Maestros of Business Possibilities Orchestration: Fine tuning BPO the iSON Xperiences Way
Maestros of Business Possibilities Orchestration: Fine tuning BPO the iSON Xperiences Way
Pranay Kumar: Chief Strategy Officer – iSON Xperiences
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) can be traced back as far as the 19th century. Fast forward to the late 20th century, in the 60’s and 70’s, spurred by Kodak’s outsourcing success, other organizations followed suit, albeit at this time near-shore or domestic in nature. In the 80’s and 90’s outsourcing broadened its’ horizons harnessing both onshoring and offshoring pureplay benefits of cost efficiencies and access to skilled labor at a fraction of the cost. This coupled with the surge in global e-commerce and high-speed connectivity, propelled the growth of the offshore BPO sector. In this BPO era performance metrics were driven by costs: cost per call, cost per resource, average handling time, and standard service levels.
BPO has now evolved into an omni-channel construct, catalyzed by increased CX demands, rampant adoption of cloud, intelligent automation, analytics and now Generative and Conversational AI, changing the character of “people, process and technology” towards digitally driven solutions.
Whilst most assume digital now takes center-stage for end-delivery to their clients, it is crucial to recognize the significance of the orchestration of the entire engagement, from end to end, to deliver desired business outcomes. It is orchestration that lies at the heart of our mission to transform customer experiences for our clients, arbitraging costs across 19 countries, including 16 in Africa, India, UAE and the UK.
iSON Xperiences has fine-tuned the way we deliver future-fit BPO solutions. We keep our eye on the prize to provide seamless, positive experiences to our client’s end-customers. Our means to this end centre on:
- Designing the strategic roadmap by engaging with the client to deliver on their key business KPI’s, aligned to their digitization ambitions
- Orchestrating delivery, and participating in the change and transformation journey alongside our clients and their stakeholders
We coin our unique approach, Business Possibilities Orchestration.
Business: One Size Does Not Fit All
What works for one client does not necessarily work for another. To address CX needs that were previously considered non-core by industry, our horizontal CXM offering proved robust enough to date. However, what we are witnessing now, is an oversaturation in the field with our clients seeking CX experts that know the nuances and speak the language of their particular industries.
This client-centric driven learning, has required us to take a vertical leap, striking a balance between adjacent horizontal capabilities, and distinctive vertical industry value-led innovations. To distinguish our industry specific offerings, we are focused on evergreen industries with demanding customer needs and pressing CX digitization ambitions. Our most recent vertical offerings span:
- Retail methodologies to enable customer self-service and rapid assistance
- Energy and utilities solutions designed to empower customers, providing them with mechanisms to switch and personalize their plans
- Banking CX solutions to ease customer onboarding and credit management
- Automated tracking and claims management interventions for the insurance sector
To deliver our vertical offerings, we have developed “idea hubs” to determine the distinct industry CX challenges. The hubs innovate, reimagine, and redesign industry specific prototypes, that are pre-trialed with SMEs for early buy-in and rapid deployment in our larger client businesses.
Possibilities: Mastering The Art of Possibilities
The “Art of Possibilities” is widely defined as making things considered impossible, provably and usefully possible. This is the key tenet of the iSON Xperiences way, where possibilities traverse tangible business outcomes, reimagined success parameters and impactful KPI’s aligned to our client’s vision and their customer’s needs.
“Provably and usefully” are core to our End-to-End solutions, ensuring we deliver measurable KPI success pertaining to:
- Brand awareness
- Revenue generation
- Customer engagement
- Cost of operations
- CX digitization
Our inhouse and partner capabilities capacitate us to redefine our client’s business models to drive cost-model transformation or value-model transformation agendas that deliver Return on Investment (ROI).
We help improve brand value through voice-of-customer surveys, boost customer acquisition and retention through upsell/cross-sell strategies, optimise journey economics by lowering customer effort score, enhance digital maturity through increased self-service adoption, and ultimately, impact the bottom line by significantly improving conversion rates.
Isn’t it time to rethink the way we do things and explore previously unimagined possibilities to deliver better, faster and smarter? It is for this reason, and fittingly, our pricing designs have evolved as we decouple our traditional headcount-driven structure to a structure predicated on demonstrable cost savings, CX metric performance and/or revenue impact, on a performance or gain share basis. This mutually beneficial alliance model is the means to unlock previously unimagined CX possibilities.
Orchestration: BPO Maestro’s in the Making
A modern full-scale symphony orchestra typically consists of 100 musicians playing a variety of instruments led by a conductor. Similarly, our business is a collection of 18000+ multilingual, diverse individuals whose combined talents and competencies create something bigger than themselves through collaboration, united vision, and the driving force of their leaders to satisfy their clients and their client’s customers.
What follows is our holistic and transformational view of CXM covering both process and technology. We envision our core process offerings shifting towards a platform-driven “business process as-a-service” (BPaaS) and aligning with our verticalised approach. Augmenting this is our advisory on journey readiness, frameworks on digital maturity adoption, assets in generative and conversational AI, robotic process automation (RPA), Customer Experience Analytics including big data analytics, and business intelligence along with an offshore-development centre (ODC) to unlock the pathway to personalized CX readiness.
Tabling the right capabilities, designing a plan to achieve agreed business outcomes, fulfilling our client’s customers journey expectations, and leveraging digitally led BPaas and CX offerings, are keys to delivering our Business Possibilities Orchestration innovations and solutions.
Our organization’s agile operating construct, digital prowess and diverse constituents play a vital role to compose, orchestrate and deliver the right mix for every customer engagement.
