NelsonHall recently attended Sitel’s European Customer Day in Paris. The event was an opportunity for Sitel to update the analyst community on the progress it is making with company restructuring following its acquisition by French BPO vendor Acticall, and to present to its clients and stakeholders a vision of the future – not just for contact center outsourcing, but for customer e[...]

        Yesterday, SYNNEX Corporation, the $13.3bn parent company of Concentrix, announced it is acquiring Minacs for $420m. The acquisition brings approximately $400m of revenue and $0.53 per share non-GAAP earnings. Minacs adds to Concentrix ~ 21k employees, 15k seats and 35 centers in Canada, U.S., India, LATAM, Europe, and the Philippines. The combined Concentrix/M[...]

The traditional inbound phone sales process is giving way to a multichannel environment, where the customer is in control – usually visiting the company website first and expecting to connect with a sales rep immediately, more commonly over webchat, and then deciding on a purchase. The challenges for customer service teams are two-fold: Training agents to sell via chat, with all the re[...]

Increasing emphasis on improved customer experience is driving customer management services (CMS) outsourcing deals to evolve, with vendors providing domain expertize, analytical insights, transformational capabilities, and access to new channels/technology across the entire contract duration. On the client side, this translates into working with fewer vendors sourcing multiple functions and geogr[...]

NelsonHall recently visited Sitel at their contact center in Chennai to experience operations at first hand and to discuss the evolving CMS outsourcing industry. Only five months ago, in December 2015, the South Indian floods hit Chennai and access to the Sitel center was blocked. Over 70 employees stayed behind in the office at Ramanujam IT Park, where the company provided beds and food, while tr[...]

 2016 can be officially declared the year of the chatbot. For  the last few months the amount of attention from the media,  and from developers and venture capitalists, has turned chatbots from an ordinary customer service tool to a hyped  technology, tipped to replace apps and become the all-  encompassing digital interface  between customers and  brands. A[...]

Self-service has long been part of the customer service mix, dating back to user manuals, and progressing to the first IVRs, website FAQs, and experience sharing communities such as Amazon Help. Even though self-service support has a wide range of benefits and savings for consumers and businesses, its adoption has been slow – due partly to technological limitations, and to a tendency to use [...]

At the end of 2015, private equity group Blackstone closed the purchase of Serco’s private sector BPO business for £250m (~$375m), and the company has now rebranded to its original name, Intelenet Global Services. Today, Intelenet employs ~55k staff across 66 delivery centers in eight countries, providing Customer Management Services (CMS), F&A, Knowledge Management, and ITO servic[...]

The biggest advantage of automation in CMS has been the ability to simplify, optimize and remove redundant workflow steps in the contact centers’ internal processes with the goal of improving the customer experience, and an end-game for vendors of increasing the number of value-add projects with their clients. Wipro’s Marvel CX is aiming to do exactly that. Marvel CX’s compone[...]

Since the first customer and marketing databases in the 80s, to the fully-fledged CRM platforms of the 90s, to the cloud-based CRMs of the 00s and the Social CRM of the 2010s, CRM platforms have had the same goal and challenge – to successfully match customers with companies. With the proliferation of more channels, and changing customer expectations for effortless and real-time interaction,[...]

Over the last few years, social media has gradually achieved a small, but highly significant place within customer care and sales channels. CMS providers jumped to provide solutions as early as 2010-2011, but not until recently have these solutions reached a maturity level that has enabled them to go beyond simple monitoring of comments, posts and tweets. Aegis developed its proprietary social [...]

The future of contact centers is in automation, self-learning AI, support for IoT, and engaging customers and agents at a new level. These were the major themes at the fourth annual Customer Engagement Summit in London on November 26th. Close to 700 delegates and 60 speakers met to compare notes and listen to success stories in robotics implementations, results driven by analytics, and connecting [...]

Minutes away from London’s Covent Garden, housed in a five-storey converted banana warehouse, is Sutherland Customer Experience Labs. This is an independent creative agency with its own P&L, offering customer experience mapping, idea generation and solution testing to Sutherland Global Services. However, three quarters of its business comes from external clients: delivering design and cu[...]

Webhelp recently entered the Turkish CMS outsourcing market with the acquisition of Callpex, a move that is set to bring an additional €20m (~$20m) in annual revenue against its global revenue of ~$648m (2014 NelsonHall estimate). Callpex has 2,000 employees and 40 clients, and will bring with it logos in the BFSI, telecom, travel and automotive sectors, primarily in the domestic market. Thes[...]