Trend: SaaS-enabled BPO

Otherwise known as technology-enabled service, the practice of offering not only software as a service, but also the people who can execute on those services with specialized skills and training, is becoming increasingly prevalent.

This gives rise to a new breed of outsourcing: highly specialized, high value, and differentiated outsourcing with interesting technology nuances. The best-known examples of truly large companies built on this model are ADP and Paychex. Now, however, I see a new trend developing along these lines.
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Outsourcing: Chris Coles, President And CEO Of HyperQuality (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana: What is the employee split between the technology and the services organizations? What is the total head count? How many employees are in services and how many are in products?

Chris: The total number of employees is a bit more than 600 right now. I would say on the technology side there are probably about 70. So, [that includes] the software and the delivery infrastructure. >>>

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. >>>

Outsourcing: Chris Coles, President And CEO Of HyperQuality (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana: So, let me see if I’ve got this right. You audit the objectives, then you edit the process as it pertains to those objectives, then you audit the tools and mechanisms of implementing those, and finally you audit the calls?

Chris: We audit the calls, then we take a look at the duty analysis and share with the client organization the observations, areas of improvement, and areas that are doing well, so that they’ve got that information. Based on their work with us and their own understanding, we can take action to adjust what is actually occurring in those interactions. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Jay Leader CIO, Of iRobot (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Product life cycle management is an area we haven’t heard so much about in our cloud computing series. We haven’t really heard much from that field. I worked a lot in that area in the early part of the past decade because I was doing a turnaround of a company that did PLM and mechanical design software. They were called Think3; you may have heard of them.

What is happening in PLM today? How these trends are affecting the product life management cycle? For instance, does social media have some impact on your product design life cycle or your innovation life cycle?

Jay Leader: Not particularly. I mean, I would say no and I know you would rather than I say yes, but …

SM: Oh, no! I would rather you say what you feel is true; I don’t need to hear anything that is not accurate. >>>

Outsourcing: Chris Coles, President And CEO Of HyperQuality (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

About HyperQuality
HyperQuality is an independent quality assurance company with operations in the United States and India. Founded in 2003, the company uses customer satisfaction as a means to retain existing customers and acquire new ones. It does this by listening to customer–agent interactions, rating them, and giving feedback to clients on which policies or practices should stay and which ones should go. It delivers this intelligence through a SaaS tool called ClearMetrix. HyperQuality is a roughly $11 million company that has approximately 600 employees in both countries. It has served such clients as AOL, Travelocity, Guthy-Renker, and SkyMall.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Chris. Welcome to the Outsourcing series. Would you tell us a bit about HyperQuality to set the context of the conversation.

Chris Coles: Sure. HyperQuality is a company that is a little more than eight years old, and it started from a position of providing cost-effective, higher quality or more reliable, more objective tiers of agent performance. Typically, it’s measured to quality attributes that were held or managed by people in the contact center. That is really the roots of the business. Over the past eight years, it has evolved, as the market has evolved, to work on software solutions for management and workflow, and providing more process and consistency within the context of evaluation. It has also moved from call evaluation and agent evaluation into caller contact effectiveness. It plays to a larger audience within a company as to what exactly is being said by customers. It’s sort of a “voice of the customer” agenda to where is it in the offer or in the PO service or in pricing or in policy that is causing topics of concern or rejection on the part of customer or prospects? So, it is a fairly systematic approach that we take to really evaluating what is going on inside the calls and making that information relevant to a wide array of stakeholders within an enterprise or within a company. >>>

Outsourcing: Ankur Prakash, Vice President And COO, TCS Latin America (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana Mitra: So, did I hear you right that the one program that India implemented incredibly successfully in the early days of outsourcing was to give the industry a tax breaks, which is not the Latin American strategy, from a development point of view?

Ankur Prakash: I don’t want to comment on whether it was a good program by India; that is not my area. What I can say is that in Latin America they do not have tax-free zones, but there is a lot of other support from the government, from physically finding an office to how to open a company to assistance with talent, resources, training, and capital expenditure. >>>

Latin America Rising

I have been interested in Latin America for more than 15 years, although my involvement with business in the region started only in 2007, when I visited Buenos Aires for a client engagement. Since then, I have closely followed the ever-growing reach of MercadoLibre, Latin America’s e-commerce leader, in the form of an interview with founder Marcos Galperin and regular Tech Stocks coverage. >>>