Teledirect: Media Clippings

In the early years of the outsourcing business, much of the processes outsourced were those that required little expertise. At that point, the growth was very much due to corporations wanting to save on costs and increase process efficiencies. However, the trend has changed today as we see more higher value business processes being off-shored by organisations worldwide. The key driver is no longer that of cost but more on the ability of outsourcing companies to provide specialised services and how they can bring more intrinsic value to clients.

Adding to the other two forms of outsourcing - business process outsourcing (BPO) and shared services outsourcing (SSO) - there is another buzzword that has been gaining traction of late: knowledge process outsourcing (KPO). KPO firms provide domain-based processes and business expertise. Essentially, KPO is an off-shoot of BPO but the difference is in the value that is provided by the outsource firm, which is much higher when it comes to KPO. Teledirect Telecommerce's managing director, Laurent Junique says KPO has been around for a while but it hasn't been talked about widely.

"In line with the global race for talent, KPO is driven mainly by talent pool limitations rather than economic reasons. There are many facets of KPO - legal process outsourcing, research and development, publishing, animation; they all allow firms to move up the value chain. At Teledirect, we offer sales channel management whereby there are more activities of higher value to our clients than just telemarketing. We help develop sales pipelines and provide information to clients on where the market opportunity lies," he adds.

While KPO allows corporations to add value to their processes without direct recruitment, one of the issues that are being debated is that of compliance to standards such as Sarbannes-Oxley (SOX) and Basel II. The argument was that in an outsource model, corporations are not in complete control of certain business processes, making it more difficult for them to ensure those processes are fully in line with the compliance standards. However, Junique says sales channel management outsourcing is not really affected by this problem.

"It really depends on the sector of which the outsource company is operating in. European and US standards are different - SOX and Base II have more impact on back-end processes that on sales, which is providing the right information to the right people at the right time. Usually, your clients will support you by providing you with standards, matrixes, process controls and even personnel. You go into a partnership with your client - it is not only on a service level agreement but also compliance with headquarters. Service must be customised these days," he explains.

Because Malaysia does not have the mass population required to compete effectively in attracting high-volume projects, KPO is likely the best area to move into for the future. This is in line with the general strategy to move up the value chain into servicing verticals and sectors where knowledge and skills of human capital will play and integral role. In terms of KPO, India is way ahead of us with numerous legal process outsourcing and R&D outsourcing contracts.

"India is ahead of us by 20 years in outsourcing, so where they are today is relative to how early they started. After time, you will eventually cross the threshold from BPO to KPO. Malaysia still has some issues that we have in common with India, like attrition. In fact, the Philippines is also facing some serious people pinching problems. Malaysia's difference is our multilingual capability. This makes it easier for us the attract Asean language speakers here, so we should tap into this market. It is all about scale in India and the Philippines. In Malaysia, it is about customised and precise delivery," says Junique.

For the moment, Teledirect has no plans to move outside of the sales function, which has been its key area of expertise for years. Instead, it is looking to add other sales disciplines aside from sales acceleration to its offerings. Currently, 30% of its business is in the KPO domain but Junique intends to move into customer service outsourcing and help desk in the near future.