Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[00:26]
Thank you, Mark, and great to see you again, Sunil. Hope you’re well. So I know you have some exciting news to share with everybody regarding CSS Corp, which we’ve known for many, many, many years. Perhaps you could tell us what you’re doing.
Sunil Mittal — CEO, CSS Corp[00:42]
Thanks, Phil. You’re right. And thanks for having me here. Indeed, so we are very excited to share this great news that we’ve decided to rebrand our company, which includes the name change as well. And so we’re pretty excited with how the process has been, and now we’re almost on the finish line and very close to announcing a new name, and that will bring a lot of change within the organization as well.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[01:09]
Awesome. So what is your new name, and why are you rebranding to it?
Sunil Mittal — CEO, CSS Corp[01:18]
Yeah, so let me start with why, and then we can talk about the name, Phil. So we have been in the business for almost 25 years, and we started off as more of a company with a trusted and reliable brand around consumer and enterprise support services. But over the last few years, the business performance, the cultural outlook, and also the service portfolio has significantly shifted to also include cloud and digital platforms. We’ve been able to get a lot of industry recognition, a lot of awards, with additional solutions on our platforms as well. And we recently acquired the gig-based platform company called Directly, which gives us more futuristic capabilities that the clients are asking for. So that’s on the service offering front, Phil. A lot of transformation happened. Then if you look at our diversified global organization base, there also we have transformed quite a bit. Now we are in almost 10 different countries. We launched new centers in Romania and Colombia in the last one year. In fact, in Costa Rica, we are the third largest service provider employer there. And on the headcount front, we’ve almost doubled in the last 3 years to almost 12,000 now, and we are proud to say that 43% of our workforce is outside India today. So which shows our evolving global identity and culture. And to top it off, the growth has been phenomenal. The year before we grew 25%, last year we grew 28%. So to summarize, we’ve been able to transform fundamentally — with services, with global scale, and also with growth numbers. And so now what we realize is that, despite the massive transformation the company has seen, many of our stakeholders and prospective customers and talent are not fully aware of the developments in the organization. So, as we know that legacy perceptions need to be built upon, hence we needed to rebrand to signal our internal transformation and the good work done by the teams to the world. And we felt that we needed a new name that could be a visible symbol of change, a flag bearer of a new purpose and ambition, Phil.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[03:35]
So what does the new name signify?
Sunil Mittal — CEO, CSS Corp[03:39]
Yeah, so the new name signifies two themes, Phil, which are agility and innovation. On agility and accelerate, we realized that the most ambitious and successful companies today need to be ahead of the curve, and accelerate represents our philosophy on helping clients achieve great outcomes at speed. And the second theme around our branding is innovation. At its core, innovation is all about solving the most complex challenges through the simplest solutions. And at CSS Corp, innovation is our beacon, and every employee strives to be an innovator at heart. So, with these two themes reflecting who we are at the core and what we stand for, we have come up with a name that actually signifies what I just spoke of, and the new name is Movate, which is a combination of two words, momentum and innovate. And together, this signals a company that puts speed, agility, innovation, and disruption in every aspect of its business and operations, Phil.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[04:42]
OK. So, the vision behind your Directly acquisition you mentioned obviously plays into the new branding. How does that strengthen your whole go-to-market? I mean, you’ve been driving this company for a couple of years now, and it’ll be interesting to hear how you’re going to drive this acquisition and drive things forward with the new momentum of the new brand.
Sunil Mittal — CEO, CSS Corp[04:46]
Yeah, thanks, Phil. I think that’s a great asset that has got added to the CSS family, Phil. And if you look at it, it’s a 100% pure gig platform where we hire experts who don’t need any training, and since they’re experts, they are solving the client’s problem with very high satisfaction levels. So if you look at the CSAT and the NPS of the transactions that are handled by the experts — because they’re passionate about the technology, they know it inside out — the experiences are much better than the traditional models. And what we have also seen is that it’s completely an outcome-based pricing model, where the customer pays and the expert gets paid only on an outcome-based model. And so that’s the second thing. The third thing is around the agility and the ramp-up. So in the typical setup, you need to hire people, train people, and then if it’s a seasonal ramp or a product launch or whatever — but in this kind of a setup, you can actually scale up 2X, 3X in a matter of days and hours, Phil, because of the network that we have built up with the gigs. So this is actually part of the real transformation, and when I talk to the clients directly, Directly’s customers have a lot of respect for this platform, with the value that this is able to bring in to their end consumers and customers, Phil. So pretty excited to have this. And also, it is a strategic fit, because of the kind of logos that it is opening for us — it would have been difficult for us to have a seat at those tables without having an innovating offering like that. So it is actually bringing us into those strategic logos. It is helping us create those larger deals that we want ourselves to be in, and solving clients’ problems proactively. So, yeah.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[07:07]
OK. So you’re immersing gig capability into your, as you call it, human-centric technology experiences. So do you feel that the Directly app is really bringing new capabilities, new access to talent, in this economy? How effective are you finding it?
Sunil Mittal — CEO, CSS Corp[07:26]
Very effective, Phil. So today, one of the top 3 companies on the planet is using that for multiple product portfolios in their companies. One of the top 3 telecom companies is using them to disrupt how they’ve been doing things traditionally in the past. And one of the companies is actually looking at routing 100% of the volumes through the gig platform, to see whatever can be solved by gig gets solved by gig, and the rest of it is solved by the traditional dedicated center models. And the human-centric design is very important for us, because we believe that we need to solve the transactions with empathy, with personalization at scale, and also bring in that insight and expertise. So I think it brings everything together with this platform, because we are getting very high-quality talent through this platform, and that too at a global scale, Phil.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[08:25]
OK. Well, this has been really exciting, hearing about Movate and moving forward as a business. And what do you think is the one thing next for the firm, as you roll out the new brand and tell your clients everything? What do you think the future direction is going to look like?
Sunil Mittal — CEO, CSS Corp[08:46]
See, from a future direction point of view, we want to execute this seamlessly in terms of innovating for our clients. We will continue to grow aggressively. We have been growing in the range of 20 to 25%. Our aspiration is to continue with that number, and I think for us, logically, given where we are today, a billion dollars in terms of size and scale is what we are aspiring to be in the next 6-7 years. And that’s what we’re targeting — for that to be a billion-dollar company by 2030.
Phil Fersht — CEO and Chief Analyst, HFS Research[09:16]
By 2030. OK. Well, I hope you get that. I know a lot of people have worked with you guys a lot over the years, and you’re a very popular company to work with. You’ve worked very hard for your clients, and I really wish you the best of luck with the rebrand. Sounds great. It’s been fun talking to you about this over the last few months and finally getting this launched onto the market, so, Sunil.
Sunil Mittal — CEO, CSS Corp[09:42]
Absolutely. Thank you, Phil, for all your support over the years, and thank you for supporting us. Yeah.
