Movers & Shakers Interview January 2014
Sandip Sen
Michael DeSalles
Global, Chief Executive Officer Principal Analyst
Aegis Limited Frost & Sullivan
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With more than 56 locations across the globe, Aegis Limited supports more than 55,000 employees
across 13 countries. Aegis Limited stands as one of the major players in the Business Process
Outsourcing industry. The company has placed customer experience (CX) management at the core of
its business strategy. The company’s solutions portfolio is structured to help clients become an originator
of memorable experiences for their customers. Aegis provides a suite of solutions for it clients, from
strategy and design to implementation and execution
Aegis services over 300 clients from verticals such as Banking and Financial Services, Insurance,
Technology, Telecom, Healthcare, Travel & Hospitality, Consumer Goods, Retail, and Energy &
Utilities. The company is wholly owned by Essar, a USD $39 billion conglomerate.
Frost & Sullivan Principal Analyst, Michael DeSalles recently sat down at Frost & Sullivan’s
Contact Center MindXchange Event with Aegis Limited’s, Global CEO, Sandip Sen. This was an
opportunity to discuss the company’s future and highlight
Aegis LISA
n- the company’s
DeSalles: Sandip, tell us about the history of Essar and Aegis Limited.
Essar is one of India’s leading business conglomerates, with revenue of over USD $39 billion. It has made significant investments across steel, construction, oil & gas, power & energy, Telecom, infrastructure and shipping. Each of these represents large, successful global multi-million dollar businesses. The Group has also strategically invested in services businesses such as Retail and IT / ITES. Over the last decade, Essar has grown through strategic global acquisitions and partnerships or through greenfield and brownfield development projects across 25 countries and 73,000 people. While the headquarters is in India, Essar has interests in Canada, North America, Africa, U.K. and Asia.
Essar acquired Aegis in 2004, as it was looking at the diversification of assets across global markets. They viewed the outsourcing and technology business as the one that could be of strategic investment in the services sector. Aegis was headquartered in Dallas, TX and was a struggling company when the group acquired the asset. It had revenues of about $62 million but was losing $17 million a year. The company had great clientele spread across verticals, domain capability and centers across the U.S. Someone said that it had a great bakery, but a poor storefront. Essar strategically invested in this business and through a judicious mix of organic growth and strategic acquisitions, Aegis has expanded its global footprint across 56 delivery centers and over 55,000 employees. Some of the key landmark acquisition includes PeopleSupport in Philippines. We knew the Philippines was a great delivery location for the U.S. due to its cultural affinity and customer- centric aptitude. We made an acquisition in South Africa – CCN, because we felt that it would be a good market for our U.K. customers and also Africa domestic markets. We also made an acquisition in Australia and New Zealand to provide onshore support for that market, also the USD $2 billion strategic JV in Saudi Arabia with Saudi Telecom Company.
We also made a foray into the Spanish-speaking world, realizing that it represents another large volume market. We now have centers in Argentina and Peru, which is very good for volumes from Spain and the U.S. We made a foray into Europe by setting up a greenfield contact center in Manchester. Looking at a global delivery model for the English-speaking world, we are providing onshore support in the U.S., near shore support in Costa Rica and offshore support in the Philippines. We also acquired AGC Networks, a leading information communication technology company with presence in the U.S., Asia, ANZ, Middle East and Africa. If you look at the last five years, we’re one of the fastest-growing BPOs.
DeSalles: Give us a snapshot of your background, career and current
responsibilities, please.
I’ve been in the technology, telecom and outsourcing industry for over 25 years now. I have an honors graduate degree in Economics and then an MBA from a premier business school in India. I worked for almost two decades in consumer and telecom sectors in India. As a marketer, I nurtured the company in several directions, both in the brand presence and product development space. In early 2001, I founded Customer First, India’s leading CRM service delivery organization and migrated several programs across the telecom, banking, retail, hospitality and technology segments. We sold Customer First to Aegis and thereafter I spearheaded global sales and marketing for the group as the Global Chief Marketing Officer. At Aegis, we had engineered a spectacular growth story interwoven with organic and inorganic wins. I relocated to Dallas for around 2 years as the President and Chief Operations Officer for the North American business and then the CEO for the Global Customer Lifecycle Management Business. In December of 2012, I became Global CEO of Aegis Limited. Overall, so it’s been a good 7 years with Aegis now.
DeSalles: What markets does Aegis target?
Aegis has crafted its comprehensive suite of solutions to specifically target the entire spectrum of business and customer experiences from ‘Managing Experience’ through our Customer Lifecycle Management solutions, ‘Enabling Experience’ with comprehensive technology solutions, to ‘Extending Experience’ through transformational back office outsourcing and shared services.
Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) is the flagship service offering of the company and provides cradle to grave, end-to-end multi-channel customer management BPO solutions. This includes multi-channel customer care, acquisition & retention, cross sell & up sell, activation, back office, technical support and collections. This service accomplishes higher customer lifetime value and improved return on investments through our global delivery model encompassing 13 countries. For CLM we are focused on telecom, healthcare, travel and hospitality, consumer goods, retail, technology and BFSI. In addition to these core verticals, we are seeing traction across emerging verticals such as gaming, energy and utilities.
We have made significant investments and developments after we took over Essar’s worldwide captive back office business and integrated them into our F&A, HR and procurement BPO practice. We have now been successful in winning third party business and non- linear BPO businesses across spend management, F&A, analytics and of-course our digital social media engagement solution – Aegis LISAn .
DeSalles:
What makes Aegis such a unique service provider in a very
competitive market?
Aegis with its presence in 13 countries and 56 locations is now a global organization providing a blend of business and industry expertise with a global delivery model covering on-shore, offshore, and near shore models.
A lot of our competitors are Indian BPO providers, however we thought it was important to build credibility and scale particularly in the buyer markets (Americas) - we’re the only ones with over 5,000 employees in North America. In a scenario wherein product lifecycles are shrinking, the end-user experience will be the only product differentiator for customer retention, brand loyalty, and increased customer lifetime value (CLTV). Near shore and on-shore centers offer tangible and intangible benefits around the availability of resources, complementary time zones, and cultural affinity.
Aegis has evolved from a provider of cost-effective services to a balance sheet partner focusing on end-user experience and business transformation. There has been a paradigm shift from cost-savings to increased focus on customer experience, quality and finding additional avenues to variabilize cost. Our serious approach to quality through the COPC partnership to manage global quality standard and compliance process has led to linking our quality programs to clients’ business requirements. We have Peter Bloom, the co-founder of COPC as our President of Global Customer Experience and Quality. He is responsible for driving the 1-Aegis concept – Based on the Quality Process Optimization (QPO) guidelines. This program provides a distinctive customer experience rooted with consistency, standardization and certification across all our 56 locations, which no other BPO provider has ever done as yet.
As an organization, we have innovated from a contact center outsourcing provider to a leader in customer experience management which focuses at engaging with a brands’ end customers while serving their expectations. We have made a significant investment in Customer Experience management through our Global Command Centre; Technology led Experience centers, Strategic Partnerships with COPC and Customer Experience Innovations. Lastly, we look at providing an integrated solution through social media, back office, analytics, enterprise business services and ICT businesses. These suites of solutions complement and augment our Customer lifecycle Management offering across geographies and verticals.
DeSalles: What is Aegis LISA and why is it so successful?
Over 70% of our customer base is active on the Social Media channels to listen and / or engage with their end customers. Social media is offering them a unique opportunity of monitoring “To brand” and “About brand” conversations simultaneously. Social Media also presents a distinct approach to tap into end user sentiments in real time, addressing and responding to service issues, sales opportunities and gathering market intelligence. It was important to integrate these social channels with the contact center and customer data – which is a major innovation in itself. We looked at various solutions. There are products which are essentially social media listening platforms. However, engagement was usually managed by a few players providing piece-meal siloed services offerings. So we launched this comprehensive solution to help our customer harness the full potential of social platforms and bring in real-world results. The acronym LISAn stands for Listen, Interact,
Socialize and Adapt. Therefore, using 4 distinct components of technology, analytics, execution and domain intelligence, this solution enables brands to include social media interactions as a strategic channel of customer communication and experience.
Integrating Aegis LISAn, with our analytics capabilities, we can uncover the type and
intensity of customer sentiments. For example in the hotel industry, is check-in time more important or is fast room service really the most important issue?
DeSalles: How has Aegis adapted to the changing needs of your clients?
A consumer interacts with a brand through 4 touch points - contact center, digital and social media, store and product / services usages. Our focus is to take a unified view of customer interactions across all these touch points. Aegis partners with a brand to enable them align their customer experience business strategy in accordance to their corporate objective and market needs (i.e. cost, necessity, differentiator or perhaps a living expression of the brand). The Aegis Experience Center / Global Command Centre, New Product Innovation, Aegis LISAnand the strategic partnership with COPC are the levers and cockpit to monitor and track customer experience measures across locations, product lines and channels. On the back office services front our relentless focus on quality, backed by proprietary tools, domain expertise and certification, enables us to deliver better levels of efficiency with a flexible and robust global delivery model. This improves infrastructure utilization and also reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO).
At Aegis, we are looking at a holistic solution encompassing customer lifecycle management, technology, back office services, analytics, social media engagement, process improvement and domain BPO services. All of our centers are interlinked and complied to provide this singular experience. It’s more than just a global delivery model. This would give our clients a better customer experience at a less expensive cost with additional revenue streams.
DeSalles: What adaptations in company strategy have you had to make as a
result of a recovering U.S. economy?
Aegis is expanding and creating jobs across the Americas. We are among the ten largest employers in nearly every North American city in which we operate. As a result of our enhanced partnership with clients across BFSI, healthcare and energy, we are planning to hire 5,000 employees at our U.S. and Costa Rica centers. The Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (IACC) recognized Aegis as the Overall Best Company and Best Company in the Innovation in the US at the 9th Indo-American Corporate Excellence Awards.
Our strategy has always been to leverage each geography for their domestic customer management BPO requirements and then look at off-shore based support. At Aegis, we look at an opportunity horizon that is global. Amid this initial recovery, we see two motivations that will drive future growth: first, corporations will attempt to investigate additional avenues to variabilize cost. Secondly the customer experience will increasingly become the key competitive advantage for clients and a differentiator in the market. This will accelerate the demand for on-shore. Aegis has 9 centers in the U.S. and we also acquired the Sallie Mae contact centre in Killeen, Texas. We have a good presence in Costa Rica and Peru.
We have heavily focused around vertically- led organic growth. The efforts have been fruitful and nearly every vertical has expanded its client engagement roster. Here are a few examples.
The pharmaceutical industry is a perennial leader in the Americas. Our engagements involve providing technical support and customer care for the client’s ecommerce sites and also cater to a loyalty/ambassador program that offers coupons to physicians.
The banking and financial sector is now recovering from the economic meltdown of a few years ago. Super regional banks, with operations across many US states, are a growing sub- vertical. Aegis has added two of these banks (among the 30 largest in the US) over the past year. We have also added a unique financial services company that connects people who want to invest money with people who want to borrow. With some fresh perspective being added to the business development team and a new subject matter expert helping to design our solutions, we are poised for growth in this important vertical.
Online gaming is booming. It has estimated that the global online gaming market was worth $35 billion in 2012 and will grow to $41 billion by 2015. Aegis has targeted this market as a key growth opportunity to provide customer care and technical support to gamers. Over the past year, Aegis has contracted with a Fortune 1000 online game retailer and three game developer companies. We are managing their end-customers from our centers in the U.S., Costa Rica, and the Philippines.
Deregulation is opening up the energy & utilities industry to competition. For the first time, business and residential consumers in the US have a choice for their energy supplier. Consumer choice has led many utilities to consider outsourcing their customer acquisition and retention, because these two skill sets are outside of their core competency. Many U.S.-based utilities are turning to Aegis to grow their customer base. Consumer spending is considered the growth engine of the US economy. When consumers spend, retailers benefit.
DeSalles: Which consumer trends will influence business growth the most
for Aegis?
During 2012 – 13, we were focused on consolidating our competitive advantages by strengthening business solutions, improving operating processes and rationalizing human resources. We are now looking at a three-tier business growth strategy focusing around enhanced penetration across verticals where Aegis has a strong forte and domain expertise to improve our share of wallet (i.e. BFSI, healthcare, telecom and travel). Secondly, we are entering new verticals such as energy, hospitality, consumer durables and gaming. And lastly, we are moving up the value-chain with non-linear & high-end services like social media, analytics, and business process Services such as F&A, HR and procurement solutions. This would mean a more robust and vertically-aligned back office services to significantly improve customer lifetime value.
DeSalles: What are the company’s plans for capital investment and growth
for the next 2-3 years?
While we have no specific timeline, we are again looking at a double cylinder growth strategy – organic and inorganic. We are looking at a couple of Asian locations as an alternative to the Philippines to support the untapped ASEAN support. Malaysia and Indonesia have great potential. While we have a center in Manchester in the U.K., we are strengthening our BPO efforts in Europe by expanding the footprint in Eastern Europe. In CALA, we are exploring another near shore location to complement our current presence. We believe that Brazil could be a good fit.
DeSalles: What does Aegis do better than any of your competitors?
Some of customer value propositions would include our serious approach to quality and customer experience. Since our partnership with COPC to manage quality standards and compliance, Aegis clients have realized a tremendous improvement in their customer satisfaction. Our integrated offering and global delivery model is an important attribute for a seamless and consistent customer experience. Aegis, with its presence in 13 countries and 56 locations, is truly a global organization providing industry expertise with a blend of on-shore, offon-shore, and near shore models. Finally, being in a people-centric business ensuring diversity and inclusive progress is an important attribute of our growth strategy. Diversity inclusiveness and sustainability reporting is definitely embedded across all spectrums of our business stakeholder, engagement process, environment and people development.
