Markus Albers — Journalist & Autor

“Virtual Private Assistants are not a form of modern day colonialism”

This is part two of my interview with Sunder P, CEO of GetFriday – the company that brought the concept of Virtual Private Assistants to a wide market. The interview was conducted as part of the research for an article about VPAs I wrote for German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche.

The news is that finally German-language VPA services have arrived with Berlin-based startup Strandschicht offering assistants from Poland and GetFriday having hired their first German-language team. This team in Bangalore is pictured above: Team leader Nicolau Da Silva (standing) with his coworkers Samik and Sneha(r.). Sneha was the lady I worked with for my article, also I spoke elaborately to Mr. Da Silva. This interview is conducted with his boss Sunder P. The first part is here.

Mr. Sunder Prakasham, where did you find the people for your German team?

Getting german resources in India is pretty tough. We have the Goethe institutes here (called max mueller bhavan) that offer german language courses. But it is still a hard to find resource. We are hopeful that we would be able to attract talent in India due to the interesting nature of work. Most german speaking resources in India end up doing nothing more than translation which could get monotonous. But here is a job that is challenging and teaches people about german culture and keeps them in touch with germans on a daily basis.

How many employees do you have in this line of work? Who are those people, what’s their background, e.g, tell me a bit more about the lady who worked with me, Sneha Rajaram …

We have about 200 plus employees in total. However the german team is pretty small with just 4, but we are expanding. Sneha is one of them. She is a very bright young lady with excellent german communication skills. Nick, who is the team manager is a german citizen, but of Indian origin. He resettled in India a few years back. So his German is as good as anyone else in Germany. One of the things we practise at GetFriday is to hire people from very diverse backgrounds – arts, science, engineering. We have them all.

Please help me visualize the office space of your team. Does it look like the prototypical Indian callcenter such as the ones in the movie Slumdog Millionaire?

It is quite typical of any IT / ITES setup, but it is quite different from a typical call center. Call centers have people intensely focused on what they are doing, typically handling calls all through the shift. Here we have low height cubicles which allow a lot of sharing, communication and interaction between assistants. They also don’t wear headsets. Less than 10% of their entire time may be consumed by phone calls.

My VPA Sneha called me several times on my mobile phone (I had asked her to) and she made many phonecalls to Germany for me. Also when I call GetFriday, it’s free. How come you can be so generous with international phone calls?

VoIP technology makes phone calls across continents so cheap. It is as good as calling someone in Bangalore or Delhi. So we usually do not charge extra to provide toll free access to our customers and or even make international phone calls on behalf of clients. But if a significant portion of the job is only calling then we may charge an additional fee.

Some people in Germany critizise that VPAs are a modern form of colonialism. What do you say to them?

I would vehemently disagree to portraying a VPA service as modern day colonialism. I have been asked this several times by different media people from different parts of the globe. And I think my response here sums up the view.

From your perspective: Is the world really ‘flat’, as Tom Friedman says or rather ‘spiky’, as Richard Florida argues (meaning that cultural differences still play an important role and that some regions do much better than others)?

The world is definitely flattening due to better flow of information and due to technology. Thomas Friedman is right that we are moving towards a flatter world. However, it is a long way (perhaps impossible) to becoming a perfectly flat world. The differences will exist but as long as the world, by and large is moving in a positive direction of growth it is a good sign. So there will obviously be those spikes. Silicon Valley in California is what it is, primarily because it attracted a certain breed of people. So cultural differences play some role, but I think there are more important factors that determine how nations and regions move on the path to growth.

I would like you to watch this amazing presentation by Prof.Hans Rosling on TED Talks. It is truly jaw dropping to watch how the world is flattening, but will still continue to retain its spikes.

Which task are best suited for outsourcing? Do you have any examples of unusual or even weird things your employees were asked to do by customers?

Our clients give us both business and personal tasks to handle. I presume the most common of them would be to keep appointments, travel bookings but again this cannot be straight jacketed because different clients come up with different needs. In my opinion, clients should try and free up their time by outsourcing any kind of task which can be done by someone else with a fair amount of efficiency at cheaper costs. However, I do come across clients who ask us if we can do up their business plans. I find that weird because that is the core thing of your business and if you don’t do it then you might as well let someone else run that business. We also undertake odd requests from clients like for instance, a US based small business outsources its singing to us. So we have part time amateur singers on our rolls who do some live singing on phone for this client.

If there’s one thing I should criticize about your German service I would name the pricing: To pay 7 or 8 Euros for a larger plan is ok. But 15 Euros for the pay-as-you-go doesn’t seem very competitive. A startup in Germany is offering VPA-services using Polish students charging about 5-7 Euros per hour.

I take your opinions on the pricing seriously. We will review it and then take a call. However, I ran into the same kind of initial reservations in the US market about using college kids during the summer to get work done very cheap. It really doesn’t work that way. Yes, on a 2 day or even in the first month with us one may feel that they are probably overpaying, but with time and a better understanding of the relationship, the assistants start delivering much more than the money that the client pays. We have clients who have been with us since 2005. They graduate and move to higher plans. Sometimes when unplanned changes happen, they may even temporarily cancel out and then come back later on to use our service. That’s the beauty of the flexibility this service offers.