Book me a holiday and then find me a date – outsourcing is getting personal
posted in Outsourcing to India |Source: business.timesonline.com
A look into the new world of web-based services opening up for the cash-rich but time-poor
“The most unusual request?” ponders Anya Portnik, the chief executive of iwantaPA.com , a start-up based in London’s upmarket Park Lane. “That would be the investment banker that employs us to read a story to his daughter every evening, for an hour, in French.”
Welcome to the world of “person-to-person outsourcing”, where the cash-rich time-poor use the web to outsource those irksome personal tasks – booking holidays, tracking down prospective life partners, educating children – that threaten to upset their precarious work-life balances.
According to Evalueserve, an India-based research firm, the market for outsourced personal services, where people hire remote “Bangalore butlers” and “time finders”, was worth more than $250 million this year. It is expected to hit more than $2 billion by 2015.
“It probably saves me a couple of hours a week. More, recently, in the run-up to Christmas,” says Caroline de Courreges, an American expat who works 11-hour days for a fund of hedge funds in Mayfair and outsources her personal administration to AskSunday. com, an outfit that looks after the tiresome jobs that plague high-flyers as much as mere mortals.
“I use it via my BlackBerry for making restaurant reservations and booking flights mostly,” she says. “The little things that everybody could do, but take up the ten minutes here, ten minutes there that I just don’t have.”
AskSunday, which channels work to sites in India and the Philippines, charges $29 (£14.60) a month for its basic package. That buys access to a “24/7 personal assistant”, accessible on the phone or via the web for up to 30 tasks a month.
Avi Samudrala, the former investment banker turned private equity staffer who co-founded the company, says that there is no typical customer. “I use the laptop analogy,” he says. “What a schoolkid, a student and a Wall Street analyst are going to use it for are very different.” But he does split up the broad classes into which AskSunday’s thousands of customers fall.
Average urbanite tasks include tracking down consumer goods – from “the hottest Manolos to a shirt for tomorrow’s board meeting”. For those too busy to engage in retail therapy, Sunday will track down the best prices and place an item on hold. Call bridging – where the site calls a doctor, gas company or telephone provider and stays on hold until the right person is on the other end – is pitched at the same set.
