'Our investment will come from internal accruals'

First thing first, what prompted you to leave HCL and join
vCustomer?

I have been in HCL for over to two decades. It was good experience, a lot of learning. I thought I should see the world outside HCL also. For me, the options were either start something new within
HCL, or start something outside, or take something that is already there and grow it up as an organization. I chose the last one. 

I thought vCustomer is the ideal company for me because the company is unique in more way than one. It has been one of the pioneers. It has been one of the largest independent companies, both the size of the clients and the engagement are significant.
While many companies do boast of big names as clients, what is important to know is how large is the engagement size. For us, the engagement sizes are quite large. For Hewlett-Packard, vCustomer is the largest outsourcing vendor globally. How many Indian companies can say that?

Apart from the fact that it is a pioneer and is fairly large, what impressed me is that it is the only player in the contact center space, which has invested very heavily on the products and customized solutions for the contact center. We have delivered customized solutions to the customers at no extra cost. Like for example, some customers have their IVR systems, that were designed for their call centers. When they are
offshoring, it requires some kind of customization. We do that for them. 

The reason why vCustomer hired me is that though the company is one of the biggest contact centers in India, they had no senior major management locally. Also, my experience in acquisition while in HCL would help. I am not suggesting that I am working on any acquisition right now, but as you grow in this space, you may have to do that. 

So what are you working on? 

Expansion. We will have two more centers in Delhi. And one more outside Delhi. Either in North or West. We are in the final stages of deciding on the location. 

Your designation is head of global operations for vCustomer. What does that mean?

We have plans for locating facilities outside India. As and when that happens, I will be looking at service delivery. 

Where are you locating?

As of today, there is nothing finalized. But all companies that are looking at being global players have to look at locating facilities in different countries to minimize geo-political risk, to get access to other language skills, and disaster recovery.
vCustomer is no exception. 

From a position where you handled all aspects of business like strategy to client acquisition to operations, focusing only on service delivery–what would be the difference in challenges for you?


See, vCustomer is one of the few big independent contact center companies in India. So far, it was being managed largely from the US. As we are looking at rapid growth, the company needs management to be based locally. That is what I am here for.

My challenge here will be to scale up rapidly–we plan to double the manpower in the next six months. Looking at the size of engagements as well as the rapid growth, maintaining high levels of quality will be a big challenge. 

Also, I plan to help in developing VC Labs. Besides, largely from a contact center offering, we are looking at other BPO work. That would be a challenge. We would start with targeting the BPO work in the technology industry.

In a big company like HCL, you did not have to think about capital. Enough cash was available as and when you wanted. That is extremely important in this business. In a VC-funded company, it may be different…

Vcustomer has raised a few rounds of funding. And it is a profitable company. In fact, most of the expenditure that we will do in expansion–about $15-18 million in next few months–will come from internal accruals.

Do you plan to productized some VC Labs solution? 

It is already productized now. And we will commercialize it. Especially on the Cisco platform, which is still fairly new, we have developed a lot of features, more features than Cisco itself has. 

Isn’t it a slight different game?

VCustomer is primarily a technical support company. Sixty-five percent of the revenues come from technical help-desk. We do not just do L1 support and escalations but also provide engineering solutions sometimes through VC Labs. By the way, 70 percent of vCustomer employees are engineering graduates.