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Global customer experience and technology consultancy services company CSS Corp helps brands reimagine customer engagements. It helps clients manage over 1.2 billion interactions and, in the process, provides technologies, tools and solutions to enhance customer engagements. Its area of focus includes shifting from reactive to pre-emptive modes and helping companies adopt the right strategies to bring in efficiencies and delivery models optimisation.

Global customer experience and technology consultancy services company CSS Corp helps brands reimagine customer engagements. It helps clients manage over 1.2 billion interactions and, in the process, provides technologies, tools and solutions to enhance customer engagements. Its area of focus includes shifting from reactive to pre-emptive modes and helping companies adopt the right strategies to bring in efficiencies and delivery models optimisation.

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Recently, Analytics India Magazine got into a conversation with Dr Kiran Marri, Chief Scientist and Vice President of Digital Engineering at CSS Corp, to understand how CSS Corp is leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Kiran is an industry consultant, educator, and researcher with over 18 years of experience in software and systems. An alumnus of IIT Madras (BE, MS and PhD), Kiran’s current role at CSS Corp includes developing innovative solutions, creating sustainable business models for growth, and launching new services in the digital, engineering and testing practices. He is currently researching to apply ML techniques and optimisation algorithms to solve complex engineering and software problems, build solutions for early validation strategies, and develop UX tools for global clients.

Edited excerpts from the interaction:

AIM: What are CSS Corp’s core tech products?
Dr Kiran: We have reimagined customer engagements and have enabled over a billion customer service and support transactions in over 25 languages across 19 global locations. We help clients succeed through intelligent automation-led outcomes and customer-centric solutions & services with the help of two AI-driven platforms:

CSS EDISON: AI-led cloud-based CX transformation platform.
CSS CONTELLI: AIOps platform; it takes an outcome-based approach and leverages cognitive RPA, AI, automation, augmented reality, and advanced analytics for IT support and services.
COEUS: provides real-time insights into agent performance and helps improve overall efficiency and productivity. Last year, COEUS analysed over 10 million transactions, resulting in a 50 per cent improvement in service levels across accounts and increasing employee productivity levels by 25 per cent.
These platforms cut across the front and back offices of any enterprise to drive meaningful business outcomes.

AIM: What tech tools do you use?
Dr Kiran: Our tools vary depending on the services. We use a broad mix of proprietary home-grown tools as well as industry-standard tech tools.

AIM: How are you leveraging AI and ML technologies?
Dr Kiran: CSS Corp proposes a set of solution elements that are flexible and extensible – supported by optimum service delivery model and usage of next-generation tools, methodologies, and framework. Our framework for AI/ML projects across domains is based on five fundamental tenets:

Design right talent sourcing strategy for the program
Define a CoE model that will provide utmost operational flexibility and tight alignment to business goals while achieving the benefits of consolidation and standardisation
Enable Service Transformation that consists of tools, accelerators, new practices, and solution components, and part of ‘managed services’ delivery model, driven by SLA framework
Implement an execution framework based on CSS Corp offerings that will enable rapid and de-risked transition, process standardisation and fosters innovation
Implement Program Management and Governance guided by KPIs, metrics, and stakeholder specific dashboard
AIM: Provide us some real-life use cases.
Dr Kiran: Here are some use cases:

One of our US-based OEMs faced difficulty detecting the quality of images (video streaming) in UCAAS products. We improved their quality benchmarking using our AI/ML and computer vision solutions.
A Europe-based CPF company had challenges in detecting faulty image uploads and automating the process flow. With our cutting-edge solutions that leverage AI/ML, computer vision, and customer algorithms, we enhanced their user experience and quality.

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Company’s CEO says firm is working with business process management (BPM) company Startek on opportunities where they can add value

Customer experience and technology services provider CSS Corp’s chief executive officer (CEO) Sunil Mittal said the company is looking at an initial public offering (IPO) in late 2023 for its standalone business.

Mittal also said the firm is working with business process management (BPM) company Startek on opportunities where they can add value, but has had no conversations with regard to increasing the minority stake of Startek in CSS.

Whenever a private equity deal happens, there is a fund that gets created. There are multiple investors in that fund. The Startek Investment Fund is an indirect investment into that fund that is managed by Capital Square Partners. From a Startek perspective, I don’t have conversations with them on these aspects. We work at arm’s length distance, (unless there’s an opportunity). The way forward is for us to be independent, continue with the momentum and create value for our investors through an IPO,” he said.

He said the firm plans to go public as a standalone business in late 2023.

Startek’s chief financial officer (CFO) Vikash Sureka had told Business Standard that it expects to increase its minority stake in CSS Corp to give it access to a larger market.

Startek announced a strategic investment worth $30 million in CSS Corp in March. The investment was made in a limited partnership managed by Startek’s majority shareholder, Capital Square Partners.

Mittal, who took over as CEO in May, said CSS is also looking at expanding to new geographies and eyeing acquisitions in areas such as healthcare.

“We have plans to take in 3,000 people and we have already hired 1,800 net positions this year,” said Mittal.

The Texas-headquartered company crossed the 10,000 employee-mark in August, and 6,000 of these employees are based in India.

“Last (financial) year, we grew by 25 per cent, and this year also we will grow more than 25 per cent. Based on the trajectory we’re seeing, we should be able to maintain that momentum for the next few years as well,” Mittal added.

The firm has presence in the US, Costa Rica, Manila, India, Colombia, and will expand to Romania from next month.

Around 80-85 per cent of CSS’ business comes from the technology and telecom sector, while 5-8 per cent is from retail consumer packaged goods. It plans to up its focus on retail consumer-packaged goods and healthcare through acquisitions.

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The Covid-19 pandemic has taught a lesson or two to both employers and employees on the importance, attention, and focus needed to be given to the overall wellness of people at workplaces, where they spend a major portion of their working lives.

The pandemic has disrupted the way the world lived and worked. It has caused a lot of mental, physical, and emotional stress to everyone.

Adapting to a new working culture has also added extra fatigue to the lives of employees. It has been over a year into the pandemic and HR leaders across the world have taken different initiatives to maintain the wellbeing of their employees.

The pandemic has really brought employee wellbeing onto the centre stage. Companies realize that employees are their valuable assets, and in difficult times like the pandemic, companies have to make extra efforts to ensure the safety and wellbeing of their employees.

Employee wellbeing is often misunderstood to be only confined to physical wellbeing, whereas it is a wide term that encompasses an employee’s physical, mental, psychological, social, and financial wellbeing.

Moderating a panel discussion at the Phoenix CXO Virtual Summit 2021, organized by ETHRWorld on September 30, Yuvraj Srivastava, Group CHRO, MakeMyTrip, said, “There is more consciousness about health and wellbeing in the minds of the employer as well as the employees, because of the pandemic. It has now struck everyone that they have to be far more careful about their health and wellbeing.”

Why should organizations invest in employee wellbeing?

“People are critical, as they are the key to the success and survival of the business and from there stems the need of investing in wellness,” said Anjali Rao, HR Leader and Senior Director, Intel India.

Employee wellbeing is extremely important for Employer Value Proposition and from the standpoint of the business because employees are the building blocks of a company. Organizations work hard to acquire the people with very niche technical skills and these are the skills that are built after investing a lot of time and effort. Employee wellbeing thus becomes very important for retaining the talent and building it further by investing in it.

“Employees’ health, psychological and emotional wellbeing is no longer a question of whether or not, it’s about how now,” said Chitresh Sharma, Co-founder and CEO, Refyne.

Employee wellbeing is very important for any organization and it is not a new concept. It has been there for a long time, but it is critical to get it right otherwise it is of no use for both the employer and the employee. The need is to come up with a programme that is relevant to the needs of the employees at that point in time and constantly evolving to keep up with the changes.

Mental and emotional wellbeing of employees

Talking about the increased interest and awareness about employee wellbeing, Namrata Gill, VP – Corporate HR, Dr Reddy’s, pointed out that earlier employees took wellness programmes as something that was thrust upon them by the management, but ever since the pandemic hit, there has been a positive shift in the attitude of the employees towards these programmes.

HR leaders believe that there is a need for a well-rounded and holistic approach to designing employee wellbeing programmes. Satyanarayanan Visvanathan, SVP and Head – HR (Global) and Head of Corporate Quality, CSS Corp, said, “The answer when we try to define workforce wellbeing is lifestyle wellbeing.” He further stated that every organization believes in a set of values, and the core values within an organization should be, respect for individuals because no one is going to stay for long if they are not respected.

Talking about emotional wellbeing, Visvanathan further said, “Instead of just putting money in their pocket, we also need to put an arm around them.” He suggested that having the resources to come out of a situation really helps the employees but knowing that their organization is there with them in their tough times gives them a sense of both financial and emotional security. “Personal support and providing solace to people that we as an organization are there for them has a huge impact on the morale of an individual and also overall wellbeing,” he added.

Financial wellbeing of the employees

The financial wellbeing of an employee is extremely important and probably is the area where the least innovation is done to date. Chitresh Sharma, Co-founder and CEO, Refyne, pointed out that a major chunk of a person’s time is spent in education and another major chunk in the organization they work for, but no one actually makes an effort to teach them how to manage their personal finances.

Sharma further suggested that organizations need to take a step towards helping their employees in maintaining their personal finances by redesigning the payroll models, for example commencing the salaries on a more regular basis, say weekly or biweekly. He also suggested that this change has to be brought through automated technology because finances are very individualistic in nature.

Adding to this, Vishwanathan said, “We need to ensure that financial complexities are not running in the minds of our people. Giving people a salary is also not enough. We also need to help them learn the art of creating wealth.”

Commenting on Sharma’s suggestion to commence salaries on a more regular basis like weekly or biweekly, Vishwanathan said water needs to be judged before jumping in.

Namrata Gill and Anjali also echoed Vishwanathan and said that Indians culturally operate in a way where we clear all our bills in the beginning of the month, so, for a change like this the entire ecosystem has to be changed and this process would take time although this could be a reality in the future.

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Businesses need to adapt to a new world order at warp speed. How they meet this moment will influence their trajectory for years to come.

The Covid-19 global humanitarian and economic crisis has left an indelible mark on global consumers.

As the crisis deepens, incremental improvements by organisations to adapt to changing customer behaviour no longer seem to suffice. Beyond the immediate fallout of this pandemic, customer experience has emerged as one of the key challenges facing business leaders.

Leading organisations have instituted new tools such as digital surveys and practices like social listening and sentiment analysis to track, analyse, and act on behavioural signals. Now the bigger challenge is to deliver a customer experience not just to stand out, but to pivot, reassess, innovate, and transform.

What’s visible in the industry

Movement patterns have flipped. Customers are housebound and vulnerable. Employees have atomised and adjusted their daily working practices. Supply chains are being disrupted. Physical stores are increasingly pulling down their shutters.

The customers are now more mindful of their spending. Stay-at-home orders have accelerated the transition from in-person to digital channels. Public safety has become a top priority for businesses and consumers alike in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment.

No longer can businesses devise strategies based on simple analytics and a gut feel about their customers’ needs and preferences. Businesses must jump years in a few months to offer digital customer experiences that are simple, intuitive, and reliable.

From reactive to proactive crisis management

The traditional crisis-response playbook is now broken. As the companies outline macro scenarios and prepare scenario-based contingency plans of action, the focus of this entire generation of business leaders is shifting from reactive to proactive crisis management.

Businesses have configured senior, dedicated, cross-functional war room teams focussed on tackling immediate challenges, finding innovative operational models and technologies to safeguard liquidity and recover the business today, and retool the business for the future.

To win in the new normal, companies need to identify the current noticeable customer behaviour that will define customer experience in the near term. Companies need to rethink strategic priorities and build capabilities fast to leapfrog stages of customers’ evolution in the new normal and use digitalisation to bolster operations

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We recently talked with CSS Corp about its investments in QA, in particular its new Digital Assurance offering. Digital Assurance targets UX QA, an area that has not had the attention it deserves.

Clients have prioritized investment in continuous testing & automation
While many large organizations have devoted considerable time and effort to continuous testing and functional automation, they have invested only selectively on UX testing. Indeed, demand for UX testing has been limited. Regulation has driven some UX activity, particularly around accessibility testing. The heterogeneity of devices and screen sizes also means organizations spend on compatibility testing. Also, performance testing has become somewhat more UX-centric by tracking performance using end-user metrics.

To a large extent, this is it. QA and UX are two different worlds and do not feed on each other. UX would gain from the automation expertise of QA, while QA would benefit from opening up to new challenges. The world of UX is vast and growing, especially in the space of usability research and testing. But so far, it is not really automated.

CSS Corp has created a UX testing platform with Digital Assurance
So NelsonHall welcomes the investment by CSS Corp to expand the boundaries of UX testing, relying on automation. With Digital Assurance, CSS Corp has aggregated opensource software tools with proprietary accelerators. The scope of Digital Assurance is considerable, ranging from performance testing to usability testing. Within usability testing, CSS Corp has focused on several dimensions, including “appeal,” “navigation,” “search,” and “content & information.”

An example of an engagement where CSS Corp developed an “appeal” feature is for a tier-one cosmetics company, verifying that the color displayed on a screen for a lip pencil was consistent with the company’s color palette. The challenge was one of scale, the client having 3k URLs and color palettes to validate. CSS Corp used computer vision technology to compare images, thereby removing manual comparison for the client’s 78 brands.
Another example is around “search”. CSS Corp has integrated SEO as part of the metrics it tracks. For instance, it will analyze the structure of a website and identify the number of steps end-users need to go through to complete a transaction.

A third example of a feature available in Digital Assurance is in “content & information”. CSS Corp is automating localization testing with spell checks and bundling it with grammar validation and readability analysis.
Alongside these features, CSS Corp has added more common functionality such as performance testing (with end-user KPIs) and sentiment analysis (the classification into different sentiments of opinions gathered on app stores and social networks such as Twitter), along with accessibility testing.

CSS Corp pushes the boundaries of UX testing
We think Digital Assurance has two main benefits. Firstly, CSS Corp is systematically extending the boundaries of UX testing automation. UX research and testing remain labor-intensive activities, and we think the potential for further UX automation is immense (see below). Secondly, CSS Corp is steadily aggregating tools around Digital Assurance and provides an increasingly comprehensive UX testing service.

Potential for UX automation
The potential for automation in UX testing is immense. While QA has focused on test automation, UX research also has the potential for automation. An example is around videos: during the research phase, digital agencies record videos of end-user interviews. Going through these videos is time-consuming. AI bears the promise of focusing on parts of the video through sentiment detection, for instance. Once a website or a mobile app is in production, clients are increasingly correlating its technical performance with its business performance (e.g. through integration with such tools as Google Analytics). Currently, understanding the correlation of multiple events takes time: using intelligent automation will help.

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International Programmers’ Day, also known as the “Day of the Programmers” is celebrated on the 256th day of the year to honor the software innovators who continue to change the world, one program at a time.

The day is celebrated based on binary code. Represented by an eight-bit byte, 256 equals 2 to the eighth power. The digit makes it the highest power of 2 that is less than 365. When translated to binary code, the day reads
1 0000 0000. Special, isn’t it?

Since this day is marked to honor and celebrate their nature of innovation, we at TechGig thought to make it more endearing by bringing in advice from the tech leaders across the IT industry. Let’s see what they have to say about the remarkable day.

Brijesh Balakrishnan, SVP – Talent Fulfilment & Digital at CSS Corp- “Fundamental knowledge across a variety of technologies is imperative to stay ahead of the curve, and to scale in this constantly changing technology ecosystem. This is the time to upskill and venture into synergistic learning skills. The onus is upon programmers to continue investing towards their growth and prowess in digital technologies and agile methodologies.”

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