featured posts:

• CX Services in 2025: Delivering Business Outcomes with GenAI

  Jan 28, 2025, by Ivan Kotzev

    Calendar 2024 was relatively muted for the global CX services market, with continued headwinds in large verticals in core North American and European geographies. In parallel, GenAI investments and rebalancing of the delivery portfolio challenged consistent margin improvement. 2025 looks cautiously optimistic, with improved growth in the range of 3.5-4.5% y/y, depending on the imp[...]

  read post

• WNS Analytics Innovates Through Productized Services

  Oct 11, 2024, by Ivan Kotzev

    In 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.[...]

  read post

• Movate AI to Drive Enterprise Reinvention at Scale with AI-First Framework

  Sep 03, 2024, by Ivan Kotzev

    In 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 [...]

  read post

• Tech Mahindra Populii: Addressing AI Training Hypergrowth

  Apr 05, 2024, by Ivan Kotzev

    Populii 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[...]

  read post

• Solving Business Challenges with GenAI: Interview with Bharath Vasudevan, Tech Mahindra

  Oct 04, 2023, by Ivan Kotzev

    I 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 [...]

  read post

• Transcom Employs AI to Reinvent Multilingual CX

  Aug 16, 2023, by Ivan Kotzev

    AI-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[...]

  read post

• CX Technology the Growth Engine for TTEC EMEA: Q&A with Alistair Niederer

  Feb 18, 2022, by Ivan Kotzev

    Over 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[...]

  read post

• Concentrix Acquires PK to Enhance IT-CX Intersection Play

  Nov 24, 2021, by Ivan Kotzev

    This 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[...]

  read post

• Tech Mahindra Orchestrating CX Transformation: Interview with Birendra Sen

  Sep 16, 2021, by Ivan Kotzev

    Earlier 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[...]

  read post

• Will the CX Services Boom Last?

  May 24, 2021, by Ivan Kotzev

    While 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 [...]

  read post

• Shifts in Mobility are Reshaping CX: CSS Corp’s SMART Mobility Practice

  May 12, 2021, by Ivan Kotzev

    2020 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[...]

  read post

• Majorel Eyes Growing EU Banking Sector with ISILIS Acquisition

  Oct 19, 2020, by Ivan Kotzev

  In 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[...]

  read post

• Online Crisis Management: Lessons from HGS’ Social Care Practice

  Aug 28, 2020, by Ivan Kotzev

    Ages 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 [...]

  read post

• Positive Outlook from the Egyptian BPS Market

  Jul 31, 2020, by Ivan Kotzev

    The 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, [...]

  read post

• ‘Work from Anywhere’ for CX Services: Q&A with Tech Mahindra’s Ritesh Idnani

  Jul 10, 2020, by Ivan Kotzev

    If 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[...]

  read post

• COVID-19 Accelerating the Future of CX Work: Teleperformance EMEA

  Jun 04, 2020, by Ivan Kotzev

    The 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 [...]

  read post

• Supercharged Technical Support: Augmented Reality with CSS Corp’s KYRA

  May 18, 2020, by Ivan Kotzev

    In 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[...]

  read post

• Concentrix Messaging & Bots: Innovation During the COVID-19 Crisis

  Apr 14, 2020, by Ivan Kotzev

    One 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,[...]

  read post

• Alorica Harnesses Technology to Engage Gen X, Y & Z Workforce

  Apr 06, 2020, by Ivan Kotzev

    High 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[...]

  read post

• Teleperformance Optimizes its Go-to-Market with Digital Integrated Business Services

  Feb 14, 2020, by Ivan Kotzev

    At 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[...]

  read post

• CSS Corp Addresses Commercial Challenges of Cognitive CX Transformation

  Nov 25, 2019, by Ivan Kotzev

    One 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[...]

  read post

• Entering the Voice Bot Age: Tech Mahindra Launches m.ai.a

  Nov 01, 2019, by Ivan Kotzev

    Voice 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[...]

  read post

• Democratizing Analytics: Tech Mahindra Virtual Analyst

  Sep 30, 2019, by Ivan Kotzev

    A 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[...]

  read post

• CX Automation in Practice: Reality Check with Webhelp

  Sep 13, 2019, by Ivan Kotzev

    The 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[...]

  read post