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Vivian Gomes, Chief Marketing Officer at Movate.
The future of work arrived yesterday.
Even before the global pandemic disrupted set models of work, work as we know it had been quietly shifting. And nothing has highlighted that shift more than the rapid emergence of the gig economy.
The gig economy is not new. It has been here for a while—longer than you may imagine—because the word “gig” was first coined by jazz musicians back in the early 1900s. But the modern gig economy really took off with the growth of internet-backed platforms that facilitated easy access to gig work. Being hyper-connected with the growth of social networks has fueled new technology-enabled ways of working. And the key word for me is “technology.”
Gartner predicts that gig work will make up about 35% to 40% of the workforce by 2025.
So, while gig work is not new, what has changed is that technology-enabled organizations are now using gig platforms at scale to reach a large talent base across the globe. Now, many organizations are focusing on building a maximally adaptive workforce: one that is flexible and agile. As the chief marketing officer at a company that provides on-demand workforce augmentation, I saw many companies and departments in the CX space embrace the gig workforce during the pandemic when the limitations of a traditional contact center environment were brought to the fore. I believe gig support models have gained popularity for their flexibility and scalability.
Yet, traditional gig support models present certain challenges of their own.
Businesses have to significantly invest in training their gig workforce to meet their quality standards. But that training is often limited to providing competence in handling their customers well, not necessarily creating experts who know their business products or services. The result is sometimes poor CX.
Add to this the challenges of availability, the onboarding of gig talent, and IT security concerns, and the traditional gig support model begins to creak at the hinges.
Rebuilding The Gig Customer Experience Ecosystem
As we go forward, I believe organizations will realize more and more that gig engagements shouldn’t be random: They should be part of the long-term strategy and be cohesive, agile and integrated. I am talking about rebuilding the entire gig customer experience ecosystem—one that has the flexibility to manage surges in demand, achieves tangible cost savings, ensures enterprise privacy and security, is agile in deployment, and offers a deeper and more empathetic experience to customers.
And one of the ways we can do that is by creating a gig-enabled support model that complements full-time agents with gig experts (people with domain and product experience) while leveraging technology solutions that drive higher efficiency and automation through the resolution process. When you do this, the possibilities are immense. Think of the gaming industry, for example. I’ve found that gaming is often affected by disruptions in demand, especially during the holiday season, which causes a surge in customer requests. To manage these surges and fluctuations, companies should develop an on-demand, gig-enabled support model that not only scales up and down effortlessly but also delivers empathetic customer support along with traditional support.
The model should bring gig experts’ native skills and real-life knowledge of the product to the problem the customer is facing. Gig experts should not just be skilled workers but also the actual product or service end users. With this model, companies could drastically reduce their training requirements.
The gig-enabled support model can not only transform the customer experience but also enable organizations to bring down their operating costs by leveraging a pay-per-resolution approach. The idea is to create a consumption-based model for the organizations and charge them only for resolutions.
Impressive as those potential benefits are, there’s more. I have also always believed in building a personal level of service. People connect to the experience a brand offers, and they connect to its humanity. An on-demand, gig-enabled support model could provide exactly that personalized human connection because it provides a struggling customer with contextual and relevant advice.
Building A Successful On-Demand Support System
To start off, clearly map out the processes against the resource type for efficient routing. Gig-based peer experts are best for product-specific queries. Account-specific requests that require access to the CRM can go to traditional support teams. As your gig ecosystem matures, the balance may shift from traditional to on-demand support.
Where you source your gig talent from can sometimes be a deal breaker for your support quality. Though there are several gig portals available today, they do not necessarily all do thorough background checks that can ensure you work with high-quality talent. You can leverage your product alpha users or community forums to source gig peer experts. It is easy to identify such product practitioners through digital channels, and they can be quickly assessed at the hiring stage to ensure faster onboarding of skilled gig talent with minimal or no training. Also, you can incentivize your gig workforce to perform well. For instance, you could provide workers with high CSAT scores and peer reviews with financial rewards.
I believe another key to success is technology. Consider how you can leverage automation in processes like onboarding, QA and payments to help you integrate your gig workers into traditional models. Think about how to use technology to make it easier to blend the gig ecosystem with traditional delivery models to achieve the stability of the traditional model with the scalability of gig.
Convert Your Best Customers Into Brand Ambassadors
It’s the human connection that drives me to believe that this is not just the future of work but the tomorrow of customer experience. When you use your best customers to provide support to other customers and deliver exceptional service, you are also building brand ambassadors.
Traditionally, customer service has always been seen as a cost center. But with this model, I think it’s time to see customer service as a value-adding center. The time is ripe for faster adoption of empathetic, expert-driven gig support. Are you tapping into it?
World Mental Health Day – How tech firms are ensuring employee wellbeing
World Mental Health Day allows organisations as well as individuals to come forward and speak about mental health, how one can look after it, and how important it is to take care of your mental health. We at TechGig thought to make it more endearing by bringing in advice from tech leaders across the IT industry. Let’s see what they have to say about the remarkable day.
When the pandemic hit globally, the most important concern of companies apart from physical health was the mental health of the employees. Every year, World Mental Health Day is celebrated on 10th October globally. The day is celebrated to raise awareness about mental health, its significance, and its importance.
World Mental Health Day allows organisations as well as individuals to come forward and speak about mental health, how one can look after it, and how important it is to take care of your mental health. We at TechGig thought to make it more endearing by bringing in advice from tech leaders across the IT industry. Let’s see what they have to say about the remarkable day.
Lakshmi C, Managing Director – Human Resources Lead, Accenture India, said “Health and wellbeing have emerged as one of the biggest priorities. At Accenture, we encourage our people to embrace their mental well-being with dignity and compassion. We enable this by creating awareness and advocacy to break the stigma around mental health. We also endeavor to create psychologically safe spaces where our people feel comfortable enough to say that ‘I’m not okay’, and reach out for help via the resources and support systems that we offer.”
Harshvendra Soin, Global Chief People Officer, and Head – Marketing, at Tech Mahindra said, “At Tech Mahindra, we believe in ‘Wellness before Business’ and have rolled out several #WellnessFirst initiatives to build a happier, healthier, and more productive workplace culture. We have in place an Employee Assistance Program to provide 24*7 counselling support with expert counsellors and coaches for emotional and mental health concerns; Emotional Wellness Self-Assessment Tools like Emotional Wellness Test for employees to assess their stress levels; AMIGO Program and People Care Manager Program to sensitise managers and build psychological safety at workplace, among others.”
Sankalp Saxena, SVP & Managing Director, India Operations, said, “At Nutanix, we shape our policies to best suit our team members’ well-being. Our Employee Assistance Program and Child Development Support Online Health Engagement Program are examples of how we help our employees. By providing flexible work hours and a hybrid work model, we also encourage our employees to find the right work-life balance. In addition, we offer wellness days on a quarterly basis so our team members can take time off to rejuvenate and recharge.”
Suzanne Kinner, Vice President, Human Resources at Blackhawk Network India, said, “At Blackhawk Network, we believe in the holistic well-being of our people and empower employees to blend health and wellness routines with their work schedules and activities. In our efforts to strengthen organizational trust and foster workforce resiliency, we continue to communicate frequently with our employees and create an environment where they feel comfortable about having open and honest conversations on any matter including topics of mental health.”
Anish Philip, Chief People Officer at Movate (formerly CSS Corp), said, “Technology at the workplace and corporate culture are intertwined, and their impact on employee mental health and wellbeing continues to evolve. At Movate, pandemic or no pandemic, we have always been mindful of our employee’s mental well-being and have provided a healthy work-life experience. We follow the philosophy of FRIENTORSHIP – ‘Friendship + Mentorship + Leadership’ creating a pleasant working environment.”
Pranali Save, Chief Human Resources Officer, Icertis, said, “The pandemic brought about numerous changes in the way businesses operate. This marks a shift from a reactive to a more active focus on employee wellness. At Icertis, we have developed a Four Rings of Responsibility framework that places a stronger emphasis on our employees’ and their families physical and mental well-being ahead of business responsibilities. This helps them to prioritise, in an order of – themselves, their families, community, and business.”
Sqn Ldr Dimple Rawat (Retd), Director – HR, Barco India, “At Barco, we prioritise the safety and well-being of our employees and strive to establish a healthy work culture, where people feel safe and cared for. On the occasion of World Mental Health Day, we plan to organise an interactive, knowledge-sharing session on a digital detox. The session will be an opportunity for employees to share their queries and challenges and enhance their mental well-being over the longer term.”
Rajalakshmi Sivanand, Head of People & Culture, Compass IDC, “At Compass, we approach employee interventions with curated projects like celebrating employee milestones, specialised medical counselling sessions, employee wellness sessions, virtual yoga, along with other initiatives that support and boost overall productivity and performance. These cultural interventions have been introduced in line with our ethos that focuses on building a technology-enabled conducive workplace where dreams are made.”
Agendra Kumar, Managing Director, Esri India, “At Esri India, we have built a people-centric culture, where trust and mutual respect are important pillars. As we prepare to celebrate World Mental Health Day, we have launched an internal campaign, ‘Your Well-Being Mantra’. The pandemic accentuated the need for holistic wellness at the workplace and with this initiative, we aim to promote a culture of open conversations and idea sharing. This, we believe, will help in creating a more collaborative and positive environment for our employees.”
Katarzyna Kern, Global head of HR, ANSR, said, “The pandemic may have ended but the shift to new ways of working is here to stay. To succeed in the post-pandemic work environment, organisations must make work an ‘additive’ to its people’s lives, by providing them with a sense of purpose, belonging, progress, and fulfilment. Employees who are well and happy perform significantly better, and studies show that this leads to a 6x return on wellness investments. When employees are allowed to complete tasks at times that best suit them, it creates more harmony than balance.”
Pankaj Sachdeva, Vice President, Data Science & Analytics, and Managing Director of India Innovation at Pitney Bowes said, “At Pitney Bowes, we believe that employees’ holistic well-being is essential for creating a resilient and motivated workforce. Our Employee Assistance Program (EAP), which combines both telephonic and face-to-face counselling, is designed to assist individuals in dealing with their personal or professional issues more effectively.”
Anjali Mahajan, Regional Vice President at Amdocs, said, “Supporting mental health in the workplace has become a priority for all employers now. At Amdocs, we are committed to fostering a healthy, respected, and successful work environment and establishing a sense of belonging for all our employees. We offer an Employee Assistance Program in various locations that provide employees with access to affordable and confidential personal support, including mental and emotional support, consulting for personal or work-related problems, and more.”
World Mental Health Day 2022: How India Inc is prioritizing their employees mental wellness
The pandemic propelled many organizations to recognize that mental well-being is critical to their employees overall well-being. As these needs evolve and re-define the future of work, its imperative that companies continue to focus on helping their people adapt and thrive in a disruptive environment – one in which mental resilience and self-care will take center-stage.
On World Mental Health Day, we asked the technology leaders on how companies should invest in their people’s holistic well-being, what do employees seek from their employers in a post-pandemic world and how are organizations creating and executing their mental wellness policies in more innovative ways.
Anish Philip, Chief People Officer at Movate (formerly CSS Corp)
“Technology at workplace and corporate culture are intertwined, and their impact on employee mental health and wellbeing continues to evolve. We are a digital technology and customer experience services company, and we understand the value EX and CX hold in today’s new normal. However, at Movate, pandemic or no pandemic, we have always been mindful of our employees’ mental wellbeing and have provided a healthy work-life experience. We believe in being compassionate and responsive to the needs of our 11K+ Movators and have extended our support to them and their kin dealing with mental health concerns. We follow the philosophy of FRIENTORSHIP – ‘Friendship + Mentorship + Leadership’ creating a pleasant working environment.
Mental health has a profound impact on all areas of everyone’s life and is vital for one’s overall wellbeing. At Movate, we believe in striking the right balance between technology and people and therefore, we follow the Hi-Tech, Hi-Touch approach. I firmly believe that, to address mental health issues like stress and anxiety, technology alone does not help as it cannot replicate the human touch and reassurance. To address these, we have launched several initiatives for the holistic wellbeing of our employees. We have Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) and various wellness initiatives that help us create effective workplace strategies for healthier, happier employees.
Keeping our people-first approach, powered with human-centered technology, we have around-the-clock (24/7) employee assistance that provides counseling and aid to employees; HR chatbots automate responses to their queries, leading to faster issue resolutions. Besides, we run digital detox/digital quarantine to enable employees to find the right balance amid their hectic schedules and conduct virtual mindfulness sessions for their mental wellbeing. We often advise our employees to stay away from any digital device every once in a while, and allow them to spend quality time with themselves and their loved ones.
How Tech Service Providers Can Rediscover Themselves Through Rebranding
It’s been over two years since the pandemic. Two years of disruption. Two years of brands having to pivot and realign their strategies, and two years of near-constant change.
The pandemic forced brands, especially tech businesses, to deliver their services with a digital-first approach. If previously, they had relied on in-person experiences to drive impact, they now had to digitalize all those experiences. The result was that tech service providers did not just have to rediscover themselves; they had to rapidly reimagine themselves.
In this shifting landscape, some brands have armed themselves with four tools:
This year, brands have shown a marked shift toward simplification. Some brands have even gone as far as to ‘debrand’ themselves. The most famous example may be Facebook changing to Meta last year. A shorter brand name? Yes, why not? It’s simpler, and brands are thriving on simplicity these days. Autodesk, in September last year, said that it was ‘reimagining’ its brand with a ‘strong, simple logo.’ And the same year, TransferWise shortened its name to Wise, signifying through the simpler name that it now offered a more complex suite of services than just money transfers.
Decluttering is another trend that brands are utilizing to reinvent themselves. What does decluttering have to do with branding? Ask Pringles, which changed its logo by removing the hair on its mascot! In the brand’s words, that change was done keeping simplicity in mind.
And in keeping with the ‘simplify’ trend, brands are also seeking clearer messaging, moving away from obfuscating jargon to more subtle messaging. Aggressive campaigns are passe. Empathetic campaigns are in.
All of this means that many of the pre-pandemic ways of branding have now ceased to hold relevance. So, what better way for brands to become relevant again than through rebranding? Brands that have been nimble and agile, and adapted to changing customer expectations faster, are well-positioned to be the brands of the future.
Brands may want to rebrand themselves for many reasons, as with NIIT Technologies, which rebranded itself as Coforge after its acquisition by Barings. Sometimes, it could be as simple as a merger. Other times, because they needed to connect with customers better. But usually, brands that choose to overhaul their entire personality do so for strategic reasons.
In CSS Corp’s case, we found that after 26 years, the brand had evolved from its initial beginnings as a service provider to a strategic value partner. The brand is known in the industry for its disruptive digital solutions and insights-driven services approach. Our services portfolio has expanded and shifted over the last two decades. But our brand identity and perception hadn’t kept pace with its transformation to a digital-first brand.
Going deeper, we found that our existing brand identity did not reflect who we were and the pillars that had driven this transformation. We wanted our brand to be known as a catalyst for cultural transformation. Was our brand ready to evolve? We found that the answer was an overwhelming “Yes!”
No matter the reasons behind the rebranding, knowing the answers to the ‘why’ will establish the future direction of the brand at a more fundamental level.
Rebranding isn’t for everyone, though. It’s more than a new logo. It’s more than a brand refresh. It’s giving a brand the chance to start afresh. Utilized well, it’s a tool for positive change. It should be leveraged as an opportunity to infuse fresh thinking into the mindsets of all employees. It is an avenue to realize that while your problems may not disappear overnight, we will at least employ new means and energy to deal with them. Realigning the organizational aspirations with a new rallying cry can go a long way to expedite the transformation.
When we made rebranding a process of rediscovering ourselves as a brand, our new identity became clearer. It led to CSS Corp becoming Movate, a combination of ‘Momentum’ and ‘Innovate’. There are two key themes behind the company’s new positioning – Accelerate and Innovate. ‘Accelerate’ represents the company’s philosophy of helping clients achieve great outcomes with speed and stay ahead of the time curve. ‘Innovate’ represents its passion for solving complex challenges through the simplest and most creative solutions. And together, they form our new tagline, which is ‘Accelerate. Innovate. Movate.’
We also unveiled our new vibrant logo that represents our organization’s vision and what we stand for. The logo has three key elements: an inverted hourglass representing agility and speed, a hidden infinity symbol that signifies infinite potential and opportunity that the company brings to the table and the X Factor underlining the multiplier effect of the company.
From our experience, we found that, for rebranding to be a seamless process, we needed to quickly bring everybody on board with our brand’s new aspirations. This included being clear about our new messaging and ensuring that our employees understood the new positioning well.
Rejuvenating a much-loved brand is not easy. But as in the case of Evernote’s or Dunkin Donuts’ rebranding, you can always look at the past as inspiration for the future. You don’t want to lose all that valuable heritage – so make that the essence of what your brand has always been while adding or subtracting new elements. This ensures that the brand continues to resonate with customers. That’s something that we also felt was critical: CSS Corp has a long, proud history, and we wanted to showcase that history of excellence with our new vision of being agile and innovative. You don’t want your new identity to confuse existing customers: it should only make your value proposition clearer.
CSS Corp Bolsters Costa Rican Operations With 300 More Staff
Outsourced CX vendor CSS Corp will add 300 more employees to its operations in Costa Rica, where it runs two delivery centers.
The Dallas-based company hosted a job fair in the Costa Rican city of Heredia in the second week of September. All the new hires would report to duty in October.
The recruitment program will take CSS Corp’s total headcount in the Central American country to more than 2,000, as the BPO already employs over 1,600 people there.
“The new workers will join the company’s 1,650 employees who provide multilingual consumer and business support in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Italian to global customers,” stated the BPO provider.
CSS expanded to Costa Rica in August 2013 with a contact center in Heredia. Four years later, it launched another delivery center in Cartago, a small town about 12 kilometers east of the capital, San Jose.
While multilingual tech support is the major service it provides from Costa Rica, its recent hunt for gamers indicates that the company is also using the Costa Rican facilities to support gaming consumers in the United States.
CSS was founded in 1996 in India’s southern city of Chennai. Today it employs over 11,500 people across 20 global locations, including Colombia and China.
NGO launches drive to sponsor lab tests for transgender people
CHENNAI: Every six months, Siddharth Bharati has to get blood and hormone tests, an abdomen scan, chest X-ray and done to monitor the effects of the hormones he is taking. The 28-year-old man of trans experience, who began taking hormone therapy seven years ago, says the regular lab visits take a toll on his emotional health as well as wallet.
“I have undergone a breast removal surgery, look like a cis man and have beard. But I have not had a hysterectomy so the abdomen scan will show that I have a uterus. Often, the lab staff ask me uncomfortable questions and treat me differently. I was scared to walk into labs,” says Siddharth. “And the tests are also expensive.”
Many transgender people go through similar experiences. That’s why SAATHII , an NGO, in collaboration with CSS Corp, is sponsoring lab tests for transmasculine, transfeminine, and intersex people. The package includes CBC, lipid and hormone profiles, liver and kidney function tests as well as ECG, abdomen scan and chest x-ray for people who need them. The initiative aims to cover at least 100 community members.
“Trans and intersex people who are on or want to take hormone therapy have to get these lab tests done regularly. But many of them cannot afford it so they skip it and often continue with the initial prescription given by the endocrinologist, which can have an adverse impact on their health,” says Fred Rogers, project consultant with SAATHII.
Disrupting the CX contact center experience with AI-powered smart routing
How many times have you called customer support and received a satisfactory resolution in less than a minute?
Calling customer support can be a frustrating experience for most of us. True, things have evolved from those days when you were put on hold for prolonged periods while listening to piped Mozart or Beethoven. And IVR menus are more intelligently driven these days. Yet, calling a contact center is just not something we look forward to. And that’s because you know you must spend a lot of time explaining your problem or struggle with finding the right agent. And this is after you have navigated past the chatbot loop and IVR menus in the first place!
In today’s digital era, the contact center remains the pillar of human connection between a customer and a brand. And these connections matter now more than ever. In an increasingly competitive landscape, loyalty to a brand is often driven by great CX. Yes, product matters. Price matters. But trust me, service is equally important. Experience is everything. As a user, we crave highly integrated contact center experiences.
Yet, brands find it challenging to deliver seamless, integrated CX experiences.
And often, that’s because customers aren’t connected to the right agent. When every customer interaction is personalized and routed to the best agent, you create better experiences and optimize your contact center KPIs. Contact centers try hard, but they don’t always succeed in this.
But we are closer now to realizing that because that sort of personalized experience is possible through predictive routing. Highly customer-obsessed companies are increasingly putting personalization at the center of their CX strategies—hyper-personalization matters. When you assess the personality type of a customer right at the beginning of a call, you are laying the foundation for a great CX journey.
Think about it. A typical customer contact center has agents with different personalities. Customers come with their own unique traits and businesses. No two agents are the same. And no two customers are the same either. The question is: How can you capitalize on these different personalities to drive consistent, measurable improvements? – With AI-powered smart routing.
Personalize customer experience with AI-powered smart routing
“AI can be a valuable tool for customer service management and personalization challenges” – McKinsey, Driving Impact at Scale from Automation and AI, Feb 2019
These days, I see many companies investing in AI not for immediate return but for long-term digital transformation.
These are companies that recognize AI’s ability to improve their contact center performance. We have already seen many applications of AI in the CX space, whether through AI-enabled conversational assistants or AI-powered human agents. But what I see as being of immense promise is AI-driven smart routing or predictive call routing.
Predictive behavioral call routing isn’t new, of course. It has been around since 2014. And contact centers have, for decades, been using skills-based routing – pairing an agent with the right skills for the type of assistance the customer requires. But AI improves on this considerably, using behavioral algorithms gathered from thousands of data points to match callers with specific personality traits to those agents with those traits. Call it sophisticated customer-agent matchmaking in finding your contact center soulmate!
When contact centers use the data capabilities of AI to match customers with the agents that match their personalities, values, and behaviors, they are immediately creating deeper connections. Such intelligent pairing creates better relationships.
And better relationships mean a happier customer. We know what a happy customer means to a business! AI-powered smart routing also does more – it provides agents with context. With this context, a customer does not have to re-explain their problem because historical data shows the customer’s previous interactions. Predictive analytics determines, based on patterns and usage, what the problem may be. With this context, you also understand customer intent and emotion. The result?
AI-driven routing also ensures that the model learns from each interaction, improving and optimizing customer experience each time. This is something that we at CSS Corp have also been using through the AI-powered CSS EDISON® Routing Manager and we’ve found significant improvements in first contact resolution (FCR) rates and higher customer satisfaction scores.
The CX space has been ripe for disruption for a while now. AI-driven predictive routing is that disruption. This decade is the decade of the customer. Seamless, hyper-personalized experiences across all channels will make all the difference to the customer’s experience in a post-pandemic landscape. We are only just getting started on this journey.
HR tech is revolutionising the human resource management. But it’s not a panacea that will solve every problem. We ask HR professionals which functions have to remain human-centric.
HR tech has emerged as a category in itself in the technology sector. New HR technologies, especially automation, are revolutionising the HR sector. However, not every HR function can be automated for the same or better performance. There are several areas in HR where technology will not be much useful.
According to a KPMG report, five functions in the HR service value chain can’t be automated at all. These are: employee relations, change management, organisational effectiveness, people performance and whole system architecture. ETHRWorld interacted with HR leaders to understand the role of tech in HR.
There aren’t any second thoughts for Anish Philip, Chief People Officer, CSS Corp, on how technology is an enabler in providing HR leaders and professionals with a better, faster way to amplify HR functions.
But Philip says that it is important to understand that technology is just an enabler. What is needed for transformation is a mindset shift. Technology is incidental and will keep complementing human efforts. Ever since the pandemic forced many organisations to automate and digitise their processes, the ‘human’ element has been overshadowed by the increased adoption of new-age tools and accelerated digitization process, he says.
Philip points out that organisations must invest in employees’ holistic wellbeing to create a healthier workforce, a stronger culture, and better employee engagement. Employees are likely to stick around when they are provided with a safe and empathetic environment where they can voice their opinions freely.
CSS Corp follows the Hi-Tech and Hi-Touch approach to strike the balance between technology and people. The company organises frequent virtual leadership townhalls, assistance programmes, and counselling sessions to keep the employees engaged.
“Also, to ensure that all the employee voices are heard and acknowledged, we have regular face-to-face HR sessions and an option to write directly to the CPO. We also conduct frequent time-outs for different teams and business units to ensure that they are rejuvenated and don’t lose that human connection,” Philip adds.