Zuora, & Xactly, and the people they hire – the difference is obvious.

Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel (Part 10)

Tony Scott — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:45:03 +0000

Tony: I think you have to start with [an open] mindset as the prerequisite; it is pretty hard to train someone to be open minded if they are not open minded already.

Amit: If you look at Andrew’s background, Andrew was born and brought up in the United States, but you’ve traveled in how many countries?

Andrew: I have always told people, particularly during interviews, that one of the things I have really enjoyed in the 12 years of being with the company is that we are in 27 different countries. I think I have worked with people in each of the 27 countries we have operations in, whether that means having been in the country with them or just spending a significant amount of time interacting and working on opportunities with people in those countries. So, it is a very global atmosphere. Open communication with individuals around the world is part of developing business, and that means getting a lot of stamps in your passport.

Tony: You know you are really using your passport when you have to keep getting pages added to it!

Amit: When your passport becomes fixed in your pocket.

Tony: When I was traveling so much that my passport was always sitting in my pocket, I thought it was a problem, but now I see it was a good thing. It was a good problem to have, because that is the only way you truly learn how to operate in a global environment – in the new “flat” world that Thomas Friedman’s famous book talks about.

In many ways, I see the outsourcing industry as the forefront of what comes when the world is flat. Now you can deliver services, deliver IT, deliver all sorts of capabilities on a global basis in a very transparent way. There is a positive and a negative side to this, but in many ways the companies that are doing it in the outsourcing world are really at the cutting edge of creating and operating in a flat world. But at the same time, because it is at the forefront of this changing environment, the outsourcing industry has had to create a lot of its own lessons in this regard. Are there other industries you look to in terms of how they have done globalization well, and ideas they have that you can apply, or are you making it up as you go along?

Amit: Our president is an ex-Dell employee, and the conversations we have when we talk about this internally are that we look at the manufacturing industry. I think for us, the endgame almost is when you go to Walmart and pick up a shirt or whatever, you don’t look a the label and focus on the fact that is says “Made in China.” Where that particular product is made becomes irrelevant to you.

Tony: But obviously, there is a big difference between selling a product such as a shirt, which doesn’t interact with me, and selling people. It is a much bigger challenge when your product is people.

Amit: You are absolutely right. The ultimate truth, though, is that with people you can accomplish much of what you want from cultural indoctrination, training, and education. Providing people with systems and tools is important, but the ultimate moment of truth is when an agent has been in conversation with a consumer, and in that moment of truth only one thing matters: the transaction, the conversation, the interaction, between two human beings. At that point it is out of our control as managers. It is a human interaction. This is the point you are making: It is true that in a store where you look at the product and it is tangible, it’s different from an intangible human mind interacting with another human mind on the other side. That’s an important point, undeniably. But what we have tried to do in addition is look at some of the manufacturing industry principles and processes. That’s one of the reasons Six Sigma or Lean Sigma has become prevalent in our industry. It is a manufacturing concept. We are focused on how you get to Six Sigma, to that “moment of truth” that I talked about.

Tony: I would say it is impossible to actually measure it that way.

Amit: But other elements should be measurable at that “moment of truth.” You try to get to that point, and you control the environment as best as you can. We have no doubt taken thinking from manufacturing. We are taking Six Sigma thinking from manufacturing, adapting it, and applying some of those principles to the services environment.

Tony: It sounds like you have gone quite far in what you have tried to accomplish, and with great success. I do a lot of work helping companies to globalize in terms of how they bring in leadership teams. As you pointed out, it is a nontrivial challenge, and it is always nice to see that someone has figured out how to do it well. I really appreciate the time both of you have spent with me and the insights you have shared.

Amit and Andrew: We have enjoyed it, too. Thank you.

You are reading part 10 in the series: Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel
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Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel (Part 9)

Tony Scott — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:37:39 +0000

Tony: So, looking at the next level – beyond middle management, or lower middle management, looking at the senior leadership – what do you think are the key strengths that are going to be necessary for your executive leadership team and their direct subordinates to develop so that you can continue to grow your company globally? Beyond that, do you think you have those skills on board today? If not, what are you doing to do to get them?

Amit: I think it is a couple of things. For one, companies like us that are global are basically selling services on a global basis and convincing people that global sourcing is the way to go. To do this, you have to have a diverse executive team, and when I say diverse, I don’t mean just ethnic diversity but also diversity of opinions, views, and thought. Because when you work in a global environment, one thing you know is that there isn’t much homogeneity; “homogeneous” is a nonexistent term. Trying to make everything homogeneous is wrong – you need to understand the diversity of how people buy, how people interact, how people are motivated.

As an executive leadership team, we know that the one-size-fits-all approach can’t work. We have to try to cultivate some of that diversity in our executive leadership team. I think as corporations become more global, they will need that diversity. For example, some players in India have become more global, but I think they need to improve that diversity within their executive ranks, not just within the lower ranks, so that all levels in the company show a diversity of backgrounds, set of experiences, and points of view.

Second, I think in this environment, if you have an executive team that is not continually thinking about improvement and enhancement, it will be a challenge. Why do I say improvement and enhancement? Because when you work in a global environment, there are a lot of smart people all over the world, and if you don’t tap into that, I don’t think the executive suite or that next level of leadership of any global company will be very successful. I will give you the automobile industry analogy. Look at the U.S. automobile industry: We were so narrow-minded, there was such a lack of diversity in our executive and middle management ranks. Today, you look at all of the companies and you have people of diverse backgrounds running auto companies in different parts of the world. Toyota’s head in the U.S. is not a Japanese, he is an American.

Tony: And the head of Nissan was born in Brazil of Lebanese immigrant parents, and educated in Lebanon and France.

Amit: But five to ten years ago, that wasn’t the case.

Tony: Absolutely not. That is what I often talk to my clients about – sourcing the best talent irrespective of where it exists. I think that one of the key challenges for companies is building a global executive leadership team, one that operates globally and interacts globally. A team that can interact with each other and with their customers globally. It is a very hard and very big transition; that’s not the way business worked before. Historically, we were focused on a lot of different flags around the map and were “multi-local” as opposed to being truly global in operations. That has all changed.

Amit: I like that “multi-local” versus truly being global. If you look at our executive team, our president is of Cuban descent, but very global. I lived and grew up in Kenya, and I lived in India for many years. I am of Indian background but have been here in the United States for many years now. Our head of HR is from the United States, of U.S. origin in his background and experiences, but he has been very global in what he has done. There is a lot of mix in our group – it is a very diverse group of people.

Tony: How do you make that work, both in terms of bringing people into the organization and working as a team with that level of diversity? Diversity of ethnicity, of background, of thought – the different lenses people look through to see the world.

Amit: One of the key things you are asking about here is what kind of leadership you need. One of the things you need is an open mind and a relative sense of openness so that each of your individual team members is very broad-minded, open-minded, and accepting of ethnic and cultural diversity. But it is also important to be accepting of diversity in terms of ideas and thought, how we look at things and how we say things. The executive leadership team that we built influences the next level down, and even the next layer of people have a global-ness about them. There’s a willingness to learn about and accept different people’s cultures, ideas, and beliefs. I think it would be much harder for close-minded people to succeed in global companies because they just don’t have that mindset. We have a team that is global and has an open mindset. People say you need to send your staff to training classes and conduct leadership change classes. You can do all that loving and hugging, but it is an open mind that makes the difference.

You are reading part 9 in the series: Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel
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Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel (Part 8)

Tony Scott — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 19:00:40 +0000

Tony: We talked a little bit about [alignment of capabilities] in terms of being able to provide more total customer care, total customer cost of ownership, if you will. As you’ve done that, have you found gaps in the cultural approaches that your middle managers and senior managers take that have been more difficult to overcome? And as you’ve moved into higher-value services, how have you addressed those gaps?

Amit: That is an interesting question. If I understand correctly, you are asking me how, as we have moved into more complicated, complex, higher-end stuff, our middle management has adapted to this.

Tony: Middle management and senior management. It is one thing to bring people on at a junior level and train them, but the big issue I see in most companies’ ability to grow and be successful globally are the skill sets and attitudes at the top management and middle management levels, because these skills and attitudes actually drive the ability to be successful as a company.

Amit: That is a very interesting question. I will give you a simple answer from our perspective, and Andrew can pitch in. Thinking through this on our feet, the simple answer from our perspective is something we call GOS – Global Operating Standard. Let me try to explain this. I might be totally off, but there are traditional steps, such as taking an expat and sending him or her around the world. I have no doubt you can do that, and I think all of us are doing it; expats are the answer in that they import talent into a market. But in terms of creating a sustainable model, expats are expensive and not necessarily sustainable. You cannot afford to have all of your managers be expats.

GOS is the operating word for how we operate as a business from an executive level, how we look at our business, how we decide where we invest, how we manage our business down to the site level of how we operate for that client. It is a set of standard guidelines and principles such that if you walked into any of our contact centers anywhere in the world, they would look, feel, manage, and run the same. So, when we move up the value chain, it makes it easier.

A great example comes from a few years ago. When Six Sigma became the next wave within contact centers, we inculcated within GOS a module on performance improvement in order to build an organization, skill sets, training vernacular, knowledge, template, and expertise within the GOS model. Every operations manager, coach, site director, regional manager, and country manager goes through that training and education and is certified in GOS. That allowed us to standardize. We were able to take what we learned from one part of the world, institutionalize it, and move it to any other part of the world. In other words, I really do think GOS is what makes it work for us.

Andrew: I completely agree, and I think this is supported by the fact that we are effective and globalized not only in multiple countries, but also across multiple sites within the same country. We offer and manage more than 140 sites today, and it absolutely that core principle methodology that we work from that makes us fluid and scalable. As a large global organization, we believe that is one of our key differentiators, our ability to be flexible and scalable. Without a set of standards, we wouldn’t be able to do it.

Amit: We had a great lesson that comes up often. I will give you an example where we had some fantastic experiences. Are you familiar with the “net promoter” concept, Tony?

Tony: Would you explain it in more detail?

Amit: The “net promoter” concept, quite simply, is our policy simplifying this: The ultimate question at the end of an interaction, whether it is among individuals within a company or group, is, “Will you recommend me or my service to somebody?” Typically, people don’t recommend you unless they had a great experience and they trust you. It is more than being happy with someone. That promoter score is one of the key metrics that our clients measure from their customers. Not just satisfaction, but promotion. We had great success in developing a net promoter model in Australia and New Zealand with one of our clients. We were able to take that model and meld into our standards. Once it becomes part of the GOS standard, people go through training and education on the net promoter goal and how to institutionalize it. This is something that adds value; [it improves] our ability to help our clients.

Your question is a brilliant one. Ten years ago, the biggest issue in offshore location was middle management, and I see where you are coming from with this. It was easy to get people trained. Now you go to the higher-value [services] and you need domain experience, you need knowledge, and you need years of experience, not just training. As Andrew puts it, you need old guys with time on them, right? How do you take that experience out of them and institutionalize it? We can’t import them all over the world. GOS is our method to do that.

You are reading part 8 in the series: Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel
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Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel (Part 7)

Tony Scott — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 18:58:09 +0000

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.

You are reading part 7 in the series: Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel
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Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel (Part 6)

Tony Scott — Wed, 18 May 2011 20:19:20 +0000

Tony: [What you just said about offering speciality skills] goes back also to another point, labor rates. Seven or eight years ago, when outsourcing was really just trying to take off in a big way for call center outsourcing, the labor rates, if you focus on India or parts of the Philippines, were at X per hour. Today, my expectation is that labor rates for the kind of talent outsourcing companies now employ have increased by a significant percentage. India is always touted as the largest producer of engineering and technical talent out of universities, and second only to China in terms of the number of total graduates. But there are still language and other skill gaps in both places that make it difficult to hire individuals with the talent needed for outsourcing.

As you continue to expand, and other outsourcing companies continue to expand, what are you doing to overcome the issues of labor rate increases and talent shortages? Is your going to all of these other countries partly a response to that, and part of your strategy?

Amit: That is an interesting question. Let me just clarify one thing, my comment on India’s being the country from which the greatest number of engineers graduate each year. Actually, I should qualify that to say the greatest number of English-speaking engineers. You are right, China certainly has a larger population, but it is of less relevance to most of the world in terms of the lack of English-speaking skills.

About labor rates – you are exactly right; labor rates have increased. But let us look at the base from where they have increased. The increase is from a very low base, and while the increases have been large, you still have a significant delta in labor rates compared to the United States.

There is a common fallacy that labor rates in offshore locations have increased so dramatically that the arbitrage is no longer relevant. That is not true; the arbitrage component is still a relevant component when you look at it on a comparable basis.

Another fallacy is that there is a labor shortage. Think about this: The middle class in these countries is growing dramatically, and the middle class is where the bulk of these knowledge workers and BPO workers come from. Where the difference is, though, is where ten years ago we had PhDs sitting in our call centers in India, today we don’t. We have changed to more university degrees, and more to liberal arts or professional degrees. Also, in many of our locations we have tier 2 and tier 3 cities with operations, as we do in the Philippines. The bulk of our activity in the Philippines centers on Manila, but there are great tier 2 locations like Sebu, Elo Elo, and Bargyo where we can sustain operations. Maybe they are not as large as Manila, but they are large enough. Similarly, in India there are tier 2 locations such as Chandigarh, Pune, or Mangalore that sustain some of these services. I think these notions of labor arbitrage and wage rate inflation in offshore markets and of lack of availability of labor causing problems for outsourcing companies are humbug.

Andrew: You can do straight math on the inflation in terms where it is today. Actually, I think numbers published by the Indian National Council say the middle is somewhere between $4,000 and $21,000 a year, which is somewhere around $10 an hour. Compare that to U.S. call center wages and there is still very, very favorable labor arbitrage. Again, you find the wages to be a problem in the equation if you assume that wages will continue to grow at the rate they have. If you apply U.S. inflation, assuming we actually have inflation, there is still a decade, a decade and a half before you get anywhere close to parity. I would absolutely agree with what Amit is saying, and the numbers support that.

You are reading part 6 in the series: Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel
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Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel (Part 5)

Tony Scott — Wed, 18 May 2011 20:15:34 +0000

Tony: There obviously has to be a match between the skill sets of the people, [not just a match] with the cost. Clearly, the people who provide technical support for inbound calls have to have specialized skills.

Amit: Absolutely, and this comes in in the way we go to market. You have to talk about the evolution, I liked the way you put it – the evolution of companies in adapting to this global sourcing model. Five, seven, or nine years ago, for labor arbitrage our value proposition was, “Hey, Mr. Client, we can help you lower your costs and sustain those lower costs.” Now we are pitching India, the Philippines, and Nicaragua, and the conversation really is, “Listen, Mr. Client. We can help you look at it not from the perspective of cost per transaction but from the perspective of the cost for a satisfied customer.” That process of changing from cost per transaction to cost per satisfied customer allows us to find the right places to deliver the right kind of work. It also allows us to drive our economic model, thus lowering the cost of service. We can now say, “Here’s your cost per subscriber, here’s your cost per consumer, and here is your cost for a satisfied customer. Or, your price booked for a satisfied customer.”

Tony: To make use of a very simple example that most people have had experience with, let’s say you go to an inbound call center for technical support for your wireless phone, computer, television, or whatever, and at the first level support has been outsourced, and the quality of that service is very low. Every call had to be elevated to second-level support back in the United States, which is already at a higher rate. Companies haven’t saved anything; in fact, they’ve lost in terms of customer satisfaction. So, when you discuss this “total cost per satisfied customer” part of the model with your clients, do you have the ability to deliver that on a global basis?

Amit: Absolutely. The interesting thing is when you look at it from that perspective, you are no longer looking at a single location. You are not looking at just India or the Philippines, you are looking at your portfolio of service provisioning locations. I want to use the analogy of an investment portfolio. This is your customer care portfolio, and you look at the portfolio of service locations, you look at the portfolio of customers, and you make the right match. It is not one size fits all. The industry has really matured in this way over the past few years.

Tony: You have multiple locations around the world, so you probably have different skill sets for these locations. Have you started to use the model where you might have, for example, first-level support in the Philippines, second-level support that is elevated to India, and third-level support back in the United States? Are there cases like that in your organization with your customers?

Andrew: Absolutely, particularly as you begin to look at some of those clients that have several hundred or several thousand agents; they operate across a network of different sites. I think one of our top three or four customers is a fairly significant PC OEM provider. I think there are four different P&Ls across their business, and there are definitely different strategies we apply for that customer based on their different lines of business. There are different business groups within that company that we are servicing, and there are everything from language considerations to unique skill set requirements based on the types of service we provide, for example, whether we are providing technical support for a particular language or whether we are providing more of a service or sales call. For different product lines there are a variety of strategies in play, but all for the same customer, the same global account.

For that customer, we have sites in Morocco supporting French sales calls; we have sites in India and in the Philippines providing English-language support. We’re providing more technical types of calls from India and more calls on the service or customer account side from the Philippines. There are a variety of unique specialty skills that are available around the world. Companies like ours that have a broad, diversified portfolio of options can bring the best of these skills together.

You are reading part 5 in the series: Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel
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Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel (Part 4)

Tony Scott — Wed, 18 May 2011 20:11:08 +0000

Tony: What do you think is driving your clients to use outsourcing overall, and why do you think they are choosing you over other BPO and inbound call center providers?

Andrew: I think the value proposition for outsourcing is essentially that it is better, faster, and cheaper. If you talked to our customers, and we have a string of 50 customers worldwide, you would see it comes down to one or a combination of those: the ability to take what you are doing today and improve the process. [By this I mean] to improve your speed to market with that process or the output of that process, or to do it in a less expensive manner. Generally speaking, it is one or a combination of those three that people are looking to improve within their call center or contact center environment.

Tony: And how do they find you? How does your sales model work? Is it a direct sales model or people who are in a channel model?

Amit: It is very much a direct sales model. It is a fundamental outsourcing value proposition. But one of the things to keep in mind is that when we sell outsourced services, and even more so, when we sell offshore call center services, we are selling to individuals, not companies. Companies are an aggregation of individuals, and company culture is an aggregation of groups of individuals with belief systems, right?

When you’re in that kind of sales model, you have to have sales executives who are not only outsourcing and offshoring experts in our business, but who also understand the psychology of individuals and how people buy.

To [understand how we] sell the services we sell, think about this for a second: Where does the representation of a company come from? Many people argue that customers are the crown jewels of any company, and all of a sudden they give [them] to us, and outsourcers are controllers of the crown jewels, right? That is a major decision, and those decisions are certainly not made at a tactical level – they are made at strategic levels. They come from a company culture. Our sales executives are exactly that: executives who understand the business, the industry, and the buying behavior. You have to sell to individuals, and sometimes there are preconceived notions and biases.

Tony: Talking about the total cost of ownership model, what percentage of your business is based on labor rate arbitrage – the pure cost differential – and what percentage is based on on value-added services or on specific knowledge that you may bring to the table to be able to work with your customers? How do you articulate that to your potential customers?

Amit: That is a great question, and I will tell you, we articulate it in very plain and simple terms. First, I use the total cost of ownership, but it also falls under relevant labor arbitrage; let me explain what I mean by relevant labor arbitrage. The idea of labor arbitrage is you take a job and move it offshore; you do it cheaply and the client is happy. And, by the way, Indians saw a lot of that in the early days of contact center outsourcing in the early 2000s.

Today we have the ability to do what a client wants done. We have the skills they need, not just language skills, but the experience they need, and the knowledge workers they need. Generally, if we look at our portfolio of delivered services, we need people with a strong technology background who have good English-speaking skills. Well, India pumps out more technology graduates and engineering graduates than anywhere in the world, and a lot of them speak English with some fluency. “What a great location to buy services from!” clients were saying in the early days of outsourcing. But now, we say to them, “We find the best labor with the right skills in the right region with the right kind of capability under the appropriate economic model.” That is when the total cost of ownership model kicks in.

You are reading part 4 in the series: Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel
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Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel (Part 3)

Tony Scott — Tue, 03 May 2011 15:10:02 +0000

Andrew: Over the past decade we have seen globalization evolve, particularly within the call center and BPO marketplace. There was a period from 2002 and 2003 to around 2007 when I spent a lot of time focusing on the emerging markets: India, the Philippines, Peru, the rest of Latin America. All different, neutral, offshore destinations, if you will. I spent 2003 to 2005 answering one question. I made a career of [figuring out] why India versus the Philippines or vice versa.

Today, it is almost not even a relevant question anymore. Rather, the question is, why wouldn’t you have a little bit in each of these regions? [Doing so] is taking advantage of different geographic locations for their unique expertise. It’s not just globalization but the concept of rightshoring, where you have a global portfolio or a global mix. That is the solution today. It is not, “Which market am I going to do?” Rather, it is, “Which market am I going to, or which talent am I going after?” Once you have decided that, you go and find talent in the appropriate global location.

Tony: What do you consider to be your core competencies today?

Amit: Recently, we were ranked the top inbound contact center company in world by The Black Book of Outsourcing, a Datamonitor company. That very well categorizes what we do. We are an inbound contact center provider at the core of it, and what we do better than anybody else is help clients in a myriad of verticals to manage their inbound customer interactions. That is what we do exceptionally well on a global basis, whether it is in financial services, healthcare, retail, technology, telecom, consumer electronics, or publishing. In each of those we have a level of specialism.

Tony: What does your typical customer look like? And what is the range of organizations that you find to be your customers in terms of size?

Amit: Are you asking from a North American or a global perspective?

Tony: A global perspective, or you can do North America or global non-North America if you think there is a significant difference between North America and the rest of the world.

Amit: It is difficult to say what our typical customer looks like. We work with some of the biggest brands in the world and in the United States, for that matter. When you look at typical outsourcing engagements, the bulk of outsourcing probably comes from three or four vertical markets in the U.S. First, telecommunications or communications in general, which is wireless and wireline, media and entertainment, satellite, and so on. Financial services will be the second largest in that group, and then there is technology and finally manufacturing. Within those vertical markets we service many brands whose names you will recognize as number one or number two in their segments. On a global basis it is not dissimilar, except that in each region we are in, one vertical market might be more prominent than another. The typical size of an engagement is 100, 200, and up to even 3,000 agents for a particular client.

Tony: What is the smallest size you would provide for an engagement, and what is the largest? You said 3,000 at the top end; what about the bottom end?

Amit: The largest is over 3,000 people and the smallest is one person. I know it sounds strange, but one of the services we provide is what we call bureau services – specialized services wherein we offer receptionist service for very small companies. [The size] is typically smaller when you are aggregating it; smaller clients are going to have 50 to 60 agents assigned to them.

You are reading part 3 in the series: Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel
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Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel (Part 2)

Tony Scott — Tue, 03 May 2011 15:07:42 +0000

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.

You are reading part 2 in the series: Outsourcing: Amit Shankardass And Andrew Kokes Of Sitel
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