Your Computers Are Down? No Problema

It is late Friday afternoon; the two busiest days of the week tick hours away. No computers will mean lost sales. The dealership finds a computer service company, Etectonics, with a Yonkers address, and an emergency call is placed. The voice at the other end takes the information and reassures the dealership that a technician will be sent as quickly as possible.

Etectonics’ customer service rep then checks the whereabouts of its six technicians. One is nearby, on a call in the Bronx, according to the report he e-mailed to the office that morning. The rep calls him, tells him the system has gone down at the dealership and gives him the address and directions.

About 45 minutes later, the tech pulls up in one of Etectonics’ yellow Volkswagens. He is joined by Ricardo Garcia, the 28-year old president of the company, who has also been paged by the office. In a few hours, the network problem is identified and repaired. The dealer is back in business — and Etectonics has a new client.

The Etectonics office manager, Juan Diego Rodriguez, J. D. for short, is pleased when he hears the outcome, although he won’t be visiting the dealership anytime soon. That’s because Mr. Rodriguez and the Etectonics customer service operation are based in Bogotá, Colombia. Clients can’t believe it when they hear it. “It’s great seeing their reaction,” Mr. Garcia said. “Sometimes they’ve already been dealing with our company for a year. They think they’re talking to a guy in Yonkers.”

Outsourcing customer service and help-desk function is hardly novel. But few businesses have gone to Colombia; even fewer small businesses have integrated off-site offices as neatly in their operations as this six-year-old computer service company, which serves around 200 small and midsize businesses in the New York area through a voice-over Internet protocol call to Bogotá and keeps a videoconferencing portal on from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. That way, the workers in Colombia, 2,500 miles away from those in Yonkers, can act is if they are in adjoining cubicles.

At first, some employees were skeptical. “I’ll be honest, I had my doubts when they told me I’d be telling Juan Diego in Bogotá when I left the office to go on a call,” said Joseph Piecora, Etectonics’ director of technology. (The technicians and main servers are in Yonkers.) “But it’s been seamless. It’s like he’s sitting in a chair right here.”

He was, actually, sitting in Bogotá but appearing on a 32-inch monitor at the Yonkers office, waving to the staff gathered there at a conference table.

Bogotá was a natural location for his expansion, because Mr. Garcia and his brother, Alejandro, a partner in the business, have dual citizenship in the United States and Colombia. “It’s the same time zone,” Mr. Garcia said. And, “despite its image in the movies, Colombia has great human capital.” The country, he says, produces many skilled, educated professionals, many of whom speak English so fluently that people are fooled, including a newspaper photographer who got lost on her way from Manhattan to Etectonics in Yonkers, called its number and got directions from someone in Bogotá.

Another main advantage of hiring people in Bogotá, Mr. Garcia said, is that employee turnover is low.

The six-person sales and service office in Bogotá has paid off: in the 12 months since the office opened, Mr. Garcia says sales are up 35 percent, customer retention has increased 75 percent, and costs have been lowered 45 percent. The company also won a New York Enterprise Report Small Business Award, given annually in September to innovative small businesses in the region. Karl Reiner Lang, an associate professor of computer information systems at Baruch College, views Etectonics as a trend-setter. “The barriers to enter the global arena have come down,” Professor Lang said. “We’re going to see more outsourcing activities that have been set up and created by small businesses and small teams across the globe. Etectonics is a perfect example of this.”

The company got running the day after Mr. Garcia graduated from New York University in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in politics. His drive and penchant for technology certainly helped. “I used to call him a nerd growing up, until I realized he could make money from it,” said Alejandro Garcia.

Now, working with their mother, Astrid Amaya, who joined the recent meeting on a computer-camera hookup from Madrid, the company wants to expand. The plan is to open a second office in Bogotá, serving businesses in Spain. Colombia offers distinct advantages besides lower costs. “The Spanish like the language the way it’s spoken in Colombia,” said Mrs. Amaya, who is the chief executive of Etectonics. Her own father started an organic foods business in Colombia in the 1970s. (Ricardo spent his childhood on their grandfather’s farm outside Bogotá before moving to the United States.) “We come from a tradition of family businesses,” Mrs. Amaya said.

Regardless of language or lineage, Ricardo Garcia thinks that what they have done — shrinking their world while enlarging it at the same time — could be a model for other small businesses. “I think this is what the future looks like for small and midsized business,” he said. “They need to understand that it’s not that hard.”