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[...]

Last week, EXL announced its acquisition of LISS Systems (LISS), a London-headquartered provider of policy administration software for the life, annuities and pensions insurance sectors. LISS will be integrated with EXL's insurance business unit. EXL has made employment inducement equity awards vesting over four years to nine new non-executive employees (all of LISS’s[...]

Within its Lean Digital approach, Genpact is using digital and design thinking (DT) to assist organizations in identifying and addressing what is possible rather than just aiming to match current best-in-class, a concept now made passé by new market entrants. At a recent event hosted at Genpact’s new center in Palo Alto, one client speaker described Genpact’s approach to [...]

  Genpact recently hosted an advisor/analyst session at its new Innovation Center in Palo Alto. So why is a BPO specialist opening a center in Silicon Valley? Genpact is using the center as a hub for the development (and showcasing) of platform-based digital assets aimed at mimicking the industry disruptors by being based on standardized, simplified operating models and distributed tec[...]

        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[...]

NelsonHall recently published its 2016 Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) market analysis and NEAT vendor assessment, as part of which we interviewed the clients of 19 RPO vendors to ascertain satisfaction levels across a range of RPO service criteria. And while we found that RPO is largely meeting or exceeding client expectations, there are a few areas that fall short of expectations and shoul[...]

Earlier this year Virtusa acquired Polaris, now rebranded as VirtusaPolaris. Polaris was a mid-sized (~$300m revenue) ADM pure-play (it had spun off its Intellect software product unit in 2014) specializing in BFSI sectors (95% of revenues, NelsonHall estimate), in particular treasury and capital markets (~52% of revenues in Q4 FY 2016, the period ending March 31, 2016), corporate banking (~19%) a[...]

Four years ago, at the time of the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympic Games, NelsonHall reported on the work Atos does for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) though its Major Events unit. See our previous commentary here. This week we visited its center in Barcelona to get an update on the work it is doing for the Rio Games starting next month, The Olympic Games remain a fantastic o[...]

  Here I take a look at how platform-based business process services (BPS) is yielding benefits for retail banks – specifically, delivering manual processes with greater efficiency, increasing automation, and delivering transaction products at scale. Delivering manual processes with greater efficiency Retail banking (RB) BPS is a large-scale, mature business with high adop[...]

  Smart Cities is one of the fastest growing segments within the burgeoning internet of things (IoT) outsourcing market. Currently worth just ~$140m, NelsonHall forecasts the global market for Smart Cities IoT outsourcing to grow by 75% CAGR over the next five years, taking it to ~$2.15bn by 2020. IoT is being applied in commercial buildings and homes, and in urban infrastructures s[...]

  RPO provider PeopleScout recently held a client forum to discuss key recruitment themes, one of which was a discussion around Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) led by Dr. Arin Reeves. This focused on the importance of D&I, including the tendency for diverse groups to outperform non-diverse groups in solving problems, and how D&I can support the hiring process. Tips on how [...]

NelsonHall recently attended a cloud computing event hosted by IBM, its first such event in Europe since it introduced a new segment structure at its investor briefing in February. With this new structure in place, plus the recent addition of revenue disclosures for cloud from each segment, we were interested in the extent to which IBM is combining its relevant cloud capab[...]

Yesterday, the people of the U.K. did what many thought unlikely, and voted the nation out of the European Union (EU). And while the wider political ramifications surrounding ‘Brexit’ start to unravel, what might be the impact on talent acquisition and the related outsourcing industry?  It’s still unclear what kind of agreement Britain and the EU will negotiate post-B[...]

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[...]

This is the first in a series of blog articles looking at how business process outsourcing vendors are applying RPA and AI in the insurance sector. First up: Wipro.     Wipro started its automation journey in the late noughties and has since gone on to set up a dedicated RPA practice, and also developed its own AI platform, Wipro Holmes. Currently, Wipro is principally partn[...]

Last week, NGA HR held it fifth annual U.S. analyst event at which it described the key elements of its strategy, including a focus on foundational HR processes, helping clients on their journey to digital HR, and differentiating through flexible global delivery and technology platforms. NGA HR also placed significant emphasis on ‘client centricity’ across every sector it operates in. [...]

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[...]

Mindtree recently briefed NelsonHall on its work in testing automation, in particular on its Dynamic Test Engineering Platform (DTEP) IP which the company launched in 2015. With DTEP, Mindtree is centralizing access to several IPs and accelerators and hosting them on the cloud or on premise. DTEP, which automates the testing life cycle, includes several elements: Test support services i.e. d[...]

This week, HGS announced the launch of their DigiCX suite of digital solutions, which integrates web self-service, live support via chat, text, social media, and voice, and optimizes the CX with analytics and automation. When it embarked on this latest phase in its development a year and a half ago, HGS consulted NelsonHall “to help validate our direction, sharpen our solution approach, and [...]

Infosys has briefed NelsonHall on several automation testing initiatives based on analytics, AI/machine learning and robotics. The software testing services industry continues to impress with its level of investment in IP and automation. Gone are the days when testing service vendors were talking about their testing frameworks and set of standalone accelerators and test case repositories. [...]