An Interview with a Director of KGN Technologies, a CMS and Ecommerce website company based in India. Let’s find out how such companies come up with, challenges and if it’s really worth considering technical development partnership with such firms.
1. Give us a brief background of how you formed KGN Technologies and what compelled you to do so?
Answer: We are 3 of us working as co-directors of this company. All of us come from software development background. Myself more involved in Sales and Marketing and my two other partners exclusively from programming background. We felt that although there are numerous outsourcing companies floating around, some really big and some small, most of them lacked in delivering good quality work. It was shocking for us to see that even though some large companies possessed several quality standards certification, most of them still failed to deliver good work. All 3 of us knew what companies from UK, US and other parts of world expected and they do want to use offshore companies to get cost benefits. However they struggled to find right ones and that’s what compelled us to get together and lay down the foundation of KGN Technologies. We started this in Jan 2009 with a team of 5 including 3 of us and now we are a team of 30+ aiming to reach 40 by the end of this year.
2. What makes you feel confident that you understand the quality and other expectations your international clients need?
Answer: I have spent 4 years working in professional IT companies in UK. Similar is the story of one of my other partner. Having worked there we learnt what basic business strategies are really must particularly ensuring good communications, keeping up with the quality of work, efficient project management, and excellent customer service and most importantly meeting the deadlines. We have worked hard to get these fundamentals firmly established in our core business ideology and our sole aim is to keep our clients happy.
3. We hear the stories about lot of companies complaining about having bad experience with offshore companies such as yours and they question the reliability?
Answer: Yes it’s true that lot of companies and individuals do disappoint. It’s a great risk to give money and work to someone who is miles away. It can get more worst if the project really messes up. These are very common complains and we are not surprised to know about this. You need to check few basic points before hiring companies such as ours before you transfer the money ask offshore team to sit down and start coding. Check their portfolio, references, how good their communication is etc.
4. Give us idea on the steps you take that can help build confidence in your team particularly the new prospect clients who have no experience of outsourcing or with you?
Answer: There are several things we do. Primarily we do Skype meetings, phone conversation with new prospects. This gives them good understanding of our communication skills. During project production, we give regular updates and request for feedback. We give them access to our Project Management tool so they get a real-time insight into the work actually going on. Every customer has different methodology they like to adopt and we try to adjust ourselves as much as we can. We aim to give quick response max within a day to any support or general emails we receive. Also we are always available on skype for instant chat. Our fundamental principle here is to work hard by delivering good work. We earn more work my doing good work. So it’s of utmost priority to us to ensure that what we do is perfect whether it’s a front end design pixel matching or functionality working flawlessly. Any small or large job is given equal attention.
5. There are companies who really promise the moon. They talk well to get the customers in however fail during the actual project delivery so how can someone trust that you do good job?
Answer: We firmly believe that in this web development industry, work speaks more than anything else. Our strategy is always to advice customer to start with a low risk small scale projects first which can help them to understand our technical team, our process and how efficiently we work. Once we do well, obviously this will help us to gain more work. We can tell thousand stories but if we really don’t perform, we will eventually lose a customer which we don’t want. So it’s our interest to establish long term relationship rather than doing just one project. So we aim that what we do, we do it perfectly.
6. How do you motivate your team? What steps do you take to groom their skills and efficiency? It’s so often heard that sometimes team from India do possess good technical skills but they don’t have good English writing or speaking skills which eventually affects project understanding?
Answer: Well a happy team is a backbone of any good organization and we are no different. It’s so important for us to keep them pumped up since they work so hard getting things done the way our clients want. We organize and sponsor annual parties, weekend getaway, picnics, birthday parties etc. The environment is full of fun on the floor at KGN Technologies. There is love, friendliness and great enjoyable atmosphere. We do organize regular trainings including communication skills improvement techniques and technical knowledge enhancement to ensure that our team has both important points covered. They understand and deliver the project well with efficient communication and follow best practices during code development. So we do invest time and money to have everything nicely balanced. We work like a true team and live like a family.