Outsourcing Focused on Asian Market Demand – with Ajay Agarrwal of SummitNext

Ajay Agarrwal, Founder and CEO of SummitNext joins the podcast to share his journey and insights into building a fast-growing outsourcing company headquartered in Malaysia.

Ajay is a 25-year industry veteran and has grown SummitNext to focus on a mostly Asian-based clientele. 

SummitNext

Ajay starts by introducing SummitNext. 

“SummitNext is a BPO company that started in 2020, right bang in the middle of COVID,” Ajay explained. “COVID gave us an opportunity to start as a greenfield project. We started in 2020 servicing the customer clients in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan.”

SummitNext has grown rapidly since its small beginnings.

“As we moved along, we expanded our footprint into Philippines, India, and the latest one being Uzbekistan. 

Our key services revolve around customer support, tech support, retention, collections, customer acquisition… and the latest one that we are doing is around the training of AI models, data collection for that. So that’s becoming one of our biggest verticals.”

Today, SummitNext employs about 500 people. 

“In the first two, two and a half years we were really, really slow,” he admitted, “but we’ve picked up in the last two years or so.”

Ajay emphasized that a big differentiator for the company has been its willingness to work with startups. 

“Some of the startups that we started working with initially had only three headcount, or even our smallest was two headcount to outsource. 

But we were happy to partner with them because we saw an opportunity with their business model and the likelihood of their business growing. That’s exactly what’s happened.”

Regional outsourcing insights

SummitNext has positioned itself to serve the needs of Asia’s multilingual markets while also expanding to global clients.

Ajay described Malaysia as a particularly strong base. “We do provide a number of languages—obviously English, Malay, Mandarin, and Cantonese is our bread and butter. Those languages are available locally. 

But for other languages, we are an approved company under MDEC, which allows the company to bring in expats into the country. So we are able to bring in other nationalities… pretty much all the Asian nationalities.”

The company has also seen rising demand from China. 

“Chinese companies have shown a lot of interest for Malaysia over the last one, one and a half years. One is multinational companies that were running businesses in China—there is this element of uncertainty, and they want to move out of China to a safer location. 

The other is Chinese companies looking for Western markets. They’re looking for people that can speak their language and can also speak English, which is a bit difficult for them to find within China and pretty much standard to find in Malaysia.”

On India, Ajay noted the evolution of the industry. 

“The competition is very high. Outsourcing is still big business in India, but it has changed drastically over the last 10 to 15 years from being a voice-only outsourcing destination to more backend outsourcing. 

Even the interest we are seeing from some of our clients is completely non-voice. It is KPO work.”

Meanwhile, SummitNext’s Philippines operations remain voice-focused. 

“That’s how broadly the industry is going, especially for the outsourcing that happens out of the US. The voice-based goes to Philippines, the backend work, the more KPO kind of work, goes to India.”

Influence of new trends in outsourcing

Ajay also reflected on how the outsourcing landscape is changing, particularly under the influence of AI.

“A lot of the customer support, customer acquisition kind of work, which was bread and butter, seems to be going down. But at the same time, a lot of other work… we are seeing in terms of data collection for training of AI models.”

He acknowledged the irony of AI development being so labor-intensive. 

“It’s a grunt work. There’s a lot of manual work that goes into developing AI models or AI projects. Somebody said, it is ironic how the development of AI is such a manual work—which is true.”

The complexity of these projects is growing as well. 

“A recent project we delivered was where two people are supposed to talk in two different languages. In India, typically everybody speaks English and Hindi, so the AI model is still supposed to figure out the conversation even if it mixes words.“

SummitNext also offers flexibility in service models, catering both to clients who want managed services and those looking for staff augmentation. 

“We do that. In fact, I would say a good number of our overall strength comes from that. They could still be customer support or salespeople, but more like managed services.”

For Ajay, the key advice to smaller clients is clear: “Don’t treat it as an external team, but treat it as an extension of your team. That’s where the success would come in.”

You can learn more by visiting SummitNext’s website or emailing them at [email protected].