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In-house concierge at your service

Vinay Kamath

CHENNAI, Dec. 8

IT was two days to go for Deepavali when Mr Kartikeyan V., human resources manager at Motorola India Electronics Ltd in Bangalore, realised that he hadn't picked up the fire crackers his son had been badgering him to.

Rather than battle the crush of last-minute shoppers and get frazzled, he did the next best thing. Sauntering over to the concierge desk in Motorola's cavernous reception area, Mr Kartikeyan handed the desk some money and told the person there to pick up a combination of crackers. In a few hours, the packet was delivered to his office.

A concierge service in the office? A service that not only handles all the mundane ticketing tasks that need to be done, but delivers gifts and flowers and pays your bills. Or even does all your work at the bank or picks up the kids from school while you 're at work.

Bangalore's infotech companies, constantly looking to improve the work environment for their scores of software professionals, have now turned to concierge services to offer an additional benefit to their employees. That way, employees don't have to take time out to do the typical daily do's and instead use their time productively at work.

Says Mr Kartikeyan, ``The idea of starting this service was not because we had any problem whatsoever, but a proactive way of showing that we cared beyond the contract with the employee. This, to us, goes towards building a psychological contract.''

In Motorola's case, it tied up two months ago with one such service provider, SuperSeva, which has a desk at Motorola's office to handle requests for its services. It's evidently gone down well with the staff as at last count, Mr Kartikeyan says, over 25 0 requests for services, mostly ticketing, were received by the concierge desk. As Motorola pays a retainer fee to SuperSeva, most services such as bill payments on an employee's behalf come free, with nominal costs for ticketing and deliveries. Special requests, evidently, cost more.

Says Mr T. Mahesh, CEO of SuperSeva, ``We don't see ourselves merely as ticketing agents or bill payment facilitators. Our value comes in when there's an unusual request on hand.'' Like the time they had to pick up kids at school at the drop of a hat dur ing the Rajkumar abduction crisis or rope in a Hindi-speaking pujari to recite shlokas for a puja. It even arranged 1,200 tickets over just three days for the movie Mohabattein.

Almost 70 per cent of SuperSeva's business comes from IT professionals. With the software industry attracting talent from all over the country, there are many who cannot negotiate the local lingo and look for some hand-holding. ``We even had a request to arrange for a Hindi-speaking carpenter,'' adds Mr Mahesh.

SuperSeva provides similar services to a variety of infotech companies from Verifone and Siemens to Satyam and Wipro. It operates a call centre in the city where all requests are received and passed onto the respective agents. It operates three formats w hich allow individual and corporate memberships. The former comes for an annual fee of Rs 1,000 and members can even log onto SuperSeva's Web site and place their requests.

An offshoot of Srishti Software Pvt Ltd, a software development company, SuperSeva claims to integrate scalable technology and a centralised Web-enabled communications centre. From early January, it expects to have a payment gateway for electronic cleari ng in place in a tie-up with UTI Bank. Next on the anvil is a tie-up with a department chain to pick up grocery for its clients and an expansion into cities such as Chennai and Hyderabad.

Evidently, the concept is catching on. Mr Bhaskar Das, Director, HRD, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Chennai, says that it too has tied up with Les Concierges, a Bangalore-based company, to offer similar services to its employees. That would be a virtua l leap in employee welfare.