CEO Spotlight - Featured CEO Ramkumar.N of Decatrend Technologies

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Ramkumar.N - Decatrend Technologies

February 09, 2009

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Background and Role in the Company:

Ramkumar has more than 15 years of experience in the IT and BPO industry. He has successfully managed several large enterprise onsite and offshore projects for international clients. He brings in operational excellence in managing teams from a size of 20 to 500 people.

He implemented mentoring across the organization which resulted into attrition rate of 15 to 18% - the lowest in the industry.

He has successfully created an offshore business development team and was instrumental in driving the Company profitable from the first year of operation.

Main Services:

Process	Services
Lead generation & acquisition	• PPC campaigns • Affiliate marketing • Search engine optimization (SEO) • Live chat / voice support • Targeted e-mail campaigns
Lead processing	• Third party support • Order entry • Order fulfillment
Customer retention & enhancement	• Credit/Debit adjustment • Discount Management • Gift Management • Returns & Chargeback • Warranty • Loyalty Administration
Marketing support	• Catalog services • Data mining and reporting
Analytics	• Web analytics • Customer analytics

We provide an entire gamut of services for multi-channel retailers and support organization (Brick & mortar, Catalog, Online, TV retailers, logistics companies) in managing their entire lifecycle process.

Why We’re Different:

•    90% processes are non-voice
•    Vertical Strength in the retail space
•    Process Maturity with Low Price
•    Organizational flexibility
•    Focus on training and imparting knowledge across the table
•    End to End services

Our Success Story:

Over the last 5 years, Decatrend has developed itself into a company with 100% focus on retail services. We service more than 50 multichannel retailers; most of them are in the Top 100 online retailers list.

Offshore (India) Sales and marketing team, keeping sales and marketing costs low.

Lowest Attrition rate of 15-18%,
We have some important client relationships running for 4+ years.
We have generated sales of 500,000 per month for an automobile retailer thro live chat

Most Important Questions Clients Should Ask to Potential Vendors:

1. Experience in handling process that needs to be outsourced

2. Experience in handling the Tools – Email management, CRM, Live chat, etc

3. Knowledge transfer process and quality assurance measures in place

4. What kind of in-house processes does that vendor follow to retain employees and improve motivation among employees?

5. Client references and learning from past clients that can be applied to a new client

6. Contingency plans to help cope with employees leaving a project and other issues

Myths:

1. Myth: Outsourcing leads to drop in quality and control

Fact: Outsourcing can improve productivity and the process cycle while still retaining full control if the vendor provides transparency and has quality measures in place.

2. Myth: Outsourcing should be limited to non-core processes alone to ensure data security and safety of trade secrets
Fact: Clients can safely outsource core projects if the vendor adheres to stringent standards on data security. By outsourcing core processes clients are able to scale up and scale down rapidly keeping the overheads low. This also gives retailers a competitive edge in a highly competitive market place.

3. Myth: Communication (reporting) is a hurdle when it comes to outsourcing projects
Fact: A well developed communication channel involving a single point of contact at both ends and the involvement of the stake holders ensure smooth flow of communication at all levels. Today’s technology allows a great deal of choices (Voice/Chat and Video) apart of email to communicate with clients in real time.

4. Myth: Imparting domain training would be difficult
Fact: Hiring of trained resources in the respective domain is not as tough it thought to be, we have clients for whom we have recruited automobile engineers to carry out the process.

On Developing Our Skills:

Learning is an ongoing process at Decatrend. Even when we are delivering a service to our clients we are constantly learning new procedures and techniques that are documented and used as learning for future use. Every client project offers a new learning experience that we use to improve our delivery standards on a daily basis and apply the same to new projects as well. We adapt to our clients needs and provide specialized training to our employees so they are a good fit for our client’s environment. We encourage client employee interaction so our clients and employees come face to face with each other allowing them to gauge each others needs and capabilities. Most of our client relationships are 3 years or older and we provide enhanced focus on client relationship building rather than just focus on business development. Our clients give us projects because they trust us with their core process and we need to prove that by building a strong workable relationship with them.

On the Future of the Industry:

In the current economic situation clients will need more support in terms of lower cost and increased reliability. We believe that if we continue to help our clients with these two qualities it will help us support our clients better during this tough economic situation. We strongly believe that the retail industry will come out of this slow market situation over the next 12 months. However, the companies that will come out on top will be the ones who use this time to optimize their operational cost and identify strong partners who can support them during this tough phase. We see a greater shift towards online retail over the next 2 years making us a very strong player because of our continued focus on retail and more specifically online retail.

Our Firm in the Next 5 Years:

With a clear domain focus we would see our organization moving to the top in the value chain providing strategic services for the multichannel retailers including Financial planning, real-estate planning, merchandising, advertisement strategy and others.

I would like to take this organization to 2000 strong retail experts servicing the top 10 retailers of the world.