US based outsourcing firm TaskUs continues its expansion, opening additional international facilities, including its most recent 500 seat site in Medellín, Colombia’s Ruta-N. That is where Cognitive Business News Executive Editor Loren Moss was able to discuss the company’s strategy and differentiation with TaskUs Chief Operating Officer Stephan Daoust.
Already a global company with operations across Europe, Asia, the Pacific and The Americas, Daoust discusses how the company seeks to win by taking care of its employees with not only market leading benefits, but a path for advancement.
Like many leaders in the customer experience delivery business, Daoust is a corporate leader who worked his way up from the floor, serving as a call agent almost three decades ago.
Cognitive Business News: So first, congratulations! I’ve already visited your site down in Cali and this is your official grand opening of your new site. I know that you guys had a soft opening and ramped up here in Medellin. You guys are in Ruta-N, and Ruta-N is an amazing facility. It’s kind of like a business incubator that’s sponsored by the city. Why did you guys choose Ruta-N?
Stephan Daoust: We chose the location based on availability of talent, right? We are close to many universities and colleges, so we look for talented individuals to join the organization. We look at infrastructure overall, so we obviously prioritize transportation. One of the things that TaskUs is very focused on is creating a frictionless experience for our teammates, meaning we’re trying to limit how many hours or time they would be spending outside of work or home to try to get to each place, right?
So we essentially located in terms of our ability to support. It met the requirements of what TaskUs does in terms of our standard operating processes for the building, in terms of the spaces that we need, in terms of the engagement, the wellness room, the things that are near and dear to our hearts to build for our teammates. We wanted to make sure that we had the ability to have those services there. We’re also attracting obviously a lot of technology, right? So we do work through…Obviously many of our clients have a variety of (skillsets) in our site, which provides us the opportunity to have a variety of skills. May that be technology, may that be language, may that be just from a customer service perspective.
Cognitive Business News: One of the things that’s interesting to me about TaskUs: I remember when TaskUs kind of first came on the scene, and it’s interesting because it’s already grown into a major player in the CX space. But it still has, and even though it’s a major player, it still has kind of a startup feel to it. The facilities are kind of really funky and fun and things like that. You know, your owners, your founders are relatively young. And so I think, maybe if you can talk a little bit about the TaskUs culture, what sets TaskUs apart from other CX players of its size and kind of at that top tier where you’ve already been able to reach.
Stephan Daoust: Sure. I think the founders have done a really good job of setting the tone of how we want to work with our employees. They’re very focused on a people-first culture. Everything that we do at TaskUs is based around our people. And it’s not just words on the wall, but obviously things that we value and we live every day. For example, we typically operate in Tier-2 cities. The reason why we do that is because we really want to bring the opportunities to the talent rather than having the talent have to relocate to get that. We also bring, you know, wellness as an example, making sure that our people are always cared for. This can be a difficult, stressful job at times. And we do want to provide the opportunity for our teammates to do that. When you walk through our sites, they’re vibrant. They’re not the traditional cubicle and what we call the “sea of beige,” right?
It’s vibrant in color, it’s exciting. The idea behind that is because we want our teammates to come on site and have a mindset of excitement and vibrant colors and just, you know, changing their mindset as they come in to provide the best output for our customers and our clients. And if we continue to do that, obviously we have the opportunity to grow. The benefits, for example, that we provide to our teammates in Colombia are higher than the normal benefits that we provide. We want to make sure that they have an opportunity to have health and support in that sense.
Cognitive Business News: You know, I want to stop you there because one thing that is amazing is that you guys offer prepaid medicine (a high-end type of health plan in Colombia). And a lot of times people outside of the country don’t understand how Colombia’s medical system works. But you have the employer mandated system called EPS, which works OK, but it’s kind of in a state of flux right now. The current president is trying to get rid of it. The largest employer, the largest company that participates, Sura, decided that they were going to no longer participate in it. But the thing that’s amazing is that you guys offer everybody what’s called ‘medicina prepagada’ (prepaid medicine), which would be in the US like a PPO plan or an HMO plan. And normally down here that’s just offered to like, executive or top management workers, but you guys offer it to entry-level contact center workers and that’s amazing.
Stephan Daoust: Yeah, it speaks to our culture. We don’t believe in a different treatment or different benefits for our leadership as we do for the frontline. You know, unless there’s something mandated from a government or something like that, that would make that difference. We don’t do that separation. We believe in providing the services and the opportunities to every level within the organization. And we do want to provide benefits that are unmatched, right?
We want, when we look at our ability to recruit and attract talent, we’re looking for a total package, a total value proposition to the employee. And those really reside around some of the benefits because we know that’s important to our teammates. We know that in some cases we need relaxation, wellness, because that’s important to our teammates. So whatever our teammates have the opportunity to tell us, we do sample our workforce on a regular basis in terms of an employee opinion survey, which they can formally fill out. We actually are in that period at the moment.
But even when I travel to every site, and every executive that travels to every site, we do focus groups, and we spend a lot of time with our teams understanding how can we get better? What can we do differently? And the things that we’ve executed, maybe they haven’t really executed as well as we wanted them to. So that gives us the opportunity to hear from them directly and tell us: “this is what matters to us.” You know, make that part of your agenda as you go forward and have an opportunity to just listen to them.
Cognitive Business News: Now, one of the things we were talking about before, and you know, you’ve kind of been part of spearheading an initiative inside of TaskUs. And you guys have created kind of a learning system, and almost like a—you guys don’t use the word university—but you’ve created kind of a system where people can develop personally and professionally. And maybe if you can talk about that, and how agents, or I guess other TaskUs employees as well, are able to take advantage of that for professional growth.
Stephan Daoust: Yeah. Some time ago we decided we would do a transformation. In order to spearhead that transformation, we knew that we had to upskill and bring more to our folks in terms of training and development. We created this program called “The Academy,” and what The Academy seeks to do is really have the opportunity to do exactly that: upscale and certify individuals into their role. And it also provides the opportunity to just complete that transformation and make sure that people have the right process, the right tool, and the right skills in order to effectively be comfortable in their work. We don’t just want to put people in roles, we want them to be successful. It has to be a win-win for us, right?
They need to be happy and really supported in their role. Now what it does today in terms of The Academy, is it allows anyone from the organization to go and take these specific courses. For example, if I am a frontline teammate who’s interested in operations, I can take the next level, the supervisor-level Academy. If I’m interested in workforce management, which is scheduling and interval analysis, we can take the workforce management piece. We can take the BIDS, what we call BIDS, which is our Business and Intelligence Data Science.
“Everything that we do at TaskUs is based around our people.”
And you don’t, you know, you don’t necessarily need to create a path to those things, but if you’re just simply interested in taking those courses, life skills, we will provide those and kind of do it. But of course, we want to create the best opportunity for a career path because we believe that is the most successful way for us. I started as a teammate. I took advantage of whatever I could, to now 26 years later, being the chief operating officer. So I know how that works, I know how that feels and I want to provide that to all of our teammates.
Cognitive Business News: It’s amazing. Now tell me about the footprint. I know that you guys of course are here in Colombia, but TaskUs was started in the US. But what countries do you operate in? How many different sites do you have? And tell me if you will about kind of broadly how big is the company?
Stephan Daoust: Yeah, today…actually we started in the Philippines. We started right in the Philippines. Our founders traveled to the Philippines and opened a small site and it started with six employees and kind of grew from there. So you know, over the last 15 years we’ve grown quite considerably based on our success. We typically deliver in four regions, what we call the Southeast Asia region. We have a presence in Malaysia, we have a presence in Taiwan, and we have our largest presence, which is in the Philippines. We have over ten sites in the Philippines, two in Malaysia, one in Taiwan. The next region that we’re very focused on as well, is India. We have four locations that are customer service oriented, and we have one technology center as well, based in India, also growing.
The next, a region would be what we call EMEA, which is Europe and the Middle East which includes a presence in Greece, where we have a strong presence in Thessaloniki, which is a Tier 2 city. We also have a presence in what we call the Adriatic region based out of Croatia, and we continue to grow and support there, but we have three locations in that area. The next is what we call The Americas. We have one location in the US based out of Texas. And then we have several locations in Colombia, which we’ve talked about already. But in terms of three locations at the moment, and we’re building out further expansion here as well. And we have one location in Mexico with the potential to grow there as well.
Cognitive Business News: Great. It’s great to hear about the growth. It’s great to kind of be here and congratulate you on your grand official opening of your center here in Medellin. I know you have a center in Cali, in Medellin, you have a third location in Colombia already?
Stephan Daoust: Yeah. We have two sites in Cali, and we have a site in Medellin. And we’re looking at expansion in Medellin as well, currently. So 4 locations, and then we’re looking at future cities as well.
Cognitive Business News: Wow, great. Well, it’s obviously, I think it’s good choice. I’m maybe a little bit biased, but I really appreciate your time and it’s been great to meet you down here and to celebrate your success.
Stephan Daoust: Awesome, a pleasure. Thank you so much.
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