With a base of operations in the Philippines, CyLynx offers quality outsourced support at a low price to medium and large ISPs and webhosts.

by Jeff Goldman [July 16, 2003]

CyLynx was founded three years ago by Alan Chung, who had previously been president of the hosting provider Digiweb, Inc. Spotting a niche in the helpdesk market for cheaper services, Chung established a base of operations in the Philippines and started his new company.

According to David Bitterman, CyLynx's Vice President of Corporate Relations, going overseas was simply the most logical way to offer more affordable services. "The cost structure is obviously different in the Philippines than it is in the States, and Alan wanted to be able to provide cheaper services for the industry that he knew well, the hosting and ISP business," Bitterman said.

CyLynx Voice: (866) 688-6945 sales@cylynx.com

Chung selected the Philippines specifically because of the strength of that country's telecommunications and Internet infrastructure. "Everybody there that's educated speaks English, which is similar to India—but the good thing about the Philippines is that it's a couple of years advanced in terms of physical infrastructure," Bitterman pointed out.

Any accent that a customer might notice when calling CyLynx's support technicians, Bitterman adds, is no more significant than the accent of a support technician in New York or New Jersey. "If an end user calls, they might be surprised to hear it, but if they call again a couple of days later, they're not even going to notice the accent," he said.

And in the Philippines, CyLynx is able to be extremely selective in the hiring process. "We have a really good status with all the top colleges out there," Bitterman said. "We're looked on as a good place to work. We might bring in 100 applicants from a graduating class and only hire eight of them, and then only keep four of them after the training period."

Thorough preparation
CyLynx offers phone, e-mail, and chat support, and will integrate with any ISP's back office systems. "Different webhosts and ISPs have ticketing systems and logging systems they've been working with before they decide to outsource," Bitterman said. "A lot of them don't want to switch. Each call might get logged into one of six or seven different logging systems; we'll work with the clients on that."

All services are fully branded, so the end users don't need to know that the support is outsourced or that they're speaking to someone outside the U.S. "The call comes in over a toll-free number," Bitterman said. "Before the call is picked up, the support technician on the other side already knows who that person was calling, and they can answer it as that company."

CyLynx's implementation process is designed to ensure that the support team is fully prepared before the first call comes in. "A lot of people are switching from doing it in house to us, so they've got months and months of tickets that we can look through, view what general questions there are, and prepare ourselves," Bitterman said.

Ultimately, he explains, the support can only be as good as the preparation behind it. "I always tell people, we'll take as much time and as much information as you'll give us," Bitterman said. "We'll take all the time in the world, and we'll prepare ourselves as best we can. The less information you give us, the less prepared we're going to be, and it's going to be harder for us to do as well as we want."

The company tries to focus on medium to large ISPs and webhosts; because of the extensive preparation process, Bitterman says, smaller accounts are sometimes not worth the effort. "We have turned some of them away in the past, because by the time you do the immersion, if you're only collecting $150 a month, it's almost not worth it," he said. "We definitely aim towards the higher-end customer."

Dedicated or shared
A number of different pricing models are available. Smaller customers can use a shared model, which gives them access to a team of support technicians who are not dedicated to them alone. The ISP pays a set amount per month for a maximum number of incidents; beyond that, it shifts to per incident pricing. For those who only want after-hours support, pricing is also available on a purely per-incident basis.

For larger customers, the dedicated support option, which assigns a full-time technician only to that customer, is the best choice. "This person only handles your calls, for a flat rate per month," Bitterman said. "There's no limitation on what that person can be doing. Maybe they're answering calls for 35 hours and doing outbound collection calls for five hours. You've got full control."

The dedicated support option, Bitterman says, gives you a full-time support technician who works for you: he just happens to work in the Philippines. "Some customers have them doing collection calls, some do outbound telesales; you could do any number of things," he said. "If you've got a list of 100 people that left your service and you want to get them to fill out a survey, you could do that."

Laker's take
Freddie Laker is the former owner of the hosting and development company Laker.Net, which he recently sold to WebUnited; he's now WebUnited's Director of Internet Development Sales. "If it wasn't for CyLynx, I wouldn't have been able to do the rollup as easily as I did," Laker said. "My customers never had to worry about support going down while we moved from one location to another."

Laker started working with CyLynx about a year and half ago. "In today's economy, with business being the way it is, we were looking for cost-effective solutions that were going to allow us to stay competitive with major ISPs," Laker said. "CyLynx had the solutions to provide that to us."

In addition, Laker says, CyLynx's staff is extremely well trained. "They're the kind of geeks I'd hire if it was my own company," he said. "I love guys who eat, breathe, and sleep computers. When I graduated high school, I could program five programming languages. I love people like that, and that's the kind of staff they are. They're an army of nerdlings at your disposal!"

— End

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