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iYogi: IT support that takes pride in its roots

By Amy Kazmin in New Delhi

January 28 2010

Sara Benton, a homemaker and saleswoman in Peoria, Illinois, was distressed. Her personal computer – loaded with her children’s photos and sensitive bank details – was infected by virulent viruses.

Each time she tried to use the internet, the viruses redirected her to pornographic websites, unleashing pop-ups with shocking images.

“I couldn’t even turn my computer on for fear my kids would be standing there,” Ms Benton says. “It was horrible. I spent hours and hours trying to fix it, but I couldn’t get it to stop.”

Finally, Mr Benton contacted a young Indian company, iYogi, that helps PC users in the US and Europe deal with a full range of computer challenges, including viruses, security, installing software, and connecting peripheral equipment such as digital cameras, MP3 players, and printers.

Over the next few hours, Syed Sharique Ali, a 23-year-old iYogi networking expert, and another technician – who had remotely accessed the stricken computer in Peoria from iYogi’s sleek headquarters in Gurgaon, India – removed 14 viruses and installed new anti-virus software on Ms Benton’s machine.

“They were fabulous,” she recalls. “I’ve worked with other help desks in the US and they don’t even care if they help you. But they kept being pleasant, and they kept trying to help me. It kind of blew my mind that they were in India. A couple of times, I wanted to say to them, ‘I can’t believe you are so far away’.”

The company, which started commercial operations in 2007 and now has 100,000 annual subscribers, is a brave innovator in outsourcing – an unabashedly Indian company, offering personal services directly to western retail customers.

“We firmly believe it’s the next generation of outsourcing from India,” said Vishal Dhar, iYogi’s co-founder, and president of marketing. “It’s an approach built on customer ownership and retention.”

India’s massive outsourcing industry earns about $60bn a year, running call centres for western businesses, supplying software and IT services and handling other back office processes.

Growth has been driven primarily by large western companies cutting costs by shifting whole activities offshore.

But corporate bosses normally instruct Indian call centre workers talking to overseas customers to hide the fact that they are in India, by using “western” names, accent modification training, and acculturation classes.

Some IT powerhouses do not ask the same of their highly skilled computer engineers, but this is because these companies mostly supply IT and other back-office support to big companies, rather than interacting with retail consumers.

In that sense, iYogi is blazing a trail. With its witty slogan: “Great Tech Support, Good karma,” and photos of its young, hip-looking Indian technicians featuring prominently on its website, iYogi makes no effort to hide its roots.

And it has found that distressed US computer users are willing to look far afield for the support they badly need but cannot find – or afford – at home.

It is not the only Indian company offering personal services directly to customers in the west. Bangalore-based TutorVista, founded in 2005, uses about 1,200 people to provide unlimited private tutoring to about 20,000 students in the US and elsewhere for $100 a month. Pearson, the company that owns the FT, acquired a 17 per cent stake in June.

Two other outfits, Bangalore-based GetFriday and US-based AskSunday, which has a large call centre in Hyderabad, offer personal assistant and concierge services to harried professionals.

But iYogi has tapped into the huge pool of frustrated computer users and appears to be the biggest and fastest-growing outsourcing company reaching out directly to consumers in the west.

With 100,000 subscribers to its plan for unlimited technical support for $140 a year and many more “single incident” calls each month, iYogi has more than 1,200 English-speaking technicians.

It expects to double that in the next six months to keep pace with a subscriber base growing a blistering 35 per cent quarter on quarter.

Uday Challu, chief executive, says iYogi, which has raised $27m in start-up and growth capital from SAP Ventures, Canaan Partners, SVB India Capital Partners, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, will report turnover of about $20m for the year to the end of March, and is projecting revenues of more than $70m next year.

So far, iYogi has found particular success among those over 50, who account for 75 per cent of its subscriber base.

But with 320m PCs in use in the US – and retail technical support there estimated to be worth $15bn-$23bn a year, iYogi believes it has merely begun to tap the potential.