Vietnam Outsourcing Insights – with Thuy Doan of Innovature

In this week’s episode of the Outsource Accelerator Podcast, Derek welcomes Thuy Doan, Founder and CEO of Innovature. 

Innovature is making a significant impact in the outsourcing sector, specializing in areas such as customer service, accounting and finance, business intelligence, and analytics. 

Derek and Thuy delve into the rapid growth of Vietnam’s outsourcing industry, exploring its unique strengths and challenges. They also discuss how Innovature is strategically adapting to the ever-evolving outsourcing landscape.

Innovature: A trusted outsourcing partner

Driven by her long-standing dream of entrepreneurship, Thuy moved back to Vietnam after working in the U.S. for ten years.

She initially set up operations for Forbes in Vietnam but later partnered with a major U.S. staffing company to enhance their back-office operations. This collaboration marked the beginning of Innovature.

“We specialize in accounting and finance and business intelligence and analytics. 

For customer service, we focus on multilingual customer support because we have both operation houses in Vietnam [and] the Philippines,” Thuy explains.

Innovature is dedicated to providing diverse job opportunities for Vietnamese and Filipino professionals. 

The CEO proudly shares, “We were able to scale up our business from the first five employees, and now [we have] 200 employees by running and growing it organically.”

In terms of client base, the company primarily serves the U.S. market. 

“I think [the] US market is a very big market, and BPO has been growing significantly in the US nowadays…US [companies] have been very familiar with [the] outsourcing concept.”

Exploring Vietnam’s emerging outsourcing industry

Vietnam has long been recognized as a viable option for outsourcing. For Thuy, the country’s outsourcing sector has established a global reputation in three particular areas.

“IT [is] still one of the top sectors that we are good at… For the next best thing, I think it should be accounting and finance. A lot of Vietnamese people are very quick with numbers…”

Vietnamese professionals demonstrate proficiency with numbers and a strong desire for career advancement, often progressing from entry-level roles to positions such as finance analysts.

“The next thing is business analytics and intelligence, which is about the same as accounting finance.”

Few years back, the English language wasn’t widely spoken in the country. 

However, “The Vietnamese government had put English as one of the requirements of the course from secondary school to up to college. And that helped to increase the quality of the talent that we’ve seen in the past five years.”

Now, the country boasts a growing pool of multilingual customer support agents.

The local job market has faced challenges, including a surplus of labor due to company closures. However, this has spurred a competitive environment where workers are increasingly motivated to enhance their skills. 

Outsourcing landscape: Vietnam vs. Philippines vs. India explored

Vietnam, the Philippines, and India each have unique positions in the outsourcing industry. 

While Vietnam is gaining traction in IT outsourcing, Thuy believes that “For the rest of the outsourcing service for BPO, I don’t think Vietnam has been recognized as one of the top three players…

Because I think India and the Philippines have been doing outsourcing for like 20, 30 years now.”

The Philippines boasts a well-established BPO market with excellent English skills and cultural alignment with Western clients, making it a leader in customer service outsourcing. 

Despite that, the Vietnamese workforce is characterized by a strong desire to improve and a growing proficiency in English. 

But as far as the cost, when finding great talent, businesses “have to pay for like 10%, 15% over the market price,” compared to the Philippines and India. 

The CEO also shares that one good thing about Innovature is that “we have maintained a training system that we cross-train our agent, and the agent can be very flexible and can adapt to working with different clients and with different systems.”

On the other hand, India, with the largest workforce and extensive technical expertise, remains dominant in IT and engineering services but faces challenges related to quality and efficiency.

Hence, companies are seeking alternative locations that can offer a long-term partnership and deliver more value for their expenditures.

Adapting to the changes in the outsourcing landscape

Thuy emphasizes the importance of adapting to changes and creating a supportive office culture to retain talent, given the high costs of training and turnover in the BPO industry.

At present, 20% of Innovature’s staff work remotely and 75% prefer to go to the office. 

“I can say that for [Vietnamese] people, [they] are still prone to working in the office because, based on the nature of the Vietnamese, they like to have the community and talking to people in the offices.”

Innovature prioritizes a culture of retaining and maintaining employees, aiming to create a happy workforce that can contribute to faster business growth.

“We would want to retain as many talents as we want because we have invested in training them and making sure they’re up to speed with the skill set, the attitude, and everything.”

To learn more about Innovature and its featured services, you may visit its website at https://innovatureinc.com/.