ESTABLISHED in 2001, Xceed represents one of the largest contact centres in the Southern Mediterranean region. It is a global provider of quality, multi-lingual Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services. The Egyptian Gazette caught up with Adel Danish, Xceed's Chairman and CEO, who pioneered the establishment of Xceed and had the following interview. You have inaugurated a branch for Xceed in Morocco. What distinguishes Morocco from the other countries in the region? Let me start with the fact that Xceed currently has two sites within Egypt with its head quarters located in the Smart Village. Xceed has an additional contact centre, geographically and culturally proximate to Europe, in Morocco. This site boasts a large, qualified Francophone talent pool. No-one can deny the fact that Egypt is a fantastic destination for BPO because it has an abundant and sustainable pool of talented, multi-lingual university graduates. Egypt's dense population produces an attractive labour supply, where English is fluently spoken by university graduates and where proficiency in many other European languages is high. As a result of its professional pool of graduates, Egypt has become one the world's most attractive and fast growing locations for global outsourcing. However, you cannot find tens of thousands of calibers who fluently speak French, German or Spanish, and this is actually what our customers want. They want a company that can provide them with the outsourcing services in different languages. They also want to have distribution of the business to avoid the risk of endangering their business in case anything happens here like for example the previous submarine cables cut that affected everyone here. Is there any plan to establish another branch anywhere else in the near future? Definitely, our plan won't stop in Morroco. In the long term, we will present in the US, Latin America and other countries. Our main aim from this expansion is to have scalability in different languages at a low cost. For instance, scalability in Spanish will probably be in Latin America. When you look for new agents, what is the language that you find difficulty finding here? Honestly speaking, we can find highly qualified university graduates who can speak different languages as Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Greek and even Hebrew. The true problem lies in the fact that we cannot find a large number of those qualified multi-lingual calibers. As an expert, how can this problem be overcome? More attention should be paid to developing students linguistic talents. There should be more universities and institutes that teach different languages. Even during school years, different languages should be included in the curricula at early stages. What are the main customers that Xceed currently serves? We mainly act as the IT arm of Telecom Egypt. Besides, we currently serve many international clients as Microsoft, Oracle, Du and others. How do any agents work with you for the time being? Xceed currently has a capacity of 1,700 web enabled workstations, at Xceed's two main sites in the Smart Village. All in all, three million transactions, both voice and non-voice, are conducted per month. Are these agents enough for your size of businesses now or is there any plan to hire more agents? Human beings are our assets. We are always expanding our team and hiring new people. Our employees are the cornerstone of our value propositions. With their multi-lingual skills, university education, competitive rates and inherent service talent, our clients can rest assured that their customers will receive the optimum level of professionalism, reliability and experience. A new partnership has been recently announced between Xceed and the Nile University, can you give us more details about it? The agreement aims to join the forces of academic research and call centre industry. This deal represents the first collaboration between the two entities, seeking innovative solutions that are likely to raise the performance of Xceed employees and the quality of services offered to clients. The research is based on thoroughly and comprehensively analysing the databases of the contact centre's calls, searching for specific words. The results of these analyses will then be matched with the clients' evaluation of the calls. The fields of research comprise several domains like auto detection of phone calls and languages, and the transference of spoken words into written ones that are inserted into databases. Other fields of research include the usage of statistics and data mining. For the second consecutive year, the global, standard setting organisation and advocate for the outsourcing profession, IAOP, recently recognised Xceed in its annual Global Outsourcing 100 list for the year 2010, what does this recognition represent to you? This list identifies the best outsourcing service providers across the globe that have demonstrated their expertise to deliver notable business solutions and made significant contributions to the industry through thought leadership. The ranking in the list is based on four key criteria: size and growth, customer references, organisational competencies and management capabilities. IAOP Chairman Michael Corbett and Chair of the judges' panel remarked that Xceed's consistent excellence in meeting its customers' needs and its investment in people has made it one of the top outsourcing service providers anywhere. Inclusion in this ranking for the second year commends Xceed's commitment to driving thought leadership and innovation across its service delivery cycle to soar with the industry conventional benchmarks to new levels. This year's award highlights the continuous efforts maintained by all Xceed teams.
