DesiCrew liaises with urban clients and takes complete responsibility for the outsourcing and timely delivery of the projects undertaken, and ensures that quality standards are met

In my previous article in the July 2007 issue of i4d (http://www.i4donline.net/July07/content.asp), I asked readers to think of  five words that came to their mind when they heard the word rural and 5 words when thought BPO. The picture painted by both is such a contrast. Can you imagine a  quality conscious, punctual office in a rural setting? Can you imagine 99 percent  uptime of infrastructure like electricity and Internet connectivity even at the Taluk level1?

DesiCrew's challenge was to convince the customer that this was possible and educate its employees  that until these pictures became reality the customer would not trust us with their work. And as DesiCrew turns 2, we are all proud to say that we are close to 99% infrastructure uptime at our centres with a team that is focused on customer service. In 2005, when we started our research on the rural BPO model, most customers politely showed us the door, in 2007 when we started DesiCrew, a few (and I can count them on one hand) forward thinking companies extended pilots cautiously. As we enter 2009 and everyone is looking at reducing costs, there are more than a dozen competitors and a lot of talk about the concept at NASSCOM forums. This is one of the key achievements – an  acknowledgment from the industry. DesiCrew's model is to set up a 25-seat office in a small town or a rural area and employ 50 resources from this set-up. Each office has adequate power back-up and connectivity to ensure 99% uptime. The employees resources are graduates with functional (reading and writing) knowledge of  English.

According to NASSCOM, the BPO industry in India is expected to face a shortfall of 262,000 professionals by the year 2012, a shortfall that can be addressed by the huge number of rural youth who, with, little training can work just as well as the urban youth.

A BPO is as good as the people in it and going by the recent accolades by our customers, we can safely say DesiCrew has some of the best people in the industry – passionate, motivated and extremely hard working. Building DesiCrew to a strength of 100 fulltime employees has been a journey full of  learnings and it was only possible because of the truly motivated people who joined in to make the rural BPO dream a reality. Some of our key learnings are no different than any other start-up – customer focus is the most important skill, compromise on infrastructure will amount to compromise on quality of service and people are the most important asset. Our biggest learning, however, was that the customer does not care where the work gets done. And some projects cannot be done without some support work in some large city. Thus, we evolved a hybrid model to accommodate such projects. The concept of a rural BPO is a means to an end, the end being – cost effectiveness, a larger talent pool and lower attrition rates.

DesiCrew offers multiple services from the plain vanilla digitisation and data entry to more complex services in product testing, transcription and translation. With over 2.1 million pages of digitised data, DesiCrew  has now invested in building a Virtual Data Factory for any digitisation effort. The capacity of the Virtual Data Factory will start with 1000 man-hours a day and quickly grow to 10,000 man-hours per day. The same has been built based on our experience working for an e-Governance project for which we employed over 1500 people on a temporary basis.

Apart from the Virtual Data Factory, DesiCrew has invested in other technology products to ensure that customer concerns on security, internal requirements on training and general functioning of the organisation are addressed.

DesiCrew's growth is also fueled by that fact that our customers are the top companies in their field of work. A BSE-listed insurance company and two of the top web property in all major global markets, have set the benchmarks for us and helped us build best practices to execute the processes we work on. The support from these key customers has accelerated our learning process and helped us establish a high standard of customer focus.

In closing, I would like share a phrase coined by one of our founding team members – "They came to us for the cost, stayed for the quality, will work with us for the value addition"

Author's Profile

Saloni Malhotra, an engineer from the University of Pune, is the Co-Founder of Desicrew. DesiCrew links urban clients with a rural workforce through the Internet kiosk network.