In January 2022, Tech Mahindra acquired BPS provider Allyis. Allyis offers digital experience, cloud, AI, & engineering, data & analytics, and technical support services and has actively built trust and safety, content moderation, and content enhancement services. The deal complements Tech Mahindra's strategy over the last seven years to acquire and expand into experience, digital consulting, and design capabilities. Allyis also brings capabilities and a client base in the highly promising space of content services.

Allyis - a multiplay provider

Allyis was founded in the 1990s and is headquartered in Seattle. It has ~2k employees in the U.S., India, Romania, and Costa Rica, generating ~90% of its revenues from managed services, primarily from consumer and enterprise software clients. It also supports consumer electronics, retail, food, and healthcare.

It provides learning and development, instructional design, and marketing services, including sales and campaign management, test engineering and app development, BI, analytics, and low-code AI solutions. In CX services, it specializes in L1 & L2 technical support such as customer onboarding and integration, device management, and augmentation. Allyis has gradually developed its data services, such as AI and ML data training, metadata tagging, digital asset management, analytics, and social media command center.

Since 2016, it has rapidly built its trust and safety practice, initially with a custom project for an existing enterprise client. Today, it provides a host of content moderation services:

• Content review and moderation, including community management and moderation of extreme content
• Compliance, where it verifies ad relevance, app compliance, user-generated content (UGC) compliance, and brand compliance
• Fraud monitoring and AML checks
• Online reputation management and online brand consulting and protection.

Content moderation growth

Since its launch, Allyis' content moderation services have scaled significantly. Today they range from the moderation of objectionable and illegal content to privacy violation reviews, forum moderation, and specialized use cases. For example, in video games, it moderates text, audio, image, and video content over chat between players or virtual events. An example implementation is for a game developer and publisher. Allyis reviews, tags, and processes UGC, investigates and escalates reported content, and reviews and communicates on user appeals. It deals with images such as custom skins, monitors in-game chats, videos, audio, and 3D experiences (e.g., creative islands). The company also set up a dedicated team to manage egregious content. Allyis processes ~15m interactions per year, covering 12 languages from four delivery markets. It significantly reduced user reports around bullying and harassment, reduced false-positive rate to below 1%, reduced TAT by 20% on technical support, and AHT by 12% on UGC review.

Another area for specialized moderation is advertising quality checks, verification, and compliance. For example, for an international online advertising platform, Allyis performs ad reviews, checks for adult content, intellectual property violations, and restricted and disallowed content such as gambling. It supports advertisers with labeling, appeals, and policy questions. Allyis handles ~15m ads, appeals, and tickets per year and runs ~300k audits annually, maintaining 97% quality across policy groups. For the client, it operates in English, German, French, and other major European languages, as well as Mandarin and Japanese.

Specialized talent management

Allyis has a dedicated framework of processes and work models to support content moderators. It has onsite wellness and resilience resources, procedures for setting mental distance from the work, and a closed office with restricted access. It employs automated pre-moderation to limit the agent's exposure to harmful content. For example, for a U.S. technology corporation, Allyis reviews automatically flagged and shut down accounts due to CSAM images and videos. The specialized onshore team investigates, gathers the necessary information to report, and identifies subjects' ages, ensuring corrective action is taken on the images in question. After the investigation, moderators mark the images, videos, and URLs and report them to the NCMEC (National Center for Missing & Exploited Children). Allyis maintains 99% quality on the workflows.

Integrating Allyis' services in Tech Mahindra's BPS

Tech Mahindra is integrating Allyis into the Digital Business Operations (DBO) practice, which will reach ~$80m in annual revenues and ~12k FTEs. Allyis adds delivery proximity in the U.S. with onshore and nearshore sites, which has been an active market priority by Tech Mahindra (e.g., the 2021 Activus Connect acquisition, which boosted the U.S. WAH capacity). 

For technical support the focus is on software products, especially L1 support for cloud products, strengthening the relationship that both Allyis and Tech Mahindra have with a U.S. multinational technology corporation.

Tech Mahindra looks to benefit from Allyis’ services in learning and development to develop knowledge bases, advise on learning curriculums, integrate and customize training platforms, and design learning programs. Within these services, the company promotes an additional spectrum of learning content services such as translation, localization, training materials creation and publishing, potentially in immersive environments. Many of Allyis’ existing learning accounts use its services for partner, customer, and supplier learning, and Tech Mahindra aims to utilize these capabilities with its enterprise BPS and ITS clients. For a U.S. technology client, Tech Mahindra is creating a content development team in Romania to write and localize materials for the brand partner ecosystem. Another high-potential vertical is life sciences, with discussions underway with a pharmaceutical manufacturer.

Tech Mahindra also looks to take Allyis’ trust and safety offerings, including adjacent services such as data annotation and training to its broader client base. Allyis already brought a new ~$40m client win in the games vertical for metaverse moderation. It plans to open up Allyis trust and safety operations in new regions, for example, Malaysia and Japan.

Another significant opportunity for the DBO practice is leveraging the design and experience consulting units such as BORN and Mad*Pow with Allyis’ learning and trust and safety clients.

As brands increasingly invest in more effective digital sales and support, the breadth of Tech Mahindra DBO’s capabilities can enable them to successfully target the various needs of marketing and customer service in an integrated way.

NelsonHall CX Services is launching a new Content Transformation research project. For participation, please reach out to 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 accelerated the need for digital to be pervasive: customer expectations have become digital and I don’t think they are going back.

All our clients are prioritizing scaling their operations as sales and support have rapidly moved online. The key is how to grow the operations without growing costs at the same pace while balancing experience objectives. The other objective is for businesses to adopt digital solutions for customers to be satisfied. Enterprises look for partners to assist them in this entire journey. Going forward, the goal is to ensure customer retention, satisfaction, and delight.

What are the main elements of this digital transformation, given that these changes are irreversible?

Birendra Sen: COVID-19 has been the Chief Digital Officer of sorts. The two facilitating factors have been the pervasive adoption of cloud infrastructure and the acceptance of work from anywhere. We quickly moved to work from anywhere as an integral building block of CX transformation.

Supporting all these shifts is crucial for brands to have the right aspirational purpose and enable it with customer journey design and CX consulting. All these elements have to come together for a brand to be relevant in post-pandemic times.

Where is this new CX vision typically residing in the organization?

Birendra Sen: We have started seeing in our enterprise clients the role of Chief Digital Officer becoming more common and at the same time new roles such as Chief Customer Experience Officer. The hope is that these new roles will unify the existing functions, break down traditional data silos, identify and prioritize opportunities to improve the CX, generate actionable insights quickly, and deliver hyper-personalization at scale. Most of these challenges will be the remit of whoever is the custodian of CX.

What proportion of organizations is going down this route?

Birendra Sen: Definitely more than half and more than a year ago. We are going to see a steady increase because our clients don’t have a choice. It is a game of relevance in a fast-moving current.

How is Tech Mahindra responding to these changes?

Birendra Sen: At Tech Mahindra, we try to bring together all the different parts of CX; for instance, we created an experience design services capability through acquisitions. Two years ago, we acquired BORN Group, Mad*Pow, and The BIO agency in the U.K. All these units form the fulcrum of our experience design services. Most recently we acquired a boutique CX consulting firm, Eventus Solutions out of Denver, with ~130 consultants with deep experience in providing CX transformation. Coupled with a technology-enabled BPS capability is an end-to-end CX playbook that allows us to execute the transformation. We apply continuous insights, automation, bots, conversational AI, and cloud migration, creating the right customer and agent experience with tools to manage the entire lifecycle.

I think this is the future of a provider like Tech Mahindra, to offer the full array of capabilities. Providers are at different stages of the maturity lifecycle, with some BPOs still operating with the same linear models. However, clients are ready to embrace the range of capabilities that Tech Mahindra offers.

BPS providers will play a pivotal role in offering these kinds of platforms and applications to enable data-driven insights using predictive analytics in operations and will run on a managed service model delivering outcomes. This model will be more common in the next 18 to 36 months, with an opportunity for providers to take a leading position.

This ability to bring together these capabilities is one of the reasons for Tech Mahindra to be a beneficiary, growing at 6 to 7 times compared to the industry average.

What are the limitations for enterprises to accelerate CX transformation?

Birendra Sen: There are several:

• Some are generic such as disaggregated customer journey, caused by internal or external setup such as operating in multiple service provider environments, with vendors offering point solutions without looking at the end state
• There is a need to innovate at a lower cost. The question is how to innovate in an agile and swift fashion with limited budgets
• Many organizations have grown off legacy infrastructure and need to modernize it
• Data maturity with the ability to generate insights quickly and leverage data
• Getting the ROI and identifying the high-impact CX opportunities in a fast-moving technology environment.

But most important is for organizations to have the right talent and skillset to drive this transformation itself.

What is the impact of a truly transformed CX on service delivery?

Birendra Sen: Work from anywhere is the new normal, with cloud computing being center stage and pay-as-you-go pricing. The pandemic accelerated the gig economy with greater flexibility and an expanded talent pool.

At Tech Mahindra, unless the client has specific requirements for office delivery, all our workforce is work from anywhere. The model offers convenience and flexibility, which is a critical factor in the war for talent. Along with that is the proliferation of different technology to amplify the agents in their work; for example, presenting information to the agent during the call, sentiment analysis for active intervention, and automating the aftercall work.  

Also, the ability to leverage multiple delivery locations will be critical. We are very active in APAC, including Australia, New Zealand, China, the Philippines, Malaysia, and we are also exploring Japan. In India, we are looking at tier 2 and 3 cities to broaden our footprint. In EMEA, we are also looking at the Saudi market to address the requirement for “Saudization” of services. We are continuing to expand in Eastern Europe and planning for South Africa.

In North America, we are growing in the U.S. with a new site in the greater Atlanta area. And in LATAM, we are investigating new delivery markets such as Colombia and Costa Rica.

What CX technology do you see gaining momentum?

Birendra Sen: We see traction around real-time analytics throughout the agent experience, automation for agent assists, unified agent desktop with RPA, and the use of AI for specific elements of the customer lifecycle; for example, our m.ai.a bot. We have an AI-based search called SEER which provides real-time insights, and it has been hugely popular – we embed it in every solution we have. Another area is the option to move to asynchronous messaging at scale. These technologies are leveraged already and are part of our tech stack. The key is to make them a constant component for every client with a view that CCaaS will be the majority of the market.

We develop this technology internally or in partnerships. We want Tech Mahindra to be the orchestrator of superior business outcomes – to bring together the different components of this tech stack to meet enterprises’ CX expectations.

What lessons do we want to keep from the last 18 months?

Birendra Sen: Virtual work from anywhere will stay; the requirement to create improved employee experience to effectively manage the talent, such as health and wellness; a renewed focus on data security and privacy, and Business Continuity Planning will be extremely important.

I would also add an increased willingness by enterprises to do business, to deliver CX in a different way.