In January 2022, Tech Mahindra acquired BPS provider Allyis. Allyis offers digital experience, cloud, AI, & engineering, data & analytics, and technical support services and has actively built trust and safety, content moderation, and content enhancement services. The deal complements Tech Mahindra's strategy over the last seven years to acquire and expand into experience, digital consulting, and design capabilities. Allyis also brings capabilities and a client base in the highly promising space of content services.

Allyis - a multiplay provider

Allyis was founded in the 1990s and is headquartered in Seattle. It has ~2k employees in the U.S., India, Romania, and Costa Rica, generating ~90% of its revenues from managed services, primarily from consumer and enterprise software clients. It also supports consumer electronics, retail, food, and healthcare.

It provides learning and development, instructional design, and marketing services, including sales and campaign management, test engineering and app development, BI, analytics, and low-code AI solutions. In CX services, it specializes in L1 & L2 technical support such as customer onboarding and integration, device management, and augmentation. Allyis has gradually developed its data services, such as AI and ML data training, metadata tagging, digital asset management, analytics, and social media command center.

Since 2016, it has rapidly built its trust and safety practice, initially with a custom project for an existing enterprise client. Today, it provides a host of content moderation services:

• Content review and moderation, including community management and moderation of extreme content
• Compliance, where it verifies ad relevance, app compliance, user-generated content (UGC) compliance, and brand compliance
• Fraud monitoring and AML checks
• Online reputation management and online brand consulting and protection.

Content moderation growth

Since its launch, Allyis' content moderation services have scaled significantly. Today they range from the moderation of objectionable and illegal content to privacy violation reviews, forum moderation, and specialized use cases. For example, in video games, it moderates text, audio, image, and video content over chat between players or virtual events. An example implementation is for a game developer and publisher. Allyis reviews, tags, and processes UGC, investigates and escalates reported content, and reviews and communicates on user appeals. It deals with images such as custom skins, monitors in-game chats, videos, audio, and 3D experiences (e.g., creative islands). The company also set up a dedicated team to manage egregious content. Allyis processes ~15m interactions per year, covering 12 languages from four delivery markets. It significantly reduced user reports around bullying and harassment, reduced false-positive rate to below 1%, reduced TAT by 20% on technical support, and AHT by 12% on UGC review.

Another area for specialized moderation is advertising quality checks, verification, and compliance. For example, for an international online advertising platform, Allyis performs ad reviews, checks for adult content, intellectual property violations, and restricted and disallowed content such as gambling. It supports advertisers with labeling, appeals, and policy questions. Allyis handles ~15m ads, appeals, and tickets per year and runs ~300k audits annually, maintaining 97% quality across policy groups. For the client, it operates in English, German, French, and other major European languages, as well as Mandarin and Japanese.

Specialized talent management

Allyis has a dedicated framework of processes and work models to support content moderators. It has onsite wellness and resilience resources, procedures for setting mental distance from the work, and a closed office with restricted access. It employs automated pre-moderation to limit the agent's exposure to harmful content. For example, for a U.S. technology corporation, Allyis reviews automatically flagged and shut down accounts due to CSAM images and videos. The specialized onshore team investigates, gathers the necessary information to report, and identifies subjects' ages, ensuring corrective action is taken on the images in question. After the investigation, moderators mark the images, videos, and URLs and report them to the NCMEC (National Center for Missing & Exploited Children). Allyis maintains 99% quality on the workflows.

Integrating Allyis' services in Tech Mahindra's BPS

Tech Mahindra is integrating Allyis into the Digital Business Operations (DBO) practice, which will reach ~$80m in annual revenues and ~12k FTEs. Allyis adds delivery proximity in the U.S. with onshore and nearshore sites, which has been an active market priority by Tech Mahindra (e.g., the 2021 Activus Connect acquisition, which boosted the U.S. WAH capacity). 

For technical support the focus is on software products, especially L1 support for cloud products, strengthening the relationship that both Allyis and Tech Mahindra have with a U.S. multinational technology corporation.

Tech Mahindra looks to benefit from Allyis’ services in learning and development to develop knowledge bases, advise on learning curriculums, integrate and customize training platforms, and design learning programs. Within these services, the company promotes an additional spectrum of learning content services such as translation, localization, training materials creation and publishing, potentially in immersive environments. Many of Allyis’ existing learning accounts use its services for partner, customer, and supplier learning, and Tech Mahindra aims to utilize these capabilities with its enterprise BPS and ITS clients. For a U.S. technology client, Tech Mahindra is creating a content development team in Romania to write and localize materials for the brand partner ecosystem. Another high-potential vertical is life sciences, with discussions underway with a pharmaceutical manufacturer.

Tech Mahindra also looks to take Allyis’ trust and safety offerings, including adjacent services such as data annotation and training to its broader client base. Allyis already brought a new ~$40m client win in the games vertical for metaverse moderation. It plans to open up Allyis trust and safety operations in new regions, for example, Malaysia and Japan.

Another significant opportunity for the DBO practice is leveraging the design and experience consulting units such as BORN and Mad*Pow with Allyis’ learning and trust and safety clients.

As brands increasingly invest in more effective digital sales and support, the breadth of Tech Mahindra DBO’s capabilities can enable them to successfully target the various needs of marketing and customer service in an integrated way.

NelsonHall CX Services is launching a new Content Transformation research project. For participation, please reach out to Ivan Kotzev.