Genpact has perpetually wrestled with its ambitions in the IT services space and its heritage and strength in the BPO market. The firm has a wealth of clients leveraging its traditional service lines, which span F&A, procurement, supply chain and a raft of other industry-specific business areas. It is investing in the Triple-A Trifecta of automation, AI, and analytics to keep pace with the changing nature of the emerging BPO demand from new clients. But existing clients should push Genpact harder to bring more digital capabilities into their back-office engagements and leverage the firm’s growing commitment to partner for growth using digital technologies.

Investments in automation, analytics, and AI set up Genpact to help your organization revitalize old BPO engagements

At a recent breakfast briefing, Genpact pushed a similar narrative to other firms in the space. It gallantly stands up and says, “We want to partner for growth with our clients, even if it means using advanced digital technologies to drive out revenue-generating old-school outsourcing work.” The difference is, Genpact is bringing client stories to market that prove its commitment to leveraging what we at HFS call the Triple-A Trifecta to drive efficiency, eroding its traditional bedrock. And a big part of this is from investing in existing engagements – transforming lift and shift BPO operations – rather than focusing on new client engagements.

The firm justifies this approach—which usually sees quick buy-in from marketing teams, but a staid response from CFOs and legacy service line owners—by citing examples of the horizontalization of business demands: growth, cost, and customer experience. And, if we’re frank, they must recognize that the days of old-school BPO are almost certainly numbered. True disruption cannot be driven by the marketing layer pulling at the strings of other functions. Genuine disruption needs involve deeper process layers under the business bonnet.

Genpact offers clients extensive BPO expertise and growing digital capabilities

But how are they going to market? And how could your enterprise benefit? Their model is strikingly similar to the HFS Digital OneOffice. The firm recognizes that it can leverage its expensive experience handling messy back offices to build digital-ready services that support the growth and experience ambitions of their clients’ front offices. Genpact executives are all too ready to admit the Cora platform doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that IBM’s Watson can bring to the party, but it does have a suite of technologies that can readily automate exceptions in processes, driving efficiencies and, in their view, driving out existing engagements out altogether. It recognizes that it needs to focus on specific process areas to succeed, so its modules include specific process areas like pharmacovigilance and know your customer (KYC) processes. Its scope remains the same. The back-office processes that it has merrily outsourced to Indian delivery centers in the past will now be analyzed and automated by new, shiny, digital solutions.

So, there’s a huge opportunity for existing Genpact clients to get on the phone to their account managers and push them for more. Candidly, the firm’s executives compare the conversations they are having with their clients. Four or five years ago, the conversation focused on reducing in-house headcount and costs through offshoring, but now the value proposition focuses on leveraging new technologies to shift the conversation away from cost reduction and toward revenue growth. And the firm is keen to keep building out its stable of reference engagements by transforming existing BPO operations, as well as engaging with new clients. In reality, the real success of the firm’s evolution is tied to its commitment to invest in existing clients – and in the process bring proof points to a market that has become more resilient to marketing hype.

Push for experiments and co-innovation to drive an ambitious roadmap while Genpact perfects its toolset

Unlike some of the other players on the pitch, Genpact has to push much harder to put its stamp in the digital space. Realistically, many of the early IT services players have ridden the digital wave for years, fighting the perception battle much earlier than Genpact. HFS’ research that examined perceptions in the digital technology strategy and consulting market, along with other key metrics, highlights Genpact’s struggle to push a coherent digital narrative. The market views Genpact as a BPO firm, much like it’s still wrestling with the idea that major consulting firms have capabilities outside tax and audit.

So, pushing on its heritage in the BPO space gives Genpact experience deep in its customers’ process value chains, which gives it the ability to tailor its solutions and build specific use cases rather than make generic statements. But here’s where the value can come in for your enterprise: The firm is working hard to prove itself. It recognizes that it will never be a major technology and consulting player and is instead pushing its core strength of process and domain expertise. It integrated its growing transformation services wing with its BPO capability, and it is looking for client organizations that will help leverage AI, automation, and analytics toolsets.

The firm’s commercial model is shifting to make better use of its digital capabilities. Genpact’s executives assure us that the company is looking for value-share (the new buzzword for gain share) outcome-focused engagements. Genpact is ready to put “skin in the game” with the right clients where the providers’ investments will boost client operations, but will also allow Genpact to build its capabilities through training staff and algorithms. However, like all firms touting outcome-focused models regardless of their new glitzy marketing names, sourcing managers must dig into the detail to find out just how much of the engagement is packaged under outcomes and how much is designed using traditional models. The reality for all players in the service provider space is that experimentation and innovation sound good to a room full of analysts, but the proof is very much in the pudding. All we can say at this stage is that Genpact certainly seems to be taking the approach seriously.

The Bottom Line: Genpact clients should get in quick to leverage the firm’s growing capabilities and appetite for co-innovation and “value share.”

For clients to make use of Genpact’s shifting focus, the opportunities sit with calling up account managers and executives and changing the conversation from the traditional approach framing existing engagements to instead push the provider to bring its growing transformation capabilities into play. It’s also time to push for a good deal—if Genpact wants to keep pushing its digital capabilities and develop its toolkit, it will need clients willing to evolve engagements, so don’t forget to push for your half of the “value share.”