Change of guard in 24/7

Bangalore, Jan 31 (UNI) One of the pioneer BPO industries in the country, 24/7 Customer, today announced a change of guard with Ms Renee Kuwahara taking over as the Chief Operating Officer from Founder-COO S Nagarajan.

Mr Nagarajan, who would be the new Chief People Officer, told UNI here that the restructuring had been done to enable him concentrate more on value system and culture of the company as the company was growing in size and migrating to new geographies across the world.

A senior 24/7 Customer executive, Ms Kuwahara had joined the company in May last year as Chief Delivery Officer for Americas.

She had set up the company operations in Guatemala and would now lead operations across five delivery centres in India and Guatemala.

Mr Nagarajan, along with Mr P V Kannan, had founded 24/7 Customer in April 2000. In his new role as the Chief People Officer, he would drive talent management globally.

24/7 Customer was the first BPO company that provided integrated customer lifecycle management services through a 'Multi-shore global delivery model'. It employed over 5,500 professionals across its offices in India, the US and the UK and the six delivery centres in India, Philippines and Guatemala.

Mr Nagarajan said that besides lifecycle management services, 85 per cent of which was voice-based, the company had now taken up another vertical in financial and accounting services and had bagged a customer. The six billion dollar BPO industry in the country currently employed over 400,000 people and was facing acute shortage of qualified manpower, especially in spoken English. Initially when the company interviewed 100 candidates, it could secure 15 employees. But today the number of selected candidates had dwindled to four or five. He stressed the need for including Spoken English in school curriculum. His company was training about 100 teachers in Spoken English and more would follow he said, patting the Andhra Pradesh Government for taking up a initiative in this sector. Moving forward, the shortage could be as high as a million, he warned.

UNI