My line of business - the founder and CEO

Do you find the multitude of roles that exist in the call
centre sector a bit mind-boggling? Well, worry no more. Call Centre
Helper is on hand to give you the low-down on the variety of jobs that
exist in the world of call centres.

24/7 Customer is my second start-up business. S Nagarajan, the other
co-founder, and I sat in a coffee shop with the proverbial napkin and
charted out what the new model for sourcing business processes would
look like and 24/7 Customer was born in April 2000.

Today, the
business employs over 7,000 professionals across eight delivery centres
in places as far and wide as India, the Philippines and Guatemala. We
are the first business process outsourcing (BPO) company to provide
integrated customer lifecycle management solutions through our
multi-shore delivery model. On top of that, we were the first – and so
far the only – company to become Customer Operations Performance Center
(COPC-2000) certified in India. Plus, we were listed as one of the top
five companies in the BPO space in BusinessWeek magazine in January
2006.

I
have been involved in the customer interaction space for some time.
Back in 1995, I founded my first company – again with S Nagarajan – in
Princeton, New Jersey, USA. Business Evolution (BEI) was a provider of
integrated customer interaction technology and was acquired by Kana
Software just before the millennium.

Within a few months of
that acquisition, we were ready to embark on our next customer
interaction project, and the BPO space was definitely the right move
for us. Ultimately, customers are the only reason a business exists.
Businesses are there to serve their customers. They’re the most
strategic and most valuable piece of any organisation.

For me,
owning that and making it successful was a very exciting proposition
back in 2000 and remains so even today. I see 24/7 Customer as a
company that makes it very simple and easy for consumers to connect
with organisations, to buy products or services, and to seek answers to
their issues. I feel we play a very important role in ensuring our
clients are able to acquire customers and keep them for life.

Currently,
we handle 8 million transactions a month. Hopefully it will be a
billion in the next ten years. With luck, my personal career would
mirror that growth and fulfilment of the company’s vision to be the
first point of connection for any consumer in the world.

What working life is like

As
for the here and now, my daily working life is strenuous but highly
rewarding. I allocate most of my time to two stakeholders: 24/7 team
members and customers. Time management for me is about making sure 75
to 80% of my time is effectively divided between these two
stakeholders. I do not undertake any activity unless I understand how
it affects my commitment to these stakeholders.

With that in
mind, I interact with teams at 24/7 Customer across the entire spectrum
– ranging from one-to-ones and group meetings to monthly calls with our
top 300 managers. Daily work life mostly involves being in an outside
location somewhere in the world – I am out of the office more than half
of my time – either interacting with my team or with prospects and
customers.

Obviously, this kind of life could be relatively
pressurised. However, I make sure to find time to laugh and have fun
throughout the day. I don’t belong to the school where you need to take
a month’s vacation to take off the stress. I do micro-vacations on a
daily basis: a minute reading the cartoon Dilbert or a quick
wine-tasting event in the evening.

Ultimately, I think it is
important not to take things too seriously and to step back every few
hours. Behaving this way allows you to see things clearly and do the
right things. I believe that if you have clarity in why you do things
and what is important, you will never end up with any pressure. Also,
being proactive means you are not rushing. Instead you are in control –
well, as much you can be…