NelsonHall recently attended CSS Corp’s analyst day and OneWorld conference. The overriding theme of the day was a reinforcement of the company’s direction; CEO Tiger Ramesh emphasized his ambition for CSS Corp to become the leading global tech support service provider, as emphasized in the company’s new by-line “Wired to Support”. A new leadership team has been brought on board, which includes recruits from competitors.

CSS Corp has traditionally focused on the high-tech sector: this is now expanding beyond organizations in the high-tech industries, to retailers and telecoms organizations which market electronic devices.

The company’s annual revenues are currently ~$200m, of which  ~90% from the U.S.  Its attention is now turning to EMEA. Currently CSS Corp has 13 delivery centers with ~5,500 FTEs supporting 20 languages. Around 3,000 of these employees are based in Chennai, India. All domestic U.S. agents are U.S. citizens (besides a handful of traiers). The company is looking to open additional centers in the U.S., Canada, the Nordics and the Middle East but has not given a timeframe on this.

CSS Corp is willing to take on small contracts of less than 50 FTEs, a strategy that has previously proved effective with many of the company’s largest clients starting out in this manner. Tiger repeatedly emphasized CSS Corp’s goal of remaining agile.

The company’s has two business units for its tech support services: enterprise and consumer.

In its enterprise tech support business, most activity is level 1 support with a small degree of level 2 and 3 support. The company also has a small number of agents providing level 4 technical support. CSS Corp has recently opened two monitoring centers in India which track client’s products and look to anticipate support queries by identifying threshold violations, etc. This service is labelled Active 360 and will be bundled in with other enterprise tech support offerings but will also be offered as a standalone service. CSS Corp’s aim is to move into end of life support and grow its level 4 support business.

Its consumer tech support business encompasses level 1, 2 and 3 support including an element of up and cross sell. As with its enterprise business, most activity is level 1 tech support, with level 3 the smallest element, handled on client site. CSS Corp also offers social media support; at this stage, this is limited to monitoring services. The company has centralized its workforce management support in India.

CSS Corp is aggressively marketing a multi-device white-label paid for tech support offering Premium Support.  It currently has three clients using this service. CSS Corp is currently developing a mobile and desktop application “Active i” which will allow for easier consumer use of Premium Support. The aim of this application is to make consumer interaction across the service easier, also to continuously make consumers aware of the service, increasing the likelihood of them extending their service contracts. It enables to consumers to schedule a call back, chat with agents, hand over remote control of device and email agents. “Active i” is set to go-live in six weeks; the future aim is to sell this directly to consumers.

CSS Corp is also offering analytics as a separate service. Labelled “Active insights”, this offering is currently in its first iteration: at this stage reporting is delivered on a scheduled basis, quantitative data only is measured and the service is hosted. The plans are for the service to develop over the next 18 months as follows:

• Active 2.0: this will include real time feedback of findings to a client facing dashboard including alerts for outlying results. Analysis will also expand to include SMS and social analytics
• Active 3.0: the service will support voice to text analytics and machine learning
• Active 3.1: will include predictive analytics and performance management
• Active 4.0: will include self-healing support to devices and voice and video analysis.

With current annual revenues of $200m, CSS Corp has an ambitious goal of becoming the largest tech support provider globally. A refresh of the management team and a focus on the high growth market of consumer technical support is setting the tone. Nevertheless, in order to reach the scale needed achieve its lofty ambition, inorganic growth will be necessary.