Front Office Operations: The Engine Driving BPO Growth

SSON interview with Somit Kapoor, General Manager & Head - Front Office Transformation at Wipro BPO Somit, how did you get to your position as head of Front Office services delivery at Wipro? My journey at Wipro began with a front office engagement for a US PC Major, and for the next five years I managed a 2,500 FTE delivery team for this customer, as one of their critical Front Office support sites as well as their top vendor. I was trained in global outsourcing and delivery best practices, including Six Sigma – I am a Black Belt and a COPC-certified facilitator. For the last six years I have headed Wipro BPO’s customer acquisition line of business for the Front Office practice, and I continue to manage delivery for some critical engagements. I also lead a niche transformational practice that is focused on new solutions, tools, technologies and frameworks, which transform the front office contact center. The combined experience of managing engagements, benchmarking global operations and managing customer relationships have provided me with the right platform for this role. At what stage did you realize there’s actually an opportunity to take on some of the front office transactional, or perhaps not transactional, work? I’m talking about customer acquisition and management – which tie directly into revenue. Our move into the front office started in 2002, when Wipro acquired Spectramind. As a result of that acquisition, we inherited Spectramind’s BPO business, i.e. the contact center business. The acquisition brought close to 10,000 employees from the contact center into our operations, mainly in the B2C sector. That was my first hand exposure to end-customer impacting services. My prior experience was limited to internal employee services within the framework of more traditional shared services. About three or four years after the acquisition we realized that the contact center business had become more about "shopping for bodies," and that we were mainly managing volumes, and delivering basic services. We also noted a lot of manual, broken processes, which we believed could be simplified and optimized with IT interventions. With Wipro’s strong IT foundation, we started what was really an efficiency program, where we introduced some very small automation concepts into our own internal practices, specifically in Wipro BPO. This provided us with the impetus to becoming a Front Office Major. It took us a few years to conceptualize and create the front office transformation practice that I head now. Today, this is a critical solution team that leverages existing market partnerships and that has invested in core research and development. We are now poised to develop a home-grown platform that will push the envelope on contact center operations as we know it today. The core philosophy behind this platform is to create a unified vision of a customer in the BPO context by bringing together disparate sources of data and interactions, and by empowering agents with tools that will make customer support predictive and proactive. This personalization improves customer acquisition through services tailored specifically to their needs, which in turn has a positive impact on customer churn. What’s the main benefit that you bring to this front end interaction? The key focus of our front office transformation practice is to move contact centers that are today operating as cost centers, to operating as profit centers – revenue generating. This is what presented a unique opportunity for us. The need to make contact centers more agile, lean, effective and very customer focused. Let us start with a look at the front office practice at Wipro. Our front office support today includes a wide range of services right from customer acquisition, order support, customer on-boarding, welcome calls, activation, product registration etc. We also have a huge post sale customer support practice that covers L0-L4 product support, installation support, remote troubleshooting, up-sell/cross-sell, warranty support, billing support, returns and claims handling. Our focus across all of these operations has always been to add or create value and to build efficiencies in processes. To this end, we started with small, simple automation frameworks that improved cycle times, reduced turn-around times, managed AHTs and improved customer satisfaction. While these initiatives contribute to overall program performance, we did not see them as critical contributors to value and started to focus on technology that would enable us to deliver optimized operational costs, improved revenues and a better customer experience. Our front office innovation framework focuses on these contributors to drive: 1. Better use of online channels and adoption of lower cost channels like self-service and virtual chat. 2. Leveraged analytics beyond dashboards and reports. We use speech and text analytics, and web and interaction analytics to deliver significant value in the form of business insights and competitive intelligence. 3. A structured approach to intelligent knowledge base usage and improved resolution accuracy. 4. Propensity models that remove the subjectivity from the sales process and provide agents with up-sell/cross-sell recommendations as well as retention offers that help improve revenues and manage loyalty. a. Today we do not need a separate sales team; instead, we can have the inbound troubleshooting agent, make the sale for a specific plan, service or product upgrade. Customers tend to perceive such agents as product specialists, and chances of making an additional sale typically improve by almost 40%. b. For some of our large programs, we are now almost 80% cost neutral to our customers. In other words: If the cost of servicing customers is $1 million per month, it means you are generating close to 800K worth of revenue on these support calls. 5. Social Media analytics to systematically bring social media conversations into the contact center. a. Today, 85% of customer queries are typically addressed online through self-service options on the web or social media forums – only about 15% of queries go straight to the support center. That means that we analyze only 15% of customer interactions for that product. So how do we increase that to 50% or 70%? We have been plugging into forums, listening to customers verbatim, and reporting on top complaints that customers are talking about. b. Every month, we gain about 2% new troubleshooting techniques that are not otherwise available on the authorized company website, but are available in social media. Besides innovating contact center channel support, we are also focusing on solutions that impact key operational processes and deliver a better customer experience, and higher productivity: An Analytics based training solution manages the audit feedback mechanism with minimum disruption to operations. Premium Support platforms allow organizations to offer a differentiated experience to their premium customers through smarter IVRs, automated call backs and Video support. Speech analytics and data mining algorithms provide 100% coverage to the contact audit process. This allows an automated response quality measurement system, and streamlines training programs, as well as providing an overview of our customer experience processes So our focus on delivering value is driven by prioritizing the customer, and making support highly personalized, no matter which channel the customer chooses. How big is this sector for you right now? How much is it growing? About 45% of Wipro BPO’s revenues come from the front office right now and we expect a 5% growth in the sector for us this year. From which regions are you seeing the most demand? Until about 2009, it was predominantly the Americas – I would say about 80%. From 2009 onwards, Europe saw considerable growth, and after 2010/2011, even the APAC region opened up in a big way. Today, the fastest growing region for us is the APAC market – China, Japan, Australia, Singapore and the Greater Asia region. Today, Americas constitute about 60%, Europe 25%, and the remaining 15% is APAC. In terms of delivery, we have the capability to offer close to 34 languages including Eastern European & Nordic languages, about 11 languages in APAC, and, of course, English. Are there particular industries that are exhibiting more demand than others? And where do you see opportunities for growth? The biggest industry for us today is telecom and media. That is our biggest customer-base. A close second is the manufacturing and hi-tech industry – product creation, consumer technology companies, and OEMs. The third, in terms of size, would be online retail and travel. These have all been growing very fast over the last 8-10 years, since they are industries that have traditionally been outsourcing their contact center and front office work. But in the last two years, we have seen new opportunities in the healthcare and energy & utility verticals. Healthcare divisions, medical devices, medical products and pharmaceutical companies have not typically outsourced, due to the process complexities. But cost pressures are driving changes in the healthcare industry and to a certain extent, offshoring, not just outsourcing, is becoming more attractive. So in terms of growth, and in terms of how these industries are opening up, I see the energy and utilities industry and the healthcare industry driving most of the growth in the next two or three years. [eventpdf]

Front Office Operations: The Engine Driving BPO Growth

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Front Office Operations: The Engine Driving BPO Growth

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