iQor began 2024 with a new CEO, Chris Crowley, and a funding boost by PE Mill Point Capital. iQor is now repositioning for growth, aiming to become a broad partner with existing clients and targeting new verticals. Earlier this month, I attended iQor’s Analyst Day 2024 in Trinidad, where the company is the largest BPS provider and has strong expansion plans.

Solid foundation as a springboard for growth

iQor is a ~$700m CX services provider with ~40k employees in ten countries, the majority in the Philippines (where it is a top 5 BPS employer), but also Colombia, India, and Trinidad and Tobago. The company supports ~200 North American clients, including several of the biggest U.S. telecoms, retailers, banks, financial services companies, utilities, consumer services, hotel chains, travel, and logistics brands. iQor also works with many of the national healthcare payers in the U.S. For example, one of its flagship telecom accounts has ~12k employees supporting 23 LOBs.

Its core mix of services includes customer care, revenue generation activities, including a sizable play in collections, loan servicing, and a range of CX back-office tasks.

With the hiring of Chris Crowley at the start of 2024, iQor has revamped its executive leadership by bringing a host of industry experts from competitors and reaffirming several long-term iQor managers, such as the Chief Digital Officer, PJ Singh and the Chief Operating Officer, Marty Lehtio, along with many technology leaders.

One of the executives’ goals is to put the iQor brand back on the map with the wider CX market and industry influencers. Its growth vision is for an expansion of nearshore and offshore delivery capacity, prioritizing promising sectors such as healthcare and travel, rethinking the tech stack and identifying new technology partnerships, and adding to the services portfolio with CX-adjacent work in KYC, fraud prevention, trust and safety, and more financial services back-office. This service diversification is building upon the in-house expertise in first- and third-party collections, dispute and chargeback management, and credit management that has already been provided to BFSI, telco, and utility companies.

Trinidad: a sustainable BPS delivery opportunity

Trinidad and Tobago is a key element of iQor’s nearshore delivery vision. It is the largest BPS player in the country with ~1.8k seats in three sites, burstable by ~1k employees during peak, including via WAH. iQor is currently reviewing the option for a fourth location to reach ~3k roles and sees a long-term capacity to employ ~5k Trinidadians.

iQor Trinidad supports 14 of the company’s core clients in energy and utilities, banking, retail, healthcare, travel, and P&C insurers. In addition to care programs, Trinidad has been shown as a promising destination for complex back-office tasks, retention, and sales. For example, iQor Trinidad runs a highly-sensitive and specialized sales and onboarding program for an elective medical procedures provider. For an insurer, it provides sales, advocacy, and large value collections (above $5k). iQor Trinidad launched a new energy client in Q3 2024 and is expanding into technical support for an insurer in Q4 2024.

Trinidad is also the market where iQor tests many of its learning and development initiatives and tools, such as the LevelUp career development program.

Trinidad and Tobago’s investment agency InvesTT eyes BPS as a promising sector for economic diversification from its traditional oil industry and emerging tourism sector. The country has nine international BPS players (the other major is Teleperformance) and two local companies for a total capacity of ~3k seats. The country has a workforce of ~590k (~350k aged under 30) and ~25k students enrolled at its top three universities. Other strengths of Trinidad CX delivery include:

• Native English with cultural affinity to the U.S. and U.K. (former Commonwealth country)
• Low labor cost of ~$600 in wages per month for a starting level CX agent. The country claims to have the lowest loaded cost in the Caribbean with competitive energy, water, and fiber optic prices
• Stable and favorable FX rate of $1 for TT$6
• -4 GMT time zone, suitable to support the U.S. market
• Direct flight connectivity to Miami, New York, Houston, London, and Toronto
• Developed international and domestic internet connectivity, allowing WAH agents.

The country has also enacted a SEZ Act in 2022 with tailored incentives such as a preferential corporate tax rate of 15%.

Considering the significant rise in environmental disruptions, Trinidad’s location below the hurricane belt is a critical BCP factor.

Likely challenges are the limited choice of Grade A office space and facilities suitable for contact center operations, an expected lack of experienced BPS middle management roles, and the need to promote the CX industry to the local workforce. CX services players are also not able to fully tap into its native Spanish-speaking workforce, although iQor has bi-lingual support programs. Another opportunity for BPS players in the country is using impact sourcing, including among the migrant community.

Being the best at putting AI to use

Part of iQor’s remaking is reviewing the company’s product catalog and assessing the business impact of technology investments. The company’s iQor Labs, headquartered in Poland, is now focused on delivering innovation runs in 60-90 days and prioritizing four or five large initiatives per year.

The current stack has solutions for proprietary interaction analytics VALDI integrated with an NPS PrediQtor, AI recruitment tool, and AI simulated role play using different third-party platforms. The objective is to plug the right solution for the specific use case, for example, in sales AI training. These platforms are now being rolled out to the entire agent population.

On the product map, the next investment areas are for: agent knowledge assist; decision-making insights generation, where a GenAI-powered virtual assistant will guide business analysts in a Q&A format; and accent neutralization. The organization is building teams of business analysts to serve as the insights hubs for both clients and for iQor internally.

AI voice enhancement is a particularly important development for iQor, as the company is already working with accent neutralization and noise reduction software providers and is running pilots from India. 

The expectation is that these and other developments, such as call summarization, automated QA, and emotion detection, will deliver a meaningful productivity optimization of no less than 5% each.

Growth plans supported by new capital structure

As AI takes over a greater share of simple interactions and replaces CX technology such as IVRs, the iQor investment roadmap aims to maintain a balance between performance and cost, human and machine CX. With its new capital structure, it is now able to invest in additional delivery capacity, agent augmentation tools, and AI applications for increased operational efficiency and insights.

iQor’s investments in employee onboarding, training, and development tools has a larger objective of selecting and uptraining CX agents to support digital-first brands by multitasking across multilayered processes and capable of handling shared services transactions. Target AI augmentation levers cover the employee lifecycle management, real time agent assist, voice enhancements and machine translation, self-service operational and business insights, predictive analytics, and eventually agentic AI.

In addition to its aggressive Trinidad plans, iQor is expanding in: Colombia, where it launched in February 2023 and has since experienced a strong pipeline; India, where a new ~1k people site is opening in November; and brand-new delivery countries in Asia and Africa for English-speaking support. The company is also looking at potential M&A activity, including strategic investments in AI-powered CX technology firms and vertical and domain opportunities, primarily in healthcare.