Outsourcing: Chris Coles, President And CEO Of HyperQuality (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana: It yours still largely a service business?

Chris: Yes, it is.

Sramana: What do you see happening? Given the trends you’re seeing and given your division or the product map you are operating with, how do you see the business evolving? Are you seeing more of a technology business? Do you see the technology business growing substantially, and is that by design?

Chris: No. I see both, well, all three pieces growing. In our business plans, we expect that the labor services piece will continue to be a significant part of the mix. This is if you talk about basic growth rates because, coming from a smaller base, the software will look like and is a faster growth component.

But again, it’s probably as attributable to initial size as anything. I think the question you are getting to is, over time, is one favored over another? I think right now, we still project the same kind of mix with a little more richness from the software as a service side. We don’t, at this point, see a model where we cap or move away from the labor services piece. So many of our customers depend on that to be able to get at the insights that they need. As we move them to smaller accounts where the labor services piece may be less relevant, in those instances we would probably expect faster growth on the SaaS side, and perhaps no growth in those segments on the outsourced labor services piece. There again, it depends on the mix as it goes out. At this point, we still cater very much to the enterprise customer just based on the capabilities of the software. As we introduce more self-service and intuitive navigation to this complex software, it will become more applicable to the smaller end of the market.

Sramana: What does the competitive landscape look like? Whom do you see in deals? What kind of vendors do you see in deals?

Chris: There are other specific providers. Some are along the lines of what we do, although I think our focus on the analytics and going beyond just the agent is distinctive. We are different from those folks. You also have BPOs and outsourcers who have quality practice as part of what they do. You’ll oftentimes see those kinds of folks. Then there are some European firms that are as specifically focused as we are. They’re not as prevalent here in North America as we are. So, you don’t bump into them all that often, but I think it is still a fairly emergent market.

Sramana: So, your customers, your 35 enterprises customers, are all North American enterprises?

Chris: Yes. They have presence overseas, so we are working to move with them to other locations or home offices.

Sramana: Is there any other area we should explore in your business?

Chris: Yes, I think that the key point is there’s so much insight to be gotten from what customers or prospects are saying to front-line personnel. Historically, it has been so challenging to mine data and understand what is going on. It has been a bit of a black box for a lot of execs within a lot of companies. What I think we are bringing forward is a way to get insight that can be relevant very quickly to make changes in policy or adjustments to product or service models, so that things don’t get away from the decision makers before it is too late to react.

Sramana: As you were saying that, I thought of one thing. All these agents who are listening to the conversations you are auditing, are they being recorded? Are the calls being recorded?

Chris: Yes, the calls were already recorded. We take the recordings. We are not doing the recording.

Sramana: Where I am going with that is, are these listening agents applying judgment to the calls, or are you taking call transcripts and applying algorithms to parse them? What is the extent of the technology today?

Chris: There are a couple of things that occur. They are applying a trained calibrated judgment to the calls if we are listening to them. We supplement our own work with other solutions, including speech analytics, which can also comb through large volumes of calls, which we will then spot listen to, to validate that the output of the software algorithms is in fact consistent with the intended query, shall we say, or intended screener or filter. Then we can do analytics off that. So, we use both – the human  as well as the software and speech algorithms.

Sramana: Do you foresee a time when this can be done completely with software? That the role of agents [will not be necessary]?

Chris: Yes. I think there is continued improvement in the field of inner software speech algorithms. It has some limitations now and limitations for the foreseeable future that will continue to argue for the need for a finer brain doing the kind of detailed listening where either a false positive or a false negative is unacceptable at some higher level. In other words, if speech is 75% good or 70% good or 80% good for certain applications, judgments, and businesses decisions, that is good enough.

For other things, it has got to be 98% accurate. You probably have a limitation in software and, I assume, will have for some time to come, because when you look at the rate of improvement, it is not closing that gap in a predictable fashion. It gets a bit asymptotic. You’re probably always listening to things or will be for the foreseeable future. “Always” is a long time and “never” is another bold statement. So again, I am trying not to go into those absolutes, because nothing good seems to happen from those kinds of statements

Sramana: I have enjoyed listening to you talk about your company. Thank you for your time.

Chris: Very good. Thank you.

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