Habla
Indian Outsourcing?
An Indian outsourcing company sets up
shop in Latin America to find Spanish-speaking workers for U.S. companies.
June 10, 2006
Yielding to customer demand from U.S. companies
for Spanish-speaking call center staff, India-based 24/7 Customer
has set up a 500-seat operation in Guatemala.
The company’s clients in the United States
have been asking for help with taking calls from their Spanish-speaking
customers, but with little such expertise available in India, 24/7
Customer decided to go to where the native speakers reside.
Chief Executive P. V. Kannan said many U.S.
companies consciously target the Hispanic community because they
constitute roughly 15 percent of the U.S. population.
“The buying power of Hispanics is growing
rapidly and few companies can afford to ignore them. But a call
center in the U.S. itself for this group is expensive, so our clients
decided to outsource the work to us,” he said.
The privately held Indian firm, which clocked
sales of $67.4 million in its last fiscal year, sought the expertise
of call center veterans in Guatemala who will set up the center
and run it on a build-operate-transfer (BOT) model for three years
before handing over charge of the operations to 24/7 Customer.
“We went after the right partners rather
than hunting for the location,” said chief operating officer
S. Nagarajan, who declined to name the partners. “They know
where the best value can be derived.”
The move by 24/7 Customer comes amid a controversy
in the U.S. over the influx of undocumented Spanish-speaking immigrants,
mostly from Mexico, who enter the U.S. seeking work. Some U.S. politicians
estimate as many as 12 million Mexicans may be living in the U.S.
Reliability Issues
John McCarthy, research vice president for Asia-Pacific
at Forrester, said 24/7 Customer’s move is practical but the
challenge would be to get reliable telecom infrastructure in Guatemala.
“Wipro has been talking of going to the
Philippines for years, but they haven’t yet done so,”
he said, adding that the call center business isn’t as easy
as it appears.
24/7 Customer’s Guatemala center has been
operational for a few weeks and the company plans to offer the facility
to its other customers in the U.S.
Other Indian business process outsourcers from
India have reached out to other parts of the globe.
MSource, the BPO arm of software services company
Satyam, has an 80-seat operation in Mexico. Progeon, Infosys’s
BPO wing, has a 120-seat center in Czechoslovakia. HCL BPO has a
presence in Ireland. And Nipuna, the BPO arm of Satyam Computer,
is considering overseas centers in Budapest, Brazil, and Malaysia
to bring in multilingual capabilities.
24/7 Customer, which expects to have 7,500 employees
worldwide by the end of 2006, is also looking for a European center
with expertise in French and German.
Contact the writer: KShah@RedHerring.com
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