15th Feb, 2010 - Hindu Business Line

BPO company 24/7 Customer sees big opportunities in the mobile Internet space.

“As tweeting grows big in India on the mobile phone and the mobile subscriber base reaches 1 billion, more innovation will happen in the mobile space. This will throw up definite opportunities for us. We are looking to bring in offerings that are different from what we provide globally,” Mr V. Bharathwaj, Chief Marketing Officer, 24/7 Customer, told Business Line on Monday.

Detailing the company's transition from a services to solutions provider, Mr Bharathwaj said 24/7 Customer has an analytics-based Software as a Service (SaaS) offering (on the cloud) that gives out solutions based on predictions that can deliver business outcome. “For instance, we helped an online retail company identify which of the visitors to its site would need help for which particular products at what point of time. Predictive analytics helps understand not only how people behave but also offers solutions on how clients can interact with them. Our vision is to offer consumers answers to their problems before they ask,” said Mr Bharathwaj. About 50 per cent of clients (around 20) are using this model, he added. 24/7 Customer is trying to adapt the analytics model to the Indian market as well.

Currently, the analytics operation accounts for less than 10 per cent of the company's business, which is still primarily voice-based contact centre operations. “But as we move up the value chain, we see the contribution increasing,” said Mr Bharathwaj. The company has analytics teams in India and the US.

With businesses trying to understand how consumers are behaving on social media, social media analytics would have a big role to play in the future, said Mr Bharathwaj. The company has a site 247tweetview.com that helps enterprises learn what consumers are tweeting about them. Around 200 companies have signed up for this.

Recruitment plans

24/7 Customer, which specialises in customer lifecycle management, has been fairly immune to the recession, said Mr Bharathwaj. The company has been growing at a CAGR of 25-30 per cent for the last five-six years. “We have also been recruiting actively. While last quarter we recruited 400-500 people, this year we are looking at 800-1,000 people, mainly graduates and under-graduates for our primary operations.”

The company employs around 8,000 people in India — this is about 50 per cent of its total workforce world-wide.

With competition from the Philippines growing stronger in the BPO space (the country took away 3 lakh jobs from India last year), BPOs in India need to pull up, said Mr Bharadwaj. “India has to focus on supply chain management and innovation. The SME market is largely untapped in the West. There are big opportunities for Indian BPOs if we tailor our offerings for the SME market. We can also benefit from learnings in the domestic market. We must test our opportunity here and take it to the international market,” he said.