iSeva: Leveraging the Offshore Model for Improving
Multi-channel Customer Care

Customer care. Companies know it’s important, but sometimes the resources simply aren’t there to provide satisfactory service. To solve this inadequate resource problem, offshore customer care (in Canada, India, and Philippines) is emerging as one solution. In this company profile we examine the business trend and focus on iSeva, which is emerging as a leading provider of offshore customer care.

Today, iSeva’s reference customers include:

• A leading security software company, which depends on iSeva for voice- and e-mail-based customer care and technical support.
• One of the largest financial institutions in the world, which relies on iSeva for complete mortgage origination support including customer handling, document preparation, vendor management and closing support, phone-based customer support.
• The biggest consumer Internet service provider (ISP) in the United States, which engages iSeva for inbound phone-based technical support, telemarketing, and outbound customer acquisition.

Why have they selected iSeva? More value for less — the universal cry of customers and the goal of companies. With customers refusing to pay higher prices, companies have resorted to squeezing their cost structures typically by reducing sales, general, and administrative (SG&A) costs.

Many businesses, however, have exhausted traditional cost-cutting methods and are turning to offshore outsourcing strategies, which are slowly but surely becoming an entrenched part of modern management.

Along with the intense pressure to cut costs, the Internet and an abundant supply of educated, well-trained employees located in lower-cost foreign countries are the other underlying reasons why customer care offshore outsourcing is becoming a widespread business practice.

Initially, companies tended only to outsource manufacturing and IT application development and maintenance. In the last three years, their focus has broadened to include business processes such as customer care and back-office transaction processing. Customer care offshore outsourcing is feasible for most processes that are standardized, easily measured (in terms of service levels), centralized, and, in many cases, high-volume.

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