Beyond Borders Podcast Episode 001: Overview
In this episode, we explore the story of Asiatel Outsourcing with our guest, Jasjit Singh Anand, the President of Asiatel Outsourcing. Asiatel Outsourcing, a brand under Asia Teleservices Inc, Philippines, stands as a distinguished entity within the outsourcing landscape. A subsidiary of Asia Telecom Holdings Limited (ATHL), the company embarked on its outsourcing journey in 2006, initially focusing on setting up captive operations for the group’s telecom business. Bolstered by its success, the company diversified into third-party BPO services, catering to corporates and SMEs globally. This diversification birthed Asiatel Outsourcing, a trusted boutique outsourcing partner renowned for its reliability and excellence in the Philippines. With over 15 years of experience, Asiatel Outsourcing has served a diverse clientele spanning various industries, offering a spectrum of services including call center, back office support, creative solutions, IT, technical support, and network operations center assistance.
Guest Bio
With over two decades of expertise in business development and project management across multinational corporations like Aditya Birla Group and Fullerton India, Jasjit brings invaluable experience to his current role. Having spent nine years with the company, he has been instrumental in spearheading the Management and overall Business Process Outsourcing development, transforming it from an incubation project to a thriving cornerstone of operations. Jasjit’s involvement in special projects like remittances and scaling up the wholesale telecom trading desk in the Philippines showcases his versatility and strategic acumen. His tenure exemplifies a commitment to excellence, driving the organization towards sustained growth and success in dynamic markets.
Interview Transcript
Neal: Welcome. I’m your host Neal Howard. Thank you so much for joining us on OutsourcingFit. We’re joined today by Mr. Jasjit Singh Anand, President of Asiatel Outsourcing. Welcome to the program.
Jasjit: Thank you so much Neal. It’s my pleasure to be here.
Neal: Outsourcing. What is outsourcing in a nutshell?
Jasjit: Outsourcing in a nutshell is taking any business function and instead of doing it yourself in the office, you give it to a third party partner to do it. Now that is the simplest definition but this has really changed. It’s evolved over the years so it’s no longer exporting a job to a place where it is cheap or cost effective. It’s really changed from there a lot especially in the Philippines you know which is a very important hub. What we have observed is that you know the lines between the front office back office and the middle office. This is actually now becoming like a completely new strategy in itself where you take some of the front office functions which are non- core and you take it to your back office a location where you get efficiency where you get the scale and you also get cost effective solutions.
Neal: I heard you mentioned the Philippines as being a BPO Hub could you elaborate on that a bit and talk about your particular geographical footprint when it comes to AsiaTel Outsourcing.
Jasjit: About the potential in the Philippines approximately there about 1.7 million jobs that are working that have been created by this industry and the official revenue is about 35 billion US but there is another market which is not covered in these figures which is the market of the freelancers. It is anticipated that a similar number of people are working as freelancing so this is about the Philippines BPO industry and about our footprint. You know we came here in a different way in the sense that we were originally a telecom company in Hong Kong. We were known as Asia Telecom that time and we came into 2006 into the Philippines largely to set up our captive back office and from then while we were here for six-seven years we realized that we understood the game of Outsourcing. Why don’t we extend the service to third party clients and that’s how we got into outsourcing. So we are headquartered in Hong Kong while our main operating office is in the Philippines and we also have a couple of offices in Singapore, Indonesia and also in Taiwan. From an operating perspective, the Philippines is the main operating office. The terms Outsourcing and offshoring are interchangeable, a lot of people would say Outsourcing is when you’re giving it to a third party and offshoring is when you doing the same job but as a captive there is one way some people define it but I would say you know the model I would say in my opinion would broadly divide into four or five categories. The first model is outsourcing. Now Outsourcing is when you give a complete project or complete KPIs to a third party and he delivers it for you, that’s outsourcing. If you do it yourself, some people call it offshoring and some people call it a captive BPO. These are just different terms but then there are other products like managed operations employer of record is becoming very big these days and then there is freelancing so these are the spectrums you know if you don’t want to work with the popo and work directly with the people there’s the freelancing which is the other spectrum and in the middle there is something called as employer of record and managed operations so quite a bit of diversity within outsourcing itself.
Neal: What particular services does AsiaTel Outsourcing offer?
Jasjit: We offer in a very simple way like we call ourselves “Your team in the Philippines.” That’s our tagline and what we do is we offer basically a survey of first assessing what our customer needs and that is the most important thing that we do. And once we understand the customer needs then the products and services come into play. Like for example we offer three or four different products, I would say four different products. One is outsourcing which is, I would say, for a customer who knows what he wants, he has a KPI, he has an understanding of what kind of productivity he should get because he knows what he wants right then. There is another set of customers who are basically startups. They have a lot of startups in our portfolio. Now the startup does not want to probably go that way for two reasons. Reason number one is they’re also experimenting with the product at the moment in the market so they really don’t have KPIs in front of them they want more people and expand. And secondly in startup some of these people understand the technology and product better than a third party would understand so these people go for what we call as managed operations in which we do in the Philippines. We hire people for them, we do the payroll processing, SSS, we do the recruitment, we replace the people, we provide them the office space and these people are working dedicated for the client but then the client supervises the work directly on a day-to-day basis while what we do is Administrative and HR oversight. This is model number two. Then after Covid things changed a little. A lot of people started working from home so there’s another model which has become very popular. So mostly these employers’ records are the employees who are not coming to the office but rest remains the same. We hire them, we put them on our payrolls, we do the payroll, all this government stuff like SSS and PhilHealth and then these people are working directly with the client. And then the other spectrum of outsourcing that we offer is also I would say co-working spaces and a bit of third was the employer of record and then the last one is the co-working space service offices.
Neal: You did mention that the client knows what they want but it seems often you may have to guide a client and kind of let them know what kind of service that AsiaTel offers is best for them.
Jasjit: Yes. I mentioned that’s the most primary step that we do I think as an outsourcing company, we do counseling at Stage One because customers may have a certain idea about outsourcing. So we try to understand what exactly they need and based on that, we offer them all the four models. There’s another fifth model which is shared services which I did not mention. In shared services what happens is if somebody is looking for a digital marketing expert and he does not need it full time, he just wants to run one campaign. We also offer digital marketing on a shared services basis. You don’t have a full time person. You get a fractional resource for what you may need. So what happens is based on the requirements of the customer and the budget. One is the requirement of the customer, second is the budget of the customer and third thing is what kind of operational control the customer wants on the campaign or on the team. We offer them one to five solutions and that’s how it goes.
Neal: Talk about some of the experiences with your Western clients and other clients and then tell us how people can find you and get in touch with you and learn more about the services there at AsiaTel Outsourcing.
Jasjit: Sure. So customers can get in touch by visiting our website asiateloutsourcing.com. Get in touch with us and see the experience of Western customers and we have customers from other geographies as well. I think it is very simple, they first come here to see what potential the Philippines has to offer and what we have seen is they may start from one particular domain. Let’s say they start with inside sales or they start with telemarketing or another customer start with customer service or customer success. But what we have seen in general is very quickly it becomes a full ecosystem of its own. Like customers will start with telemarketing then they go to customer service, then they may go to accounting, then they may go to digital marketing so I think this is the trend. I’ve seen with our customers and in general with all customers. BPOs as I mentioned earlier, the lines between middle office back office and front office are blurring and hence the customers enter with one job in mind but they keep finding that’s the experience.
Neal: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
Jasjit: I think we are fundamentally a very relationship driven company and that is exactly how we try to deal with the customers. So basically we are trying to bring a model where people are your office in the Philippines while a group has a presence in a few places but we at the moment focus on the Philippines as a destination because we feel here that the demographics are right. And one thing I want to mention about the Philippines is that there is a service culture in the country and that makes outsourcing so many people here. Just to answer your question we are present in Asia, in Singapore, in Taiwan, in Hong Kong but that’s again a presence. Fundamentally we are operating in the Philippines. In the future, yes we may add other countries that want to get into development, we may look at India, Vietnam but for services such as sales, customer service, accounting, graphic design, IT support, accounting – we have them in the Philippines.
Neal: You’ve been listening to OutsourcingFit. I’m your host Neal Howard in conversation with Mr. Jas Anand. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you and once again your website is asiateloutsourcing.com
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