A Swedish entrepreneur has successfully launched an outsourced interactive business secretarial service in Taiwan.

“Harvard Business Review” listed “outsourcing” as a very important management concept and practical operation topic in the 20th century. The most common outsourcing service is ITO (information technology outsourcing)-information outsourcing, and BPO (business process outsourcing)

In fact, BPO has become a trend everywhere in the world. It has not only quickly changed the mode of enterprise operation and management, but also has a significant impact on human structure and costs. In Taiwan, the Ministry of Economic Affairs also actively wants to understand the possibility of promoting the domestic BPO industry, and even wants to step into the export of knowledge and share the outsourced pie.

Elias Ek, General Manager of Ashland International Business, who has successfully started a business in Taiwan but has established the number one brand of telephone secretary, said that from the perspective of the United Kingdom, which has already achieved considerable gains in the implementation of outsourcing, it has already started from customer service and technical support. It extends to secretarial duties, from overseas outsourcing carried out by large companies in order to reduce costs, to outsourcing carried out by small and medium-sized enterprises in China for cost and quality considerations.

For example, Moneypenny, a company that provides telephone assistants in Wales, UK, grew its turnover from 2.9 million pounds (190 million Taiwan dollars) in 2005 to 4.2 million pounds (280 million Taiwan dollars) this year. This company has only 2 assistants since 2000; now more than 120 telephone assistants answer the calls of more than 3,000 companies, and the leading company in this industry in the UK, AlldayPA, has more than 20,000 corporate customers.

This unstoppable trend is also prospering in all countries. In fact, not only European countries, but the United States and Australia on the other side of the Atlantic have many successful cases.

Taiwan’s entrepreneurial island has a total of 1.24 million small and medium-sized enterprises, and more than 100,000 new ventures are invested in each year. However, as land prices and labor costs continue to soar, Taiwanese companies have gradually adopted the concept of outsourcing to streamline labor and cut costs.

According to Elias Ek, general manager of Anshi Business, a representative manufacturer of telephone assistant services in Taiwan, with 4 million small and medium-sized enterprises in the UK, more than 40,000 enterprises use telephone assistant services. It is speculated that there may be close to 10,000 enterprises in Taiwan. With this demand, the telephone assistant market exceeds at least 200 million business opportunities.

Although this service has not yet become popular in Taiwan, Elias Ek is deeply confident in Taiwan’s outsourcing market, saying that outsourcing is a world trend. Although Taiwan’s speed in integrating with international standards is relatively slow, it has been able to get a glimpse of the popularity of outsourcing services in recent years. At present, the Taiwanese telephone assistant market will be promoted in a free trial mode, allowing ordinary enterprises to experience the different magic of outsourcing and assistant services.

Associate International Business in Taiwan is a leading company with outsourcing assistants. At the end of 2007, it launched the world’s only interactive business secretarial service. Assemble sorted out 80% of the company’s common call questions and provided customers with pre-set answers through the telephone computer intelligent system Work with the industry’s highest standard service personnel to handle all calls as customer employees.

At present, a dedicated platform for users to query call records and set up the latest information services is provided. It is expected that in the second quarter of 2008, the platform will further provide customer information management functions and a full range of business assistants and office functions, so that business secretaries can serve more than just answering and leave a message.