Outsourcing: Chris Coles, President And CEO Of HyperQuality (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana: Would you give me a use case to illustrate what you are talking about?

Chris: There are two. One could be a product person and the other could be a call center operations person within a single enterprise. We are looking at a network of contact centers around the globe. The centers can be in the U.S., nearshore, in Europe, in South Asia such as India or the Philippines … [or in a Latin American country such as] Costa Rica. You’ve got a variety of vendor partners doing that. You have your own agents. If you are looking to conduct form creation, which is basically the evaluation score card, you calibrate against that. You can imagine that you’ve got a number of people who have to come together to try and go through that process and drive that coordination and synchronization. You can accomplish a bit through software tools and techniques that liberate you from location dependencies and time-of-day dependencies, and are we all listening to the same call and hearing it the same way. You take advantage of workflow to ensure that you are pulling that together on a timely and coordinated basis. At the end of it, what you‘ve got is a much more streamlined approach for getting and reporting the data that is relevant to not only people who are running centers, but people who are trying to run a product line and understand what is the nature of the sentiment from their customers or their prospects. What is working and what is not? This is the question we are trying to answer.

Sramana: OK. Let’s switch the discussion to your organization. What does your organization need to look like to deliver on this value proposition?

Chris: Well, the organization that we have evolved into has agents or listeners both in New Delhi and here in the United States, depending on customers’ particular requirements.

Sramana: How many agents do you have?

Chris: About 500 or 525.

Sramana: Five hundred, and mostly in New Delhi, or do you have a mix?

Chris: No, mostly in New Delhi, but there is a mix here in the States as well.

Sramana: Okay, about 500 listening agents.

Chris: Roughly, yes, and their infrastructure around them. We also have a software development team that is based in Seattle and Gargal, India, that is developing and iterating software as a service. We have product management, financial management, human resources management, training – all of those departments and efforts.  We also have sales and other teams on the data market side.

Sramana: Other than the listening agents, there is nothing else that is a specific methodology; it is a regular software development operation?

Chris: It is. We also have a professional services team with a group of Six Sigma qualified folks who for a process analysis or deeper analytics, and they would typically engage as well.

Sramana: OK, basically, when you are doing the objectives assessment or the process assessment, those are the kinds of people who are managing those accounts?

Chris: Yes.

Sramana: Would it be fair to say that what you are doing is SaaS-enabled BPO, that is, SaaS-enabled business process outsourcing?

Chris: Yes. We oftentimes think of it or refer to it as a tech-enabled service.

Sramana: Yes, same thing.

Chris: SaaS is the business model, but it is basically taking technology that we developed. It’s purpose-built for these kinds of evaluation and analytic applications. There’s still a necessary people element to that, and that is where you get the services peak.  It is a combination of the two, and that fits quite effectively and nicely in the world we live in today. Certainly, as people have adjusted their sizing and focus, oftentimes they don’t have spare or skilled resources, some of this works. We are able to do it on an outsourced basis more effectively than hiring and training and doing that themselves.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Outsourcing: Chris Coles, President And CEO Of HyperQuality
1 2 3 4 5