As an owner of a BPO firm who is quite active in LinkedIn, I often browse through the social media site in hopes increasing my network, to get potential clients and increase my business. Being a member of multiple outsourcing groups in LinkedIn, I also often browse through these groups to get the latest updates on the BPO Industry.
More often than not, I will find a post by a so-and-so company, mostly from India, having a great campaign for a BPO firm with great payout and profit margins. The only catch? They want an upfront payment, and that too a sizeable amount, for per agent seat.
The first time I showed interest and sent them my email and my contact information, I got blasted by emails with information about the different campaigns they had. All of them had breakdowns and details about how much I would be earning on each campaign for each agent seat. And they all seemed so lucrative.
But written down at the end of each of these offers was a writing in bold stating that I would have to pay an upfront fee ranging from 30,000 INR to 40,000 INR for each agent seat that they send workload of.
In case you need to do the maths that's somewhere from 400 to 600 USD that I would have to pay per agent. If I wanted workload of 10 agents I would have to pay 4000 USD upfront before they would send me anything.
Now this to me was an absolute ripoff, I mean they wouldn't send me any information, no documents, I would have to first deposit the money to their bank account, no questions asked.
When I showed reluctance to invest in their offer, they called, trying to convince me about how "reputable" their Firm was and how was just overtly worrying. It sounded like an exact sales pitch you get on a telemarketing call.
First off, which BPO firm in their right minds would ever sub work to other outsourcing firms. I mean if their reputation was so great that foreign firms were knocking on their doors to outsource work, they would invest in their own infrastructure and keep the work to themselves instead of giving the work to another firm and risking to loose the client due to others incompetency.
And even so, if these BPO firms were so charitable, why take upfront payment without providing any documentation whatsoever? I mean you could just take a huge cut from the payment, right?
A little search in google to get feedback came come colored in deep red. When I asked for documents that proved their validity, they fumbled and I politely declined to entertain any more of their "offers".
Zayed Uddin Ahmed is the Founder and CEO of ASL Preservation Solutions, a startup BPO firm that provides Outsourcing Solutions to small and medium sized companies. To know more about him and his firm go to https://www.aslpreservationsolutions.com/