It’s early Saturday morning, and employees, sporting elaborate headphones and mikes, are already busy on the call floors at the offices of 24/7 Customer.com in Bangalore. A few spill out onto the foyer, nattily dressed, clutching Styrofoam coffee cups.

A few months ago, the company would probably have sent a different kind of signal to the discerning public. Three members of 24/7’s senior management team quit the company on short notice, and there were doubts about the venture’s future. But founder P.V Kannan, previously founder of Business Evolution Incorporated (BEI), took over the reins as CEO and brought the company through a bad phase.

It has been a tough time for Indian startups offering remote services. The specter of the Gujarat riots still fresh in the minds of his clients, Kannan now finds it a little tougher to convince them about the benefits of shifting call center functions to India. “At least 50 companies that were considering outsourcing their business processes to India are having second thoughts now,” he says. “Clients were worried that our operations were concentrated in Bangalore. Riots or some other calamity could derail critical business processes. So we decided to start another contact center in Hyderabad.” That is the least of his plans for the future growth of the company.

“I am looking at the IPO market with interest. It’s early days yet, but that is a viable exit strategy as far as 24/7 is concerned,” he says.

Second Coming
24/7 is not Kannan’s first foray into uncharted waters. He was running BEI as a services company in 1998. “Running a services business was the easier thing to do,” says Kannan. “But I didn’t want to get complacent. So we shut it down and started on e-mail chat software. The risks were bigger but at least we were the ones taking them.”

Luckily for Kannan, his timing was impeccable. The $140 million in stock that Kana Communications paid for nascent BEI in December 1999 was the kind of windfall reserved for the shotgun exits and fast-track IPOs of the technology bubble. Soon Kana Communications saw its own stock fall through the floor below the one dollar mark, on the way to a desperation merger with also struggling Broadbase. Crafting an exit for 24/7 will require a lot more staying power, in a much more realistic market.

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