TechLahore

TRG had a virtual front desk assistant for their US office... telecommuting from Karachi! But was this a service other customers could get?

With businesses in the US looking for more and more ways in which they can save money in the current economic climate, interesting new trends in outsourcing are emerging. I recently finished reading a rather thought-provoking book (more on this later), that makes a compelling case for outsourcing every-day repetitive tasks and activities. Many of these tasks would have ideally been performed by an executive assistant, but since not all of us have one, the least we can do is outsource these time consuming activities to a cost-effective offshore destination! The two destinations mentioned in the the book were the Philippines and India. The Philippines in particular has a great reputation for being extremely service oriented and their english skills are fairly good… so it makes sense.

This made me wonder. Are there any companies in Pakistan that provide similar services? Do we provide outsourcing for things other than software development, data entry, call centers and the other usual suspects? This Washington Post story from 2005 made for a very interesting read. As you’ll see, it talks about Pakistan-based TRG (The Resource Group) and their own US office where a large flat panel connected to a call center operator in Karachi replaced the usual front desk assistant. Nothing in there mentions that outsourced assistants were ever offered as a service to customers… but perhaps the time for that has come!

This is a fascinating area to me personally, and I’d really like to do a feature on Pakistani companies that provide off-the-wall outsourcing; things that range from executive assistants and outsourced personal shopping to finance and legal outsourcing. So if you are running such a company or know about one, please do let me know.

What all can be outsourced? Clearly engineering, call center operations and many other business processes are already tried and tested candidates. Can sales and marketing be outsourced too? Probably so for specific industries and specific kinds of products that don’t require physical presence to sell. Perhaps Pakistani companies should start to look at these additional areas.

I know that one of the things startups in the US focus on – especially pre-funding startups, or companies that have only managed an Angel round –  is stretching the dollar and getting off to a running start. These competing goals usually don’t go all that well together. But if the dollar can be spent in Pakistan, it is automatically stretched many fold and with an outsourcing organization backing you, you can leverage large numbers of people and scale a lot faster than if you were screening and hiring each new employee. So the value proposition makes a lot of sense and I think there is serious money to be made by creating these targeted outsourced offerings for a specific clientele.

The days of being a generalist and winning are long gone. Do you really want to be yet another undifferentiated software body shop competing on elance? Unless you have a captive client or a pre-existing relationship to leverage, the odds of success are about the same as drawing the winning numbers on a lottery. But if you target a well defined group, with a set of services they really need, now that’s a different story.

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