Make in rural India: Honing help-desk skills

Chennai-headquartered business software solutions leader, Zoho Corporation has just released a software tool to run customer help desks, using context-aware  information and feedback. The product, Zoho Desk uses customer data from past interactions and from other tools like Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects to organise tickets and intelligently present information to agents so that they can better understand a customer’s problem and resolve it swiftly, efficiently. It was used internally over many months to service the 20 million global users of Zoho’s other business products, mostly in customer relations management. The product having been proven is now available for a wider clientele of customer care centres. These global users may not know that Zoho Desk was created, not in Silicon Valley or even its Indian clones like Bangalore but in a small rural centre near Tenkasi, in the Tamil Nadu heartland. “Our broken urbanisation model creates severely overcrowded and polluted megacities and denudes rural areas of talent. That is why we decided to move from metros to a rural spot like Tenkasi,” says Zoho’s founder-CEO Sridhar Vembu.

The 150-strong staff in the Tenkasi centre are all school dropouts or technical diploma holders from the surrounding  towns and villages of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, who were trained in-house for the requisite programming skills. Like all their other products, Zoho Desk is free for small companies with up to ten users. Paid plans cost between Rs 750 and Rs 1,500 per user, per month.