French CMS vendor Groupe Acticall is to acquire Sitel Worldwide, buying the 86% stake owned by Onex for ~$55m including an earn-out component. Groupe Acticall has financing for the acquisition from Société Générale and BNP Paribas It comes as no surprise that Onex is selling its stake in Sitel. What is perhaps a surprise is the size of the company making the acquisit[...]

NelsonHall recently visited one of Convergys’ Intelligent Contact (IC) centers in Belfast, Northern Ireland. IC originally started life as LBM in 1996, then was acquired by Stream in 2013, which was itself acquired by Convergys in 2014. IC is a specialist sales division of Convergys, consisting of agents across multiple centers in Belfast and Greater Manchester, performing a mix of outb[...]

Two common themes in the marketing collateral of vendors providing Customer Management Services (CMS) are the use of analytics and transformation.  For analytics, a popular claim is the use of big data for predictive modeling within contact centers. But is it really happening? The reality is that, while certain vendors are using data for simple predictive modeling, this is still a distinct[...]

What a difference a year makes for EXL. It entered 2014 under the cloud of the loss of two contracts, including the unfortunate termination Travelers (which had accounted for nearly 10% of total revenues in 2013) because of inappropriate behavior by an employee. So it started the year facing significant revenue headwinds. A year later, EXL delivered full year 2014 revenues that beat revise[...]

Germany’s fiscal success story presents an interesting value proposition for the local customer management services (CMS) BPO market. Real GDP in Germany grew by 1.5% in 2014 and current forecasts indicate that, driven by a strong labor force, high consumption and favorable energy prices, Germany should be able to maintain this level of growth through 2015 and accelerate to around the 2.0% m[...]

NelsonHall, the leading global BPO and IT outsourcing analyst firm, has today launched a new tool to assist strategic sourcing managers in assessing vendor capability in Property & Casualty Insurance BPO for the automotive sector. The NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation and Assessment Tool (NEAT) for P&C BPO in the automotive sector is now available to NelsonHall clients, and is also available[...]

In the last twelve months we have more customer management services (CMS) BPO investment in South Africa, including  Webhelp setting up centers in Cape Town and Johannesburg with an agent headcount approaching 1,000 Capita transitioning part of its O2 support to Cape Town in the form of a ~1,400 seat operation. One (of many) attributes that make South Afr[...]

So far, 2014 has been a mixed year for Quindell; it faced damning speculation from Gotham City Research in April (which has since been rejected) and a failed partnership with the RAC in September, which would have seen ingenie’s telematics services being made available to all drivers, not just 17 to 25 year olds, from July. On the plus side, there has also been a number of signi[...]

NelsonHall recently attended CSS Corp’s analyst day and OneWorld conference. The overriding theme of the day was a reinforcement of the company’s direction; CEO Tiger Ramesh emphasized his ambition for CSS Corp to become the leading global tech support service provider, as emphasized in the company’s new by-line “Wired to Support”. A new leadership team has been [...]

NIIT is set to launch its latest offering to the insurance market next week, in the form of an upgraded policy and claims administration system which will join its existing set of insurance tools. NIIT has delivered IT services to its Lloyds of London clients for some 20-years, using its insurance specific tools: Subscribe: NIIT’s existing policy administration platform, a multi-cur[...]

Sitel has been awarded a two year 800 FTE CMS contract by Danish telecom provider TDC, following an initial contact that was made with twelve potential suppliers in November 2013. This is TDC’s largest foray into outsourcing its CMS function by agent number and by total value, with headcount representing approximately one third of total CMS capacity. The contract includes the transfer of [...]

Genpact’s Q2 2014 results show similar mid-single digit (5%) top line growth to Q1 (4.9%), in line with prior guidance for the year of 4%-6% (this has now been adjusted to 5-7% to include a revenue contribution from its Q2 acquisition of Pharmalink). But it is substantially below the 12.1% growth seen in 2013.   EBIT margin was 13.0%, down both sequentially (-7 bps) and y/y (-157 bps[...]

Be it in support of healthcare, the London market or consulting capabilities, the U.K. insurance BPO market is seeing a lot of acquisitive action from four major players who have already made significant acquisitions in the H1 2014.  Starting with two of the most acquisitive vendors in insurance BPO: Innovation Group and Quindell continue to build operational scale Earlier this month, A[...]

With like-for-like growth of 10.3% this is another strong quarter for Teleperformance although it continues to be challenged to its exposure to exchange rate fluctuations in the LATAM region resulting in reported revenue growth of 4.1%. Its Brazil business is contending with a stalling economy and a sharply depreciating currency, although it is still profitable and[...]

Cognizant recently announced a F&A BPO contract award by facility management services group ISS, covering its operations in the Nordics. This is the third F&A BPO client win for Cognizant in the Nordics. The first award was with Volvo, announced March 2011, followed by one at Norway Post, in partnership with local partner Visma, in July 2011. Cognizant’s clie[...]

EXL recently announced the acquisition of Albany, NY-based Blue Slate Solutions. Blue Slate, founded in 2000 by CEO Rick Barnett, has from its inception focused on data driven business consulting and services. Today, with a staff of 35, it focuses on developing simplified data models and business processes for health insurers (~85% of its business, including large insurers and Medicare contractors[...]

After three months of talks, Teleperformance is to acquire Aegis' U.S, Philippines and Cost Rican operations for $610m. The transaction will involve the transfer of 19,000 agents (18,000 work stations) in 16 centers, representing ~$400m in annual revenues.  Aegis will bring to Teleperformance the following operations: The U.S: nine sites with ~5,300 total seats The Ph[...]

After a quiet year of acquisitions in the contact center outsourcing market in 2013, 2014 activity so far has been more inline with what we’ve come to expect of this market in terms of the volume of acquisitions. Most of the acquisitions so far this year have been to enhance, and in some case establish, geographic presence, for example: Webhel[...]

NelsonHall recently spoke with management from Virtual Operations, a privately held Dallas, TX-based provider of consulting, implementation and technical services around robotic process automation (RPA).  The company was founded in 2012 by Dan Hudson and Matt Smith who had previously worked together at OnTarget Partners and other ventures.  We asked them about the growth that they a[...]

Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Google+, the list goes on . . .  the need for both B2C and B2B enterprises to establish and foster a social presence has evolved from a nice to have to an essential capability . . . yaaawn! We’ve heard this so many times that we are at risk of ignoring it, like irritating boy band lyrics. But unlike the boy band lyrics, there is some truth to the message. [...]