featured posts:
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WNS Analytics Innovates Through Productized Services
Oct 11, 2024, by Ivan KotzevIn 2024, WNS rebranded and relaunched its analytics practice to include data, analytics, AI services, and consulting in a unified offering to enable decision intelligence. I spoke with Gautam Singh, the head of WNS Analytics, covering the opportunities and pitfalls of GenAI solutions, the team’s vertical and domain focus, and the company’s vision for productized services.[...]
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Movate AI to Drive Enterprise Reinvention at Scale with AI-First Framework
Sep 03, 2024, by Ivan KotzevIn August, NelsonHall spoke with the leadership of Movate AI to discuss the market expectations and challenges of AI integration, their in-house holistic framework, target applications, existing deployments, and how the company plans to build commercial relationships around this AI reinvention model. From platform to framework to dedicated AI unit Like most BPS players, Movate [...]
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Tech Mahindra Populii: Addressing AI Training Hypergrowth
Apr 05, 2024, by Ivan KotzevPopulii is Tech Mahindra’s enterprise gig marketplace for data collection, user studies, and microtasks. NelsonHall recently spoke with Populii executives about the platform’s current capabilities and growth plans in support of the exploding AI data training market. Human annotation and specialized microtasks Populii is a gig community platform offering data collect[...]
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Solving Business Challenges with GenAI: Interview with Bharath Vasudevan, Tech Mahindra
Oct 04, 2023, by Ivan KotzevI spoke with Bharath Vasudevan, Chief Capability Officer, Tech Mahindra Business Process Services, on the company’s investments in GenAI, the business challenges it addresses, and the longer-term effects on CX services. What are some of the immediate opportunities for using GenAI? Bharath Vasudevan (BV): Like every other technology disruption, at Tech Mahindra we look at [...]
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Transcom Employs AI to Reinvent Multilingual CX
Aug 16, 2023, by Ivan KotzevAI-generated text and voice have significant applications in CX services, with multilingual support now offering the most transformative use cases. Transcom has been actively building its capabilities in AI voice with its T:Translate platform and already has live implementations. Integrating AI translation into the existing CX ecosystem T:Translate is an automated real-time tr[...]
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CX Technology the Growth Engine for TTEC EMEA: Q&A with Alistair Niederer
Feb 18, 2022, by Ivan KotzevOver the last several years, TTEC has been actively investing in EMEA and looking to bring its technology development and CX transformation services to the region. I spoke with Alistair Niederer, Senior VP, Head of Europe, Middle East & Africa, about the company's growth plans, what's happening in the CX services industry, and best practices for CX leaders. What are th[...]
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Concentrix Acquires PK to Enhance IT-CX Intersection Play
Nov 24, 2021, by Ivan KotzevThis week, Concentrix announced its agreement to acquire PK, a U.S. CX design engineering firm, for ~$1.6bn from PE Carlyle Group. PK will add significant scale and IT capabilities in CX transformation and will enhance Concentrix’s play in the fast-growing intersection of cloud technology, automation and analytics assets, and digital customer journeys. Digital and human asse[...]
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Tech Mahindra Orchestrating CX Transformation: Interview with Birendra Sen
Sep 16, 2021, by Ivan KotzevEarlier 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[...]
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Will the CX Services Boom Last?
May 24, 2021, by Ivan KotzevWhile 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 [...]
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Shifts in Mobility are Reshaping CX: CSS Corp’s SMART Mobility Practice
May 12, 2021, by Ivan Kotzev2020 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[...]
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Majorel Eyes Growing EU Banking Sector with ISILIS Acquisition
Oct 19, 2020, by Ivan KotzevIn July 2020, Majorel acquired French platform developer ISILIS, specialists in bank account switching. In this blog, I look at the new capability, the company’s focus on the banking and financial services sector, and the evolving CX services needs of EU banks. Specialist in bank account portability ISILIS was founded in 2004 initially to support non-regulated account switching pro[...]
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Online Crisis Management: Lessons from HGS’ Social Care Practice
Aug 28, 2020, by Ivan KotzevAges ago, in the pre-COVID-19, pre-U.S. election, pre-BLM protest times of 2019, the challenges of online reputation management (ORM) seemed to be brand-specific. For example, how Boeing could restore customer confidence in the 737 MAX aircraft. Today, in the second half of 2020, navigating social media during a crisis is top of mind for most brand managers and PR departments across [...]
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Positive Outlook from the Egyptian BPS Market
Jul 31, 2020, by Ivan KotzevThe impacts of the pandemic and lockdowns are creating winners and losers in terms of BPS delivery geos. Determining factors include a geo’s ability to manage the health and safety of workers, its success in minimizing economic disruption, and the flexibility of its labor regulators. For Egypt, the unfolding effects of COVID-19 on front-office BPS may be too early to judge, [...]
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‘Work from Anywhere’ for CX Services: Q&A with Tech Mahindra’s Ritesh Idnani
Jul 10, 2020, by Ivan KotzevIf there is a silver lining to the pandemic with respect to CX services, it is the changing perception of clients and providers on the pace of digital transformation and the role of frontline staff. In a conversation with Ritesh Idnani, President of Tech Mahindra, we discuss the company’s vision for what the Future of Work looks like and some of the latest trends and technologi[...]
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COVID-19 Accelerating the Future of CX Work: Teleperformance EMEA
Jun 04, 2020, by Ivan KotzevThe COVID-19 crisis is forcing a rethink of the CX delivery model with large contact centers. The fundamental question is how to maintain people’s health and safety in an open floor space with hundreds of seats, continuous face-to-face interactions, shared equipment, and 24x7 operations. For many outsourcing clients, the pandemic was the trigger to adopt work-at-home (WAH) for [...]
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Supercharged Technical Support: Augmented Reality with CSS Corp’s KYRA
May 18, 2020, by Ivan KotzevIn a new social distancing world, most traditional face-to-face customer service tasks have had to digitize quickly. This trend is not new, but for some processes, it required the adoption of emerging technology and different operational models. A prime example is customer premise visits by engineers for equipment installations, parts replacement, and technical support. For several y[...]
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Concentrix Messaging & Bots: Innovation During the COVID-19 Crisis
Apr 14, 2020, by Ivan KotzevOne of the memes during the COVID-19 crisis asks ‘who led the digital transformation of your company?’ with the options of ‘the CEO’, ‘the CTO’, or ‘the virus’. The global emergency has severely impacted CX, forcing many organizations to shut down or limit their contact center operations when they are most needed. A side effect is that,[...]
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Alorica Harnesses Technology to Engage Gen X, Y & Z Workforce
Apr 06, 2020, by Ivan KotzevHigh employee attrition rates are the norm in contact centers, with companies maintaining a constant recruitment, training, and onboarding pipeline. As generations X, Y, and Z come to represent the majority of the workforce, these new workers have different career aspirations, work values, and learning styles. For CX services providers with global delivery networks and demand for spe[...]
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Teleperformance Optimizes its Go-to-Market with Digital Integrated Business Services
Feb 14, 2020, by Ivan KotzevAt the end of January 2020, NelsonHall attended Teleperformance’s global analyst meeting in Mumbai. Here are some insights into the company’s progress since the Intelenet acquisition in October 2018 and the formation of Teleperformance Digital Integrated Business Services (D.I.B.S.). Repositioning as a knowledge partner Teleperformance’s reorganization in 2019[...]
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CSS Corp Addresses Commercial Challenges of Cognitive CX Transformation
Nov 25, 2019, by Ivan KotzevOne of the main challenges facing front-office automation projects is the adoption of commercial terms protecting the interests of both clients and CX services providers. In an industry dominated by traditional per FTE and per hour/minute pricing, to be successful, end-to-end digital transformation requires significant initial investments, new KPIs, a stake from the vendor, and a lon[...]
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Entering the Voice Bot Age: Tech Mahindra Launches m.ai.a
Nov 01, 2019, by Ivan KotzevVoice bots are a tiny part of the customer service and outsourced CX services market today. However, they are significant both in terms of investment and the attention they are receiving from organizations. In both smart home devices (voice assistants) and traditional telephony, voice bots are growing (*see a sample of news items from October 2019 at the end of the text). With div[...]
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Democratizing Analytics: Tech Mahindra Virtual Analyst
Sep 30, 2019, by Ivan KotzevA common theme in NelsonHall’s Advances in Analytics BPS market analysis is that organizations’ need to operationalize data has matured beyond BI and simple visualization. Companies do not want to wait days to build a report and weeks, or even months, to generate insights. They need to fill the AI-analytics continuum, democratize data discovery and data manipulations, and[...]
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CX Automation in Practice: Reality Check with Webhelp
Sep 13, 2019, by Ivan KotzevThe inevitable automation of the contact center role has become such as surefire prediction in mass media, by CEOs, and even politicians, that a more realistic view of the industry may seem impossible. In this blog, I look at Webhelp’s assessment of the CX automation landscape and the realistic challenges and opportunities in the market. Customer-facing automation requires s[...]
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Will Crowdsourced Customer Service Get Solv(ed)?
Jun 26, 2019, by Ivan KotzevCrowdsourcing and different types of freelanced customer support models pre-date the current household names using these models in leisure and travel, personal transportation, and delivery services. Many of these early attempts died out because of poor business models, or remain effective today but in niche markets (e.g. gaming) or on a small scale (e.g. U.K. mobile network, giffgaff[...]
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Seizing the Automation Opportunity: Alorica’s Automated Discovery Process
May 28, 2019, by Ivan KotzevOne of the first stumbling blocks of business process transformation is identifying meaningful automation opportunities. A typical process will have a management consultant, system expert, or Lean Six Sigma specialist to monitor manual processes for a set time, collect performance data, and make recommendations. Companies supplement this assessment with executive ideation sessions, operational[...]