Redial BPO started with just a single site in Tijuana, México, but has now gone truly global with the opening of its Johannesburg, South Africa facility. With already 1,000 seats, the company has big plans. Co-founder Jason Heil sat down with Cognitive Business News executive editor Loren Moss during ICMI’s Contact Center Expo in Orlando to discuss the company’s humble origins, continued success, and ambitious plans for expansion.
Cognitive Business News: So, I’m here with Jason Heil. Jason’s an old friend with Redial BPO. If I remember correctly, you were based in San Diego and then started with operations in Tijuana, but you guys have grown. Here we are. If I’m not mistaken, you guys just opened up new operations on a different continent, right?
Jason Heil: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. We opened up about a year ago over in Johannesburg, South Africa. We opened up a nice facility. We were fortunate enough to find a building with an existing infrastructure, where we were able to take over that infrastructure, rebrand it, and redesign it in our Redial way. We have about 1,000 seats over in South Africa right now, in Johannesburg, in the Braamfontein area.
Cognitive Business News: Amazing. So, you guys have grown. If I remember correctly, the history, you and your brother started the company, right?
Jason Heil: That’s correct, my brother. Twin brother.
Cognitive Business News: So it was cool to see this growth. What were the conditions that led you guys to decide to expand, specifically to Gauteng and Johannesburg, South Africa? What precipitated that move? And how did you guys end up selecting Johannesburg?
Jason Heil: Oh man, I tell you, that’s such a loaded question. It’s great. So, one of the first things that happened was, before COVID-19, I was invited by Peter Ryan, advisory and the BPESA group, to go out and check out South Africa, which was super cool. So, we went on a tour of South Africa for about a week. Met a lot of great contacts, met the people, and saw some of the programs that they established to help the community. And they were very heavily involved in impact sourcing, which is something that we’re very much doing as well in our current nearshore operation, so it resonated with me well, and then when I finally returned, COVID-19 happened.
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So, everything went on pause, we weren’t expanding, we were just taking care of our current clients, maintaining, making sure that they were operating. And those were rough waters at the time; nobody knew what was going to happen, so we were just figuring out how to navigate those waters. And we survived, we did well, and we grew in COVID-19, which was great, but it wasn’t warranted to grow into another country. We just felt like that risk was too much at the time. But meeting a lot of people at the BPESA organization, when we finally did decide to go back, we went to revisit a lot of the relationships that I made. My brother also went out and did a three-city tour with them, and then he validated everything that I saw. Then, from there, it was just a no-brainer for us to take the next step and go big.
Cognitive Business News: What are the different challenges? You guys are already used to operating in Latin America. And know how to do that. What did you find to be the biggest differences operating in, let’s say, Africa, compared to in Mesoamerica, and on this side of the Atlantic?
Jason Heil: Well, before having an overnight operation over there, we had to do a lot of steps that required us to work late at night or through the morning with the vendors that were operating in their daytime. So I think that was like, the only biggest thing, and then, other than that, once we’ve squared away all the little pieces to get the operations up and running, we have a great country manager, Shoana Padayachee, that is running our site. She’s like our right-hand lady out there in South Africa, and yeah, everything else is in good hands.
Cognitive Business News: Wonderful. So, tell me about the future. You guys continue to grow, it’s so cool to see from where you guys started to where you are now. I know that you’ve expanded your service operation. I know that you guys originally focused on revenue operations, which kind of got you started in outsourcing. But tell me about the lines of business, the types of clients you guys have, and the different verticals where you operate now.
Jason Heil: Okay, yeah. So, we started in merchant services. And then kind of transferred off from merchant services into the financial service space. Financial service space we went into subprime lending, and then bit our teeth, cut our teeth, into that subprime lending market. Grown well, and we feel like we have an excellent stronghold on subprime lending, from loan originations, servicing loans, customer service, 90-day delinquents, getting them back on payment track, to even collections, breaking off in the third-party collections. So we do that well. We also wanted to diversify our portfolio, realizing that we can’t always have all of our eggs in one basket.
So we started to branch off into retail, e-commerce, as well as into healthcare. The healthcare space has always been massive. So, we did a lot of the compliance piece, where we focused on making sure that we were up to standards with PCI Compliance and HIPAA Compliance before it started acquiring clients in those different niches. But we recently brought on a nice big client in the e-commerce retail space. They’re using both of our GEOs, so LATAM and South Africa, and yeah, it’s been going well.
Cognitive Business News: Wonderful. What languages are you able to support now?
Jason Heil: Right now? So, it’s funny. We’re evaluating the languages we could support, but we’re currently doing English, Spanish, French, and some Dutch right now. We’re also starting to evaluate more languages because there are a lot of languages in the South African region.
Cognitive Business News: Right. That’s certainly true. So, as you seek to grow, what are your areas of strategic focus in terms of what lines of business you guys have your eyes on? What’s the profile of a potential client that should contact Redial? Because you guys, you started small but are a lot bigger now. Let’s talk about your size and the kinds of business you can handle. Tell me about how big you guys are now in terms of FTE.
Jason Heil: We’re around 1,000 FTEs right now, but we can support 2,000. So we’re about 50% occupants. So, once we get to about 80%, we’ll start pulling the trigger, opening up new sites for the clients. Now, a lot of the clients nailed down our onboarding base.
So what we do for onboarding is we spend about 6 weeks to onboard a client, and we try to find a perfect client that doesn’t look at us as a vendor. We don’t want to be considered a vendor, we want to be considered a partner. And the reason I say that is a lot of the times I’m explaining to them that the people that we hire like Redial as a career path because we do a lot of internal growth, growing into our operation, into different sectors of the business.
So, we want clients to also see us as that. So, when we’re doing business with them, I’m like, “Don’t look at us as a vendor; treat us as a satellite operation of your existing business. Because we’re going to provide you the infrastructure and the people that are going to make sure that your operation is running successfully,” right? And that’s the type of client with that type of mindset. And then also using technology to help assist the agents to become better performers is fantastic. Because we also provide some value and technology to the clients that do onboard with us.
Cognitive Business News: Okay, great. What’s the website?
Jason Heil: Redialbpo.com.
Cognitive Business News: Wonderful. You guys have a safe trip back; we’re closing out here at ICMI 2024 in Orlando, and so, Jason, it’s always good-
Jason Heil: Absolutely, man.
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