IN 1999, Sanjay Kumar founded vCustomer Corporation, headquartered in Kirkland, Washington, providing Customer Support and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services with operations in the US, UK, Philippines and India. Before founding vCustomer, Sanjay was the Network Architect at Teledesic Corporation, a visionary LEO Satellite venture backed by Bill Gates and Craig McCaw. Prior to that, he worked at Microsoft Corporation, where he created and managed the Broadband and Internet Telephony Group. Kumar was in a recent visit to Egypt for the first time, during which The Egyptian Gazette caught up with him for the following interview. Would you start by giving us an overview about vCustomer? vCustomer is a leading provider of customer care contact centre solutions and services. We leverage the right blend of innovative technology, business analytics and industry expertise to consistently deliver customised, high quality, cost-saving services and solutions. We provide a unique focus around the customer that helps you gain insight into customer behaviour and leverage the solutions and services to improve the customer support experience. We ensure that people, process and technology are always centred around the goal of increasing customer satisfaction. What distinguishes vCustomer from its competitors? We understand that our clients have a limited budget within, which they would like to support their customers. While their budget is limited, they also want the customer to feel like they care. That is why in addition to our flat pricing structure, we provide state-of-the-art speech-based IVR solutions and web-based selfservice solutions, with fully integrated messaging that ensures customers only make an inquiry just once. We partner with our clients to ensure that their customers have a consistently great experience in the course of every interaction with the support team. Our goal is to provide the most cost effective solution that leverages a global workforce that enables customers to get the help they need, when they need it and via the communication channel they choose. We have also developed some of the most flexible and adaptive customer communication tools designed to support both inbound and outbound communications. Whether it is ensuring the customer is never on hold, or assuring the customer with follow-up status updates after they have made a request, our solutions assure the customer is always handled in a quality fashion and provided the information they need. We will establish a new branch for vCustomer in the Middle East and we have chosen Egypt to be our hub for the region, that is why I am here today. When and where exactly will your new branch open? Our new branch will be in Alexandria and the official inauguration will be at the end of the second quarter of 2010 with the appointment of Ahmed Mokhtar – a highly qualified Egyptian expert – as the chairman. Why did you choose Egypt to establish the new branch? One of the main reasons is the fact that Egypt has been blessed with a unique geographical location. Egypt is strategically located as a hub between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the US. Another important fact is that Egypt's dense population produces an attractive cheap labour supply, where English is fluently spoken by university graduates and where proficiency in many other European languages is high. Moreover, the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) is committed in many initiatives to support IT/BPO industry development and exports. ITIDA stimulates multinational training programmes for managers covering different management disciplines including sales, marketing, business development, finance. ITIDA sets up dedicated training for IT and BPO professionals on high demand jobs. Implement specific “you hire, we train” programme (at 80 per cent hire rate) for specific skills required by companies. Which industries does vCustomer serve? Our clients work in different sectors including ICT, tourism and hotels as well as banking and financial sectors. Speaking of banking and finance, don't you think that this sector in particular does not believe in BPO? Working in the banking and finance sector is really complicated. This can be attributed to the fact that this sector deals with very highly sensitive and confidential data, that is why tend to handle their activities by themselves and do not use any outsourced services. However, when it comes to customer services, they definitely use BPO to handle their clients' everyday requests anytime, anywhere and we have experts in handling our clients' requirements. It is commonly known that BPO has exacerbated unemployment in the States. What do you think? This can be easily reputable. The truth is the problem lies in the American citizens themselves not in the BPO industry. Americans do not like working in the BPO field because of its relatively law wages and that is why the BPO industry heavily relies on other nationalities especially Indians. In your opinion, will BPO reduce unemployment in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East? Sure, it is expected that the BPO industry will offer thousands of job opportunities in the near future.
