Call centers are no longer a cool business to be in, for many offshore providers of business services. Fast commoditization of the services leading to erosion in margins is cited as the reason for this disenchantment. The much-hyped offshore call center business of the early 2000s is today a “low-value” area that not many would like to to discuss.

Yet, 24/7 Customer, headquarterd in Los Gatos, CA, believes that it is not what you do, but how you do, that decides whether you are into a high- value or low-value business.

24/7 Customer is an offshore-services firm with its operational hub at Bangalore, India, and is positioned as a customer-lifecycle management company that works on “processes that either directly or indirectly interact with the end customers of its clients.” It does not try to downplay its large share (85%) of revenues from “voice services,” as call center services are popularly called in the offshore outsourcing lingo.

“We don’t sing a different tune because the media has fallen in love with a new buzzword,” says P.V. Kannan, CEO of 24/7 Customer, taking a dig at the current discussions in the media dubbing call center services as a low-value offering.

“Our differentiation is based on performance and innovation — we promise to be the number one center for our customers in terms of performance,” he says, explaining what value means to him. The company has a tangible promise on that, which it calls promise of outperformance. “We promise to consistently outperform our customers’ best center by 10% or more,” goes the statement, inscribed everywhere in the company’s buildings — collaterals and Website.

That kind of positioning has earned the company some valuable notices from people who matter — like Tom Friedman, for example, who in his celebrated book, The World is Flat, devotes quite a few pages to it. When BBC decided to make a television series on Indian offshore call centers, it chose 24/7 as a paradigm. A competing CEO even says the company is “trying to be” an Infosys of the call center space.

For that kind of high-profile visibility, 24/7 is fairly small in size, with expected revenues of close to $70 million by the end of this year. About a dozen India-based BPO companies are larger than it.

However, thanks to its clear positioning and its very tangible promise of performance, the firm has managed to rope in a few large accounts, and follows a strategy of focusing on few clients and growing them. Though it won’t name the clients other than the U.K. insurer, Aviva, and hard-disk maker Seagate, because of confidentiality clauses, its clients include a leading U.S. bank and global financial-services company.

The company remains focused on its future in the CLM space.