A couple of months ago, I had a delicious lunch (at Manhattan’s Jaiya Thai, which seems to hold a monopoly on the Thai-food-for-desis market) with a friend who had just been to Pakistan on business. He told me about a company in D.C. which had outsourced its receptionist to Pakistan via videoconferencing. Today, our mutual friend Mitra Kalita published the story in the Washington Post:
In a chic downtown lobby across the street from the Old Executive Office Building, Saadia Musa answers phones, orders sandwiches and lets in the FedEx guy. And she does it all from Karachi, Pakistan.
As receptionist for the Resource Group, Musa greets employees and visitors via a flat screen hanging on the lobby’s wall. Although they are nine hours behind and nearly 7,500 miles away, her U.S.-based bosses rely on her to keep order during the traffic of calls and meetings…She turns the camera — which is usually focused on her face — to offer a view of her surroundings in Karachi: a lounge, a cafeteria, a pool table… Just then, a phone call interrupts her. It is 1:15 a.m. where Musa sits. “Good afternoon,” Musa says brightly. “Thank you for calling the Resource Group.”
Musa went through Stepford Wife-like call center training:
“A smile can be heard,” Musa recited in an interview via her flat screen. She worked as a call-center operator before being promoted to secretary. “Posture can make a difference. A dress code makes a difference.”
The company’s Pakistani-American founder, Zia Chishti (PDF), previously cofounded the company which does Invisalign braces. He was born in the U.S. but grew up in Pakistan:
… Chishti co-founded the Resource Group three years ago after selling his shares in a California dental-imaging company he had also founded. That company, Align Technology Inc., left its operations in Lahore, Pakistan, after the 2001 terrorist attacks, and Chishti took the abandoned office filled with laid-off workers and asked them to trust his vision for a call-center empire.
The security situation for Western clients in Karachi doesn’t sound great:
… having been escorted by armed guards, Beringer acknowledged he did not feel totally safe. Being a Westerner made him feel, at times, self-conscious. “There was a bomb threat while we were there,” he said.
And Pakistan remains far behind India in outsourcing:
Pakistan remains just a blip in the offshoring industry, generating an estimated $150 million in revenue from software and related services last year, according to the Pakistan Software Houses Association. India, meanwhile, generated $12.8 billion.
But Chishti himself reports $170M of revenue in three years. Even if he made ample seed capital from Invisalign, that’s an impressive figure.
Previous post here.
