Business Process Outsourcing 3.0: What We Are Building At SquadRun

Every business has to deal with repetitive back-office tasks that are critical to their operational success. Large ecommerce marketplaces like Alibaba or Snapdeal curate over half million products every day including moderation, classification and tagging of the products correctly before making them live, Ola has to qualify over 50,000 potential driver leads per week and take their details and identity proof and YouTube has to moderate millions of flagged videos each month. Similarly, businesses are even struggling to cope with the flood of menial administrative tasks such as resolving support tickets or efficiently setting up their contact center for seamless operations.

So, what do these business do in such a case? They either build a large internal team or use Business Process Outsourcing (BPOs) options. For example, a top ecommerce marketplace in India hires 1200+ people for curating products uploaded by sellers on a daily basis. This large workforce comes at a high fixed costs (seat cost, managerial cost, travel, etc.) attached as well. “One of the biggest regrets is building a large in-house team for this work. It’s not core, a nightmare to manage and kills the culture of our company,” says COO of this ecommerce company.

Current outsourcing options such as BPOs/BPMs, are broken. They too have a high initial and recurring fixed costs, are operationally intensive, inflexible, and the best ones are inaccessible for the mass market. Today’s businesses need a quick setup and instant turnaround times because operations move quickly. “Most of the work needs to be completed within 10 days and current alternatives would take me 30-60 days just to set up”, says the Operations Manager of a large taxi aggregator. Also, for sub-Fortune 5000 companies the problem is especially bad. They lack access to good quality outsourcing options and are stuck with mom-and-pop shops where quality, data security, etc. are very big concerns! This mid-market segment is completely underserved. 

SquadRun connects the work to the workforce directly and replaces all the inefficient layers in the middle with technology. The table below that points the differences between our model with existing alternatives. Just draw a parallel with what Amazon Web Services did to in-house servers or what Uber did to cab companies.

Product: Overall Process Automation

The platform systematically breaks the business requirements into micro-tasks. Some of these get done automatically using algorithms. For complex pieces, SquadRun’s smart matching algorithm then identifies the capability of the contractors; typically housewives, grey collared workers and college students, and accordingly assigns respective tasks. The contractors complete the assigned work on the platform and get paid for the work which has to pass our proprietary quality assurance algorithms. If a task fails our quality check, a contractor does not get paid and has to finish it again. Not only does this ensure that the output for the business is of super high quality, but also removes the efficiency variability for a business as compared to a fixed cost model. Then, the platform layer concatenates the results and exports it back to these businesses in an efficient and a seamless manner.

Supply

For any good business model, it is extremely important to ensure that the economics work well for all stakeholders. For us, it’s contractors (supply) and businesses (demand). Our contractors are mobile entrepreneurs who earn 3x of what BPO employees make (approx INR 10-15k per month for working three effective hours per day). The vision is to empower housewives, students, grey-collared workers and anyone else who uses SquadRun by providing them with a stable source of secondary income . By 2018, we aim to have more than a million people in India earning a stable income from this platform on a daily basis.

We strive to continue being the top choice of leading businesses to solve all their operational work from inbound calling, email/chat support to testing. We’ve realized the massive potential of on-demand and scalable human intelligence to solve large business problems, create new or fix existing business models and even create entirely new industries. The back-office work market is worth more than $360 Bn and is ripe of disruption. The future is exciting and we’re creating it here. Closing this with an illustration of the SquadRun Stack.