Source: www.moneycontrol.com

Imagine reading bedtime stories to your client in America, or even calling for a taxi for a New Yorker from India. CNBC-TV18’s Roshni Menon tells us how a small start up in Bangalore is changing the meaning of the term Bangalored!

Its 6.30 am on the US West Coast. Shahnaz Ali, a graduate from Coimbatore has just walked into work. Her task for the day is to help her client Steve Jones, a techie in the US, find another job. She says some requests are even more outlandish.

“Once one of my customers boarded the wrong train and got lost. He called us and we had to find him a taxi to take him to the right place” Shahnaz Ali, Personal Assistant, Get Friday.

Shahnaz is just one of the 200 employees of Get Friday, a subsidiary of TTK Services in Bangalore. The company provides offshore personal assistants to the Americans.

It is not just Fortune 500 company CEOs that they assist, it could be anyone from struggling artists to plumbers to magazine editors. Their tasks range from mundane research work to planning holidays. One assistant was even asked to read bedtime stories to a client’s children.

“We started the company when an editor of a magazine asked us to provide some services to him,” said P Sunder, COO, TTK Services Pvt. Ltd.

The reason why this makes sense for the Americans is that Get Friday is certainly value for money.

The average wages for a full time personal assistant in the US ranges from USD 4,000 to USD 6,000 a month. While Get Friday’s full-time plan of 160 hours will leave an American’s pocket lighter by just USD 1,120.

Another division of the company -your man in India provides concierge services to NRIs. It is seeing a growth of 50% quarter-on-quarter. And there certainly seems to big bucks in this business, according to a study by research firm Evaluserve.

While a majority of the company’s clients are in the US, they are also rapidly expanding in other countries. In fact, they even have a waiting period of three weeks to add new clients. So, will we get to see this service in India soon? We might have to wait for that.

Source: www.bcs.org

Outsourcing to India remains a strong need for many UK businesses and the trend shows no signs of slowing, according to a national sourcing advisory firm.

EquaTerra found that every UK firm using outside IT firms for some or all of their needs use India as one of their resources.

Cost remains the primary driver for many organisations who outsource and the report also stated that quality and flexibility are seen more and more as the most important qualities affecting customer satisfaction.

Phil Morris, managing director of EquaTerra in Europe said that companies in India “such as Wipro and TCS are achieving real satisfaction in providing skills, flexibility and quality of work.

“The globalization of services will require larger, more global suppliers such as Accenture, IBM and HP to reposition their overall delivery models and structures in order to keep pace with newer market entrants,” he said.