Bobcares' outsourced support is designed to provide the best of both worlds—a call center in Arizona backed by technical expertise in India.

by Jeff Goldman [August 1, 2007]

Indian software development company Poornam Info Vision was founded in November of 1999. Its outsourced support division, Bobcares, which was created at the same time, provides a combination of U.S.-based and India-based support to ISPs, webhosts and data centers.

Co-founders Sangeetha Naik and Amarjyoti Krishnan were doing freelance web development work for various clients when one of those clients asked them to look after his servers while he went on vacation. That experience led the pair to start offering support to other small and medium sized webhosts and ISPs, and the company kept growing from there.

Bobcares Poornam Info Vision LLC 3443 N Central Ave STE 1705 Phoenix, AZ 85012 Voice: (800) 383-5193

At the time, Naik says, they saw a market opportunity in serving smaller providers. "These companies… did not have the ability to come to India and set up shop themselves, but they wanted to outsource," she says. "They did not have the technical capabilities to manage their own support—they wanted to concentrate on marketing their solutions."

In addition, Naik says, most of those companies needed not just Tier 1 support staff but also highly skilled technical support, which was a much more affordable proposition in India than in the U.S. "At that time—and even now—highly skilled engineering talent is extremely expensive in the United States," she says.

A large client base
Today, Naik says Bobcares supports a total of about 3.5 million sites from a 300-person company in India, as well as a U.S. call center in Phoenix, Arizona. "We look after clients of all sizes, from resellers to large data centers, and we have the ability to help them scale," she says. "We have clients who started with us when they were resellers—they were on a $25 account with us—and now they pay us a lot of money, looking after thousands of servers."

The experience of working with such a large client base, Naik says, is extremely beneficial. "Our expertise in all the webhosting environments is so big that if a problem comes up with your web server… we have probably seen that problem earlier with someone else," she says. "It's difficult to get that kind of expertise within a single webhost, even if you have the best people."

In addition to its support services, Poornam Info Vision has a team of about 50 people doing software development for ISPs, webhosts, and data centers. "We specialize in customizing data center related applications—their Web sites, their portals, controls panels, things like that," Naik says.

India and Arizona
Bobcares' support offering is relatively unique in that Tier 1 phone support is handled out of the company's Phoenix, Arizona location, while Tier 2 and Tier 3 support is handled by e-mail from India. "We realized that while our engineers are extremely talented and can fix all the problems, we feel that our customers are probably more comfortable speaking to an American voice," Naik says.

The result, Naik says, is the best of both worlds: American phone support backed by affordable technical expertise in India. "Companies that are completely out of the U.S., if they had to hire the same kind of people that we hire in India, top class engineers who are totally trained in our kind of work, they would be charging their customers too much money to make it viable," she says.

And at the Tier 2 and Tier 3 levels, Naik says, the Indian engineers can help not only with issues as they come up, but also with preventative maintenance. "We can help with upgrading the server, upgrading the software, upgrading the operating system, making it secure," she says.

Straightforward pricing
A wide variety of pricing plans are available, and full pricing information for each plan is listed at the company's website. The most basic plan, targeted at resellers, costs $24 a month after a $25 setup fee to support up to 12 accounts by e-mail.

For higher-volume clients, a per-ticket plan costs $140 for 50 tickets after a $25 setup fee, while a per-server plan costs $200 per server per month for an unlimited number of tickets. "That's a very popular plan—many clients take three servers, so it comes to $600 for them, and that's it for their support," Naik says.

For phone support from the Arizona call center, pricing can be structured either per minute or per call—and all costs are laid out clearly on the website. Naik says larger clients usually pay per minute, while smaller companies tend to pay per call. Still, once they've watched the calls for a while and seen how quick they are, she says, most eventually switch to paying per minute.

On all plans, a free seven-day trial is available to try out the service with no commitment.

Quality control
Bobcares offers a one-hour e-mail response and six-hour resolution guarantee—and the entire helpdesk system, Naik says, is fully transparent to the client. For phone support, clients can view all calls that have come in, when they came in, and how long they took. "That's tied straight to the billing, so they can get an idea of how the billing took place compared to the number of calls that came in," she says. "And the calls are monitored, so clients can get access to the calls that are monitored as well."

For both voice and e-mail, Naik says, a specific team of technicians is assigned to each client, and in order to ensure clear communication, that team is never larger than six people. "Let's say a client wants to change something—that change has to be communicated to everyone in the team," she says. "Of course, we have a centralized repository of all this information, but still, our work involves human interaction."

— End

Related articles:
	[Dec. 27, 2002]	We Need Cheap Overnight Tech Support
	[Jan. 22, 2001]	When Your Help Desk is Distant
	[June 2, 2000]	Building an ISP Business Plan Part 4: Operating & Organizational Plans

Online resources:
	Outsourced Customer Support Directory
	Quick Reference Chart