In May, Alorica announced the appointment of Mike Clifton and Max Schwendner as Co-Chief Executive Officers. Prior, Mike was the company’s Chief Growth and Transformation Officer, and Max was President Business Services and Chief Financial Officer. I spoke with them earlier this month to discuss their vision for the company and its position in the evolving CX services market.

Co-CEOs in times of significant industry change

The CX services market is undergoing a sizable transformation with the advent of GenAI, which is at the forefront of CX automation. For BPO players, pressures come from inside and outside the market. They have to deal with rising labor costs globally, persistently lower volumes in core sectors, consolidating competition, and clients potentially looking to leverage GenAI to eliminate a large proportion of live agent support.

With the appointment of co-CEOs, Alorica is adopting a more agile and encompassing model of corporate leadership to address these challenges. Traditionally, the co-CEO format has been more common in technology providers such as Oracle, SAP, and previously Salesforce, whose native ecosystems of technology and services are becoming more closely aligned to the CX services industry in 2024.

The change at the top of Alorica also comes as the leading CX services vendors have been restructuring their organizations over the last 18 months. CEO changes include Konecta, iQor, Firstsource, Transcom, IGT Solutions, an upcoming appointment at Yource expected in 2024, and the succession plan at Teleperformance with a deputy CEO.

Aggressive pivot to digital

Mike and Max have a remit from Alorica’s board for an aggressive pivot to equip the company with next-gen technology and capabilities to implement AI-first conversations. In support of this vision is that, as a private company, Alorica experiences fewer constraints when making such investments.

The new leadership sees the creation of an ecosystem of partnerships with a continuously refreshing platform stack as its key. Example platforms are Google CCAI, Genesys AI stack, OpenAI and Crescendo. The goal is to capture more CX technology implementation opportunities and deploy a fully managed model with built-in automation and LLMs.

Another crucial step for Alorica is retooling its marketing, sales, and accounts structures for GTM verticalization to achieve greater client intimacy, subprocess problem solving, and managed outcome commercial relationships. Alorica looks at outcome-based pricing as underpinning all ongoing CX services solutions. It is embedded in the managed service platform model, the license and the applications stack for voice and digital under a single price per transaction.

Part of the adoption curve for these changing pricing constructs is convincing clients to think differently about the individual interaction, particularly in high-growth product and service lines. Another tactic is helping clients see the final state of tech-enabled outcome-based delivery.

Everywhere, every language, every time

Alorica expects the natural end state of AI’s application in CX to still require human-centric support. One reason is that the CX interactions Alorica handles are highly complex, requiring industry and customer knowledge and multiple systems. As an example, at Alorica, agents run an average of six applications to respond to customer queries.

With that in mind, the company plans to maintain a nimble delivery footprint. Compared to its direct competitors, Alorica has a relatively concentrated delivery network in 19 countries, selected based on their longer-term market demand.

Max and Mike will continue the company’s strategy of limited capital investments in multilingual hubs and multinational footprints and instead apply the funding to a language portfolio delivery network integrated with realtime machine translation and AI voice enhancement via Alorica ReVoLT. This approach will allow Alorica to find pockets of talent where available and achieve the lowest costs for clients.

Alorica to be a tech-first company

The immediate roadmap for Alorica is to take the solutions developed by Alorica IQ labs in Bangalore and Mohali, India, and embed them in a federated services approach in all centers. Using federated services helps with faster client enablement. The co-CEOs challenged Alorica’s internal teams to think “tech-first”, driving increased collaboration and adopting the federated model. This tech-based vision permeates internal functions such as accounts receivable and HR. The company plans to substantially build up its development and process improvement teams, for example, expanding resources with expertise in AI collaboration and persona training. The objective is for Alorica IQ to become an expert in technology selection, particularly in AI wrappers.

Another part of Alorica’s vision is an investment in the VC ecosystem to gain early access to upcoming solutions, become early advisers, and test and try in Alorica’s labs. For this objective, Mike and Max will also rely on their contacts in investment circles to identify potential acquisition targets. One of the priority service line tracks is revenue generation and expanding Alorica’s existing cards and loans servicing practice.

All these investments highlight the vision of the CEO team for Alorica to evolve from a managed services provider into a digital-first company while maintaining the core of CX services delivery which, in Mike and Max’s view, will remain CX people.