Chennai: Brigade Corporation was incorporated in 1998 to offer e-customer relationship management (eCRM) to dotcom companies. From the first day of its inception, Brigade leveraged the cost and technical advantage offered by India by having a centre each in Hyderabad and Chennai.

With the dotcom bubble bursting, Brigade found itself in a precarious situation, with many of its clients pulling down their shutters. Not wanting to join that bandwagon, the less-than-$5-million-revenue company decided to expand its domain to enterprise relationship management and then to business process outsourcing (which plainly means subcontracting).

Having decided that, Brigade drew a unique business model called ATL (acquire, transform and leverage), which it claims as a win-win plan for its clients as well as itself. With a new management team, fresh investments and $50-million commitments from the investing firm General Atlantic Partners, Brigade today has big acquisition plans.

''We are now looking at insurance, financial services and telecom companies to acquire their non-strategic, but rule-based, transaction works,'' says Brigade India president Sri Dasari, who is also the vice-president of the company's offshore operations.

Dasari, who has an MBA from Northwestern University and an engineering degree from Marathwada University, was earlier the CEO of IT Gurus, which offered onsite and offsite consultancy services. He talks about Brigade's unique business model and the company's plans. Excerpts:

What is unique about your business model?
We call it ATL strategy. Our idea is to acquire rule-based transaction processing works from corporations and client companies - mainly foreign - and operate them as separate outfits. Normally, when a company sells its non-core activity, its share price spurts up and adds value to its shareholders. Further, the client company forms part our bottomline as we offer the same services at a lower cost. And the selling companies can choose the manner of payment receipt - they can opt for immediate cash payments, committed cost savings, prospective income streams or a stake in the new services company.

Our expertise lies in transforming the acquired business into a more focused and cost-effective outfit. While continuing to offer the same services to the company that sold the business, Brigade will leverage that experience in adding new clients by offering the services to others in the same or similar industries.

How do you transform the business you acquire?
We will reengineer the processes, change the management and take other required measures to achieve economies and improve quality. Many a time this requires additional investments, which companies are not willing to make. One of the ways to make a business more cost-effective is to outsource the services from India. Except for bandwidth and other telecom charges, India is a cheap place for outsourcing such services. The real estate, labour rates (the front office - the agents and advisors, and back office - administration) are very cheap in India. One can hire a qualified engineer for a lower salary than a person with a lesser qualification based in the US. To make things smoother, telecom rates are also coming down fast.

Have you acquired any transaction processing business?
We are in the process of acquiring some. We are looking for buyouts in the fields of insurance, telecom and financial services. As mentioned earlier, we are interested in all those rule-based transaction processing. We offer eCRM services and e-mail customer support to Compaq, the leading computer manufacturer.

Some sort of mass conversions take place inside the call centres here. eCRM agents, who are anyway faceless as far as their clients are concerned, have to shed their original identity and sport a new one while occupying their seats. For instance, Dikshithar becomes Donald. What is this all about?
(Laughs) That is true. Foreigners are not able to pronounce our names. In fact, my name Sri Dasari is a shortened version of Srinivasan Dasari. Till date, the question of name-change hasn't arisen in Brigade as we offer email service support to Compaq.

How does Compaq compensate you? Is it based on the volume of emails you attend to?
Our service charges are based on a combination of factors like the number of complaints received and resolved. The number of attempts we take to resolve a complaint also has a bearing on our revenues. The more the attempts, lesser will be our rates. We attend to 92 per cent of the complaints within one hour of mail receipt. The stipulated minimum is 90 per cent. Similarly, we resolve 70 per cent of the complaints in the first attempt itself. The customer satisfaction index is at 80 per cent.

What is your agent's churn ratio? What are the HR initiatives taken by you to reduce the agent turnover ratio?
Both Chennai and Hyderabad centres put together, we have around 400 agents/consultants. In Chennai several competitors poached our consultants. Based on a survey done by Ma Foi, we have taken several HR initiatives and now the outflow has come to a trickle. From five agents leaving us per month, it is now just one every month - an excellent number, I should say. Our average salary levels are around 75 per cent of the industry's best pay packet. In addition, there are performance-linked incentives for agents.

Your total capacity is around 850 seats, more or less equally divided between Chennai and Hyderabad centres. On the other hand, the total agent strength is around 350. How are you planning to make your operations cost-effective?
A major part of our operations will now be carried out by the Chennai centre. From Hyderabad we will offer some services, apart from keeping it as our standby unit