This past week I had the privilege of attending isolved’s Connect annual user conference at the Diplomat Beach Resort in Hollywood, Florida. The event marked a few firsts for me personally: my first time attending isolved Connect and the first time I have traveled for an in-person event in 18 months. It was great to get back to meeting and connecting with vendors and buyers face to face [...]

  Earlier this summer, I spoke with Birendra Sen, Business Leader, Tech Mahindra Business Process Services, on the building blocks of customer experience transformation and lessons from the pandemic. What are the main customer experience objectives for companies in 2021 and 2022? Birendra Sen: The pandemic caused almost a reset of customer experience objectives for brands. It acc[...]

  We recently spoke with Qualitest, the world’s largest QA pure-play. The company is in investment mode to accelerate its growth, backed by its majority owner, PE firm Bridgepoint. The company has added Cognizant leaders to its executive team (CEO, CMO, and India MD positions) with the intention of reaching $1bn in revenues in the next five years. In support of this drive to a[...]

  The world of OT has been consulting-centric in recent years. Although their focus on digital manufacturing and IoT opportunities has intensified, enterprises have typically engaged their IT services partners mostly for use case identification, PoCs and pilot projects. Large-scale build projects have been uncommon. But the pandemic has put digital manufacturing firmly at the top of[...]

  Digital startup banks are built on FinTech functionality to deliver financial services in an omnichannel environment. There are two types of FinTechs: B2B businesses that have a proprietary platform to deliver service to clients, and B2C businesses that provide clients with an all-digital banking experience. WNS: expanded focus on B2C FinTechs While WNS supports B2B and B2C, it[...]

  2020 triggered multiple large-scale engagements between public sector bodies and CX services providers, with contract activity growing 12.5% year-over-year to reach $4.7bn globally this year (NelsonHall estimate). Outsourcing companies provided healthcare information lines, patient track and trace, unemployment and social benefits hotlines, and loan administration for national, regio[...]

  In 2020, the U.S. healthcare payer BPS market saw accelerated growth in the adoption and design of digital solutions across all functional areas. The acceleration is driven mainly by consumer demand for an "Amazon" experience from their health plans and providers, to know the cost of care for associated benefit plans to assist in plan selection or inform decisions about ele[...]

  This past week, CloudPay announced the launch of CloudPay NOW, its latest offering focused on modernizing the way workers are paid globally. The employer-integrated Earned Wage Access (EWA) solution is a key addition to CloudPay’s offering that pairs its unified database and technology-enabled operating model, with its deep global treasury capability to offer one of the most[...]

  As the world begins its slow emergence from the pandemic, cloud adoption is seeing its already rapid growth accelerate. NelsonHall forecasts overall cloud services to grow by 8% in 2021, with a CAAGR of 5.9% through 2025, both significantly higher than overall IT services market growth of 2.7% in 2021 and 3.6% through 2025.  This forecast cloud growth also doesn’t refle[...]

  From wine to pharmacy sales, gamification is quickly becoming a tool for marketers to attract and retain customers in a subscription economy. Yet at its core, gamification is a leading method to teach, retrain, and engage employees. We recently spoke with Teleperformance about their gamification practice and the benefits of implementing comprehensive game-based learning. Game-base[...]

  Capgemini is aiming for low or no maintenance and support fees as part of its ADM offering. Depending on its level of responsibility for development activities, the company commits to reducing maintenance and support activities and is, therefore, making a bold statement unheard of in the IT industry. To achieve such high aspirations, the company believes Sogeti's application t[...]

  Sitel’s announcement on 18 June to enter an agreement to acquire all outstanding shares of SYKES stock further consolidates the global CX services leaders. It also highlights the market shift to large-scale, multinational, and financially strong players able to make the needed investments in consulting, CX technology, and automation. Here is a short analysis of the deal. The[...]

  The last two years have challenged employees and HR teams in ways we could never have imagined, and many now have a new outlook on what “work-life balance” means. 2020 and 2021 have seen heightened resignation levels, and companies are only now starting to reflect on the impact of burnout on their employees. While vaccines are being rolled out, and with the threat of loca[...]

  Banks are accelerating their move to the cloud to respond to the pandemic, enable greater operational agility to reduce time to market, and develop open banking capabilities. At the same time, performance dispersion (the operational variance across institutions within the industry) has increased significantly. Cloud delivery can change operational performance and hyperscale busine[...]

  We recently talked to Infosys Validation Solutions (IVS), Infosys’ quality assurance unit, and discussed its continued investment in AI to automate testing and validate chatbots and AI models. AI-Based Analytics from Test Case and Defect Data The primary AI use cases in QA are around analytics: QA and development produce a vast amount of data that can be used for guiding [...]

  One of the impacts of the pandemic has been a broad acceleration in enterprise digitalization initiatives, and organizations are looking for strategic partners to assist them in their digital transformation journeys. While digitalization is now top of mind even in procurement, historically there have been challenges in applying intelligent automation to procurement, including budget [...]

  While the CX services industry is anxiously following the situation in India and its surge of COVID-19 cases, the start of 2021 mainly brought positive news. In this blog, I look at the strong performance across the industry and the extent to which the current growth is sustainable. 2021’s record start The three months ending 31st March 2021 was a record quarter for many [...]

  IBM recently announced its acquisition of Salesforce Platinum Consulting partner, Waeg. The company, whose name means “wave” in old English, expands IBM’s Salesforce service presence in Europe and is IBM GBS’ second Salesforce services acquisition in 2021, following 7Summits in the U.S. It is also GBS’ fifth acquisition since IBM announced the intended s[...]

  The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital transformation across all industries, and in the financial sector, operational transformation has grabbed the top spot in the priority list for investment and spending. At the same time, performance dispersion (the variance across institutions within the industry) has significantly increased. So, how can banks make their transfo[...]

  2020 further accelerated transformative trends in the mobility space. Changes include electric vehicle adoption and the shift to mobility as a service and mobility on demand. Auto manufacturers, car rental firms, ridesharing providers, and public transport operations are all responding to this new market and, in support, the underlying model is changing from product to service to cus[...]