by Vicki Jenkins & Ivan Kotzev NelsonHall’s principal Customer Management Services analysts take a look at how the CMS market will shape up in 2017, with predictions for CMS delivery & transformation from Ivan Kotzev, and industry-specific predictions from Vicki Jenkins.   1. CMS Delivery & Transformation Predictions For CMS, 2016 marked a substantial shift i[...]

  Three watershed moments in online sales and support happened in November and went somewhat under the radar. At the beginning of the month, StatCounter reported that mobile surpassed desktop browsing for the first time at a global level. Then for the Singles Day in China, e-commerce retailers JD and Alibaba not only announced record sales, but the latter opened up the event internatio[...]

  NelsonHall recently attended Alorica’s analyst day in Guatemala City for an update on strategic developments. Here I take a look at how Alorica’s EGS integration is progressing, at the company’s U.S. nearshore strategy from LATAM, and at plans to drive CX transformation through consulting and analytics. EGS acquisition: a path to the global CMS top 3 As we covered[...]

  NelsonHall recently visited CSS Corp’s contact center in Chennai, India to learn more about its operations and its current focus on developing its premium technical support services. The center opened in July 2010, supports 28 clients (primarily in the high tech and telecoms sectors), and has ~2,200 employees providing customer care, technical support, premium technical support[...]

  Last week, NelsonHall attended the latest BPM Summit in Cape Town organized by BPeSA (Business Process enabling South Africa), the official trade body for the outsourcing and contact center industry in the Western Cape. The event provides an opportunity for potential investors, analysts, providers, and government officials to interact. Here I take a look at the appeal of South Africa[...]

  From January 1st 2017, Xerox will separate its business process services (BPS) business into a public company called Conduent (trading under the ticker CNDT on NYSE). Conduent will have approximately ~$7bn revenue and over 96k employees. I recently spoke with Chuck Koskovich, Executive Vice President Customer Care Services at Xerox Services, about the implications of the split o[...]

The explosion of connected devices and IoT products promises a greater volume of technical support interactions and increased customer demand for proactive and always-on assistance through the lifecycle of a product. In turn, these requirements force customer experience (CX) providers to be involved with the product manufacturers at new levels, participating in development and testing, sales g[...]

Over the last few months, I have held discussions with a number of leading customer management services (CMS) vendors and their clients regarding the increasing need for advanced analytics to drive step changes in customer experience (CX). Here, I reflect on the changing role of analytics as they take centre stage as the key to disruptive CX. How times have changed When I first participa[...]

On 22nd August, Teleperformance announced the acquisition of interpretation services provider LanguageLine Solutions (LLS) for $1.52bn. LanguageLine was founded in 1982 and is headquartered in Monterey, California. In 2015 it had revenues of $388m and adjusted EBITDA of $147m, and the company is expected have revenues of between $400m and $450m in 2016. It has ~8k interpreters, 92% of whom&[...]

NelsonHall recently visited Convergys’ contact center in Bangalore to learn more about its operations, and here I reflect briefly on three areas: The center’s ongoing channel shift to webchat An interesting development in the center’s analytics work An initiative to hire more women in an effort to have a more balanced workforce. Background Convergys Bangalor[...]

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[...]

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 [...]

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[...]

I recently presented at the CCA’s annual Convention in Glasgow, Scotland. One of the key themes was ‘The Digital Game’, with sessions examining how organizations are responding to demand for digital customer services as part of the ongoing transition from call to contact centers. The future of customer engagement was illustrated using examples of newer channel usage, including vi[...]