You clicked? I'm a Bangalore Butler

ADRIANNE Yamaki, a 32-year-old management consultant in New York, travels frequently and regularly clocks up 80-hour working weeks. So to eke out more time for herself, she routinely farms out the administrative chores of her life – making travel arrangements, hair appointments and restaurant reservations – to a personal assistant service.

Kenneth Tham, a Californian high-school student, is striving to improve his exam grades. Most afternoons, he is tutored remotely by an instructor speaking to him on a voice-over-internet headset while he sits at his personal computer going over lessons on the screen.

What both have in common is that the personal assistant and the tutor they use are located in India. The age of the 'Bangalore Butler', situated thousands of miles from the individual they are helping, has arrived.

The first wave of slicing up services work in developed countries and sending it abroad has been all about business operations. Computer programming, call centres, product design and back-office jobs like accounting and billing have to some degree migrated 'offshore', mainly to India. The internet makes it possible, while lower wages in developing nations make outsourcing attractive.

But the second wave will be the globalisation of consumer services. People such as Yamaki and Tham are the early customers in a market that will one day include millions of households in the US and other nations.

Tutoring and personal assistance is only the start. Health and nutrition coaching, personal tax and legal advice, help with hobbies and cooking, learning new languages and skills will all be offered for affordable monthly fees or piecework rates.

K P Balaraj, a managing director of the Indian arm of Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, says: "Consumer services delivered globally should be a huge market."

Yamaki uses Ask Sunday, which has a New York head office but a workforce in India. During a late meeting at the office recently, Yamaki said, she sent a one-line e-mail message from her laptop that told Ask Sunday to order her usual meals from her favourite Manhattan restaurant, for delivery at 9.30pm. When the meeting ended, her take-out food was waiting.

"The service is great to make your life a little smoother," Yamaki said. "And it's available 24 hours a day, which is more than you can expect from a personal assistant at work."

But globalisation of consumer services faces daunting challenges, both economic and cultural. Offshore outsourcing for big business thrived partly because the jobs were often multimillion-dollar contracts and the work was repetitive.

It is not clear that similar economies of scale can be achieved in the consumer market, where customers are individual households and services must be priced in tens or hundreds of dollars.

Then there are the matters of language, accent and cultural nuance that promise to hamper the communication and understanding needed to deliver personal services. Already, some American consumers voice frustrations in dealing with customer-service call centres in India. At the least, the spread of remotely delivered personal services will be a test of globalisation at the grass-roots level.

In a report this year, Evalueserve, a research firm, predicted that "person-to-person offshoring", both consumer services and services for small businesses, would grow rapidly, to more than $2bn by 2015. Yet there is doubt about who will make the crucial start-up investment in the newly emerging companies so that the sector can get over its teething troubles.

What the offshore consumer services industry needs, it seems, is a solid success story in some promising market.

A leading candidate to watch, according to analysts, is TutorVista, a tutoring service founded two years ago by Krishnan Ganesh, a 45-year-old Indian entrepreneur and a pioneer of offshore call centres.

Concerns about the quality of education in America and the increased emphasis on standardised tests is driving the tutoring business in general.

But whereas other remote tutoring services generally offer hourly rates of $20 to $30, TutorVista takes an all-you-can-eat approach to instruction. Its standard offering is $99 a month for as many 45-minute tutoring sessions as a student arranges.

TutorVista also stands out for its well-known venture backers, its scale and its ambition, raising $15m from high-profile US investors. The two-year-old company now employs 760 people, including 600 tutors in India, a teaching staff it plans to double by the spring. Its 52-person technical staff has spent countless hours building the software system to schedule, monitor and connect potentially tens of thousands of tutors with students oceans away.

"Our vision is to be part of the monthly budget of one million families," Ganesh says.

It is a long-term goal. To date, TutorVista has signed up 10,000 subscribers in the United States, and its British service, rolled out in September, has 1,000.

Further gains will depend on winning over more customers like the Tham family in California. Since he was in elementary school, Kenneth has had stints of conventional tutoring, often in classroom settings with up to 10 other students. At times, this cost the family up to $500 a month. Last year, Ernest Tham, a truck driver, noticed a reference to TutorVista on a website and suggested his son give it a try.

"Kenneth was apprehensive at first, and I wasn't sure how it would work," Tham said. "But it's gone very well."

Kenneth said he initially found it "very unusual, not seeing another person. You get used to it, though." He schedules sessions nearly every day, mainly for English and chemistry. With a digital pen and palette, he writes sentences and grammar exercises, for example, and his work appears on his computer screen and on the screen of his tutor. They discuss the lessons using internet-telephone headsets.

Ramya Tadikonda has tutored Kenneth, among many others, from her home in Chennai, India. Aged 26, she is a college graduate who had previously worked as a software and curriculum developer for a maths website but left earlier this year to join TutorVista. She now works about 24 hours a week as a maths and English tutor and makes about $200 a month.

Tadikonda says she enjoys tutoring and the flexible hours. "You can have a career and still spend time with your family," she said. "I never thought I could do that."

The timing is right for global tutoring, according to John Stuppy, TutorVista's president. Improved internet technology and the ability to tap a vast pool of educated instructors at low cost are crucial ingredients. "It becomes possible to make high-quality, one-on-one tutoring affordable and accessible to the masses," he said.