Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) is said to be the next big thing in outsourcing. Where traditional business process outsourcing is often rules-based, such as administering insurance claims, KPO involves using discretion and judgement. But KPO is more talked about than practised. Evalueserve is one exception – the first KPO firm to grow beyond 1,000 employees.

Evalueserve provides business research, investment research, market research, data analytics and intellectual property research. The company was founded five-and-a-half years ago by Alok Aggarwal and Marc Vollenweider. Aggarwal was running a research centre for IBM in Delhi when he got talking to his friend, Vollenweider, who was running the McKinsey knowledge centre in Delhi.

‘They realised what they were doing would apply to every company,’ says Mike Taylor, who heads up the UK operation. ‘So they formed Evalueserve. We still do the same two things: one of them is business research which came via the McKinsey side, and intellectual property and patent research, from the IBM side.’

Evalueserve employs 1,200 people, mostly researchers based in India, but there is also a small team in China who research the local market. Some of the researchers in India are graduates from European universities who want India on their CV to improve their chances of getting a job with a big consultancy when they return.

Taylor was recruited to sell Evalueserve’s services in the UK. ‘People were aware of India for call centres and for IT, but the kind of work we do, the higher value-add, customised projects, was completely new. No one thought it could be done from India. Initially people weren’t that receptive. They didn’t believe we could get the right quality of person in India to study a market research project 6,000 miles away in London.’

Evalueserve’s growth rate for the first four years was over 100 per cent per year. It slowed last year to 80 per cent, but Taylor is confident the firm will grow by about 70 per cent this year. ‘Some of our rivals, founded at a similar time to us, are only a third of our size now,’ he says. ‘It’s maintaining the quality that’s hard.’

About half of Evalueserve’s revenue comes from the UK – mainly from investment banks and large consultancies. ‘Over the four and a half years I’ve been here, attitudes to Evalueserve have changed completely,’ says Taylor. ‘People now accept that this can be done from India. They understand we can get very good quality people over there who can do this kind of work. People now ask: is the quality sustainable? What’s the attrition like and what’s the price like?’

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