This article from Business 2.0 is interesting.
Conventional wisdom is that a single location is very important for a startup and I think getting a multinational operation going for a startup is not easy. The advantages are numerous and it is nice to read about people who have made it work.
I recently read about Pramod Bhasin’s ( CEO of GenPact) vision of call center operators being able to work from their homes.
Now if that works it would be awesome. No more Qualis murders.
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I work for a voice-based enterprise telcommunications service provider – we have products which one can use to implement a virtual call center. The call center agent can use the landline at home and it will be transparent to the other party (work number mapped to a home number).
However, I believe the issues for implementation are quality of service over the network and cultural issues.
This idea of having operators working from home has been going on for many years, even i have seen some projects on those lines in beginning of 2000 and 2001 here in Australia, but nothing went beyond from prototype to real time deployment. If this can be executed its a great thing for India and its manpower who other than 8-10 hrs a day at work spend 2-4 hrs in traffic.
I hope it can be executed and made available in India. India badly needs things like that.
Depending on what the business is, and how comfortably the team is able to carry it, multilocational startups may eiher be easy to handle or fail miserably.
About call center operators being able to work from their homes, I am not too hopeful. I have spent half my working life in the BPO business. Data Privacy issues and clients’ quality policies (compliance with six sigma & COPC etc) may be hinderences to the implementation of an excellent idea (vision). One would also have to queue upto the DoT for umpteen clearances. Too many practical problems to negotiate one’s way through, at least in the immediate future.
It makes a lot of sense since most of the time, startups have fully wired founders but downright mediocre manpower support. When you have the built in sourcing flexibility as offered by the MNC startups , you don’t need too much of VC money either.
Result : you get to build a business to last rather than the one to flip.