Melissa O’Brien — Executive Research Leader, CX, HFS Research[00:21]
Hi, good morning. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining this HFS videocast. I am Melissa O’Brien, an executive research leader here at HFS, and I lead all things CX, so customer experience. And today I am joined by Bharath Vasudevan, who is Global Chief Capability Officer at Tech Mahindra. Thank you so much for joining us, Bharath. Would you give us a brief introduction, please?
Bharath Vasudevan — Global Chief Capability Officer, Tech Mahindra[00:21]
Thank you, Melissa. Always a pleasure talking to you and the HFS team. I run the capability function for the business process services arm at Tech Mahindra. In that capacity, I’m the custodian of all our solutions, offerings, our competencies, so anything and everything that we’re taking to our customers is managed by me and my team, including our customer experience practice. I also run Navicus, a newly minted transformation engine within the BPS organization. Navicus, in a nutshell, is responsible for driving everything that is business transformation in our managed services. Navicus is also responsible for advising and guiding our clients in their CX transformation journey, and that’s what we do. Excited to be here today and looking forward to talking to you.
Melissa O’Brien — Executive Research Leader, CX, HFS Research[01:44]
Yeah, likewise, excited to get your perspectives on this. I think it’s such an interesting space to be watching right now, customer experience in general, and listening to the service providers that are delivering on these capabilities for some of the world’s largest enterprises. We recently released a Horizon report, which is our vendor assessment and analysis on service providers in the CX space, in which Tech Mahindra participated and came up on a leading note. So really very interested to hear some of your perspectives, Bharath, on a couple of the dynamics that we’re seeing happen that we learned from this study that we did. We spoke with a lot of your clients, clients of your peers and competitors, and we learned that one of the big things that’s impacting CX delivery now is the gig economy and leveraging that as a lever for talent in a place and time where talent is really crunched and you’ve got a lot of macroeconomic headwinds and other things that are impacting the talent pools. So I’d love to hear how you and Tech Mahindra are approaching this gig economy, how you’re leveraging it specifically for your CX delivery capability.
Bharath Vasudevan — Global Chief Capability Officer, Tech Mahindra[02:36]
Thank you. And you know, I think it’s a very interesting question and possibly one of the most exciting components of our CX journey today. Look, as we look to disrupt customer experience, as we look to take our clients through a transformative journey, we realize that we’re not going to be able to do it if we stick to traditional delivery models alone, right? While they’re important, while they’re relevant, I think it’s important for us as an organization to be able to go to where talent is, to be able to go to where we need a very high level of specificity in terms of the types of skills that we need, the geographics, the demographics, the skill sets. And the only way for us to do that is to leverage the gig, right? Delighted to tell you that among the mainstream system integrators, we’re probably one of the few companies that has our own crowdsourcing platform. We recently launched something called Populaye, and Populaye is Tech Mahindra’s own crowdsourcing platform. From sourcing the community all the way to making payment and other transactions happen, it’s end to end. It’s owned by us. It’s driven by our engine. It gives us access to a very wide community. We’ve started to grow our community organically. It continues to grow at a very rapid pace. And very importantly, it allows us to leverage the crowdsourced communities. It allows us to leverage gig without compromising on our fundamentals, which is being able to offer customer experience in a safe, secure, and reliable manner without compromising on integrity and security, right? So gig today coexists with our traditional delivery models. Whether it’s delivering from office or from home or from customer location, we’re able to coexist gig with that and provide the same seamless experience to our customers, which is really what they want.
Melissa O’Brien — Executive Research Leader, CX, HFS Research[05:21]
Fantastic. That’s great. And you know, we touched upon the people part. I know you guys are process experts, but excited about the technology like the tools there as well. And I think in Navicus, one of the things you’re doing is actually helping your clients develop and think through these journeys, right, that are increasingly influenced by and impacted by technology in particular. And with the dawn of GenAI, that’s starting to get impacted. So what is your take on tech usage and CX delivery in terms of how you find the right balanced approach between humans and tech?
Bharath Vasudevan — Global Chief Capability Officer, Tech Mahindra[05:37]
There’s no doubt that there is significant disruption happening in the tech ecosystem, especially when it comes to CX. I think we’re all seeing it. We’re able to leverage not just what we are organically building in terms of some of this tech, but a very efficient and effective partner ecosystem, right, whether it is CCaaS, whether it is automation, whether it is process mining, digital interaction services. Today we have a wide ecosystem of both organic capability and a network of specialist partners that we’re able to bring together, right? But I often look at these as ingredients, as the raw material. But for you to be able to produce the finished product, which is outstanding customer experience, I think it’s important for us to connect and understand our customers and what is it that they want to do with their end customers in terms of outcomes. And then understanding those outcomes and bringing all the tech at play to deliver to those outcomes is still a human task. It’s still a task that is intrinsically coordinating multiple variables, coordinating both structured and unstructured data, coordinating human emotions, coordinating customer sentiment and customer beliefs, value systems. So I think partnering with our customers and being able to define those outcomes and ensure that we’re able to do it in a manner that is ethical, that is in line with the values of these organizations, I think that is still a very human activity, right, whether it’s the advisory part of our organization that’s helping clients design the journey or it’s our agents and advisers who are helping execute to that promise. I think it is a very human activity, and to us, bringing in that human component while we leverage all the technology that’s at our disposal, really getting the optimal mix, is important. It’s paramount, and that’s really what we’re focused on as a CX organization.
Melissa O’Brien — Executive Research Leader, CX, HFS Research[08:14]
Fantastic. Yeah, I like how you stick with what’s the outcome that we want to accomplish, and completely with you on the human element. I think, and I hope, that technology can help us do our jobs better and be more human and get more satisfaction out of customer interactions and differentiation for businesses and things of that nature. Great, I think that’s all the time we have actually, but thank you so much for joining us, Bharath. Great insights. Thanks for sharing, and thanks to our videocast audience for joining us today. We’ll see you next time.
Bharath Vasudevan — Global Chief Capability Officer, Tech Mahindra[08:33]
Thank you.
Melissa O’Brien — Executive Research Leader, CX, HFS Research[00:21]
Hi, good morning. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining this HFS videocast. I am Melissa O’Brien, an executive research leader here at HFS, and I lead all things CX, so customer experience. And today I am joined by Bharath Vasudevan, who is Global Chief Capability Officer at Tech Mahindra. Thank you so much for joining us, Bharath. Would you give us a brief introduction, please?
Bharath Vasudevan — Global Chief Capability Officer, Tech Mahindra[00:21]
Thank you, Melissa. Always a pleasure talking to you and the HFS team. I run the capability function for the business process services arm at Tech Mahindra. In that capacity, I’m the custodian of all our solutions, offerings, our competencies, so anything and everything that we’re taking to our customers is managed by me and my team, including our customer experience practice. I also run Navicus, a newly minted transformation engine within the BPS organization. Navicus, in a nutshell, is responsible for driving everything that is business transformation in our managed services. Navicus is also responsible for advising and guiding our clients in their CX transformation journey, and that’s what we do. Excited to be here today and looking forward to talking to you.
Melissa O’Brien — Executive Research Leader, CX, HFS Research[01:44]
Yeah, likewise, excited to get your perspectives on this. I think it’s such an interesting space to be watching right now, customer experience in general, and listening to the service providers that are delivering on these capabilities for some of the world’s largest enterprises. We recently released a Horizon report, which is our vendor assessment and analysis on service providers in the CX space, in which Tech Mahindra participated and came up on a leading note. So really very interested to hear some of your perspectives, Bharath, on a couple of the dynamics that we’re seeing happen that we learned from this study that we did. We spoke with a lot of your clients, clients of your peers and competitors, and we learned that one of the big things that’s impacting CX delivery now is the gig economy and leveraging that as a lever for talent in a place and time where talent is really crunched and you’ve got a lot of macroeconomic headwinds and other things that are impacting the talent pools. So I’d love to hear how you and Tech Mahindra are approaching this gig economy, how you’re leveraging it specifically for your CX delivery capability.
Bharath Vasudevan — Global Chief Capability Officer, Tech Mahindra[02:36]
Thank you. And you know, I think it’s a very interesting question and possibly one of the most exciting components of our CX journey today. Look, as we look to disrupt customer experience, as we look to take our clients through a transformative journey, we realize that we’re not going to be able to do it if we stick to traditional delivery models alone, right? While they’re important, while they’re relevant, I think it’s important for us as an organization to be able to go to where talent is, to be able to go to where we need a very high level of specificity in terms of the types of skills that we need, the geographics, the demographics, the skill sets. And the only way for us to do that is to leverage the gig, right? Delighted to tell you that among the mainstream system integrators, we’re probably one of the few companies that has our own crowdsourcing platform. We recently launched something called Populaye, and Populaye is Tech Mahindra’s own crowdsourcing platform. From sourcing the community all the way to making payment and other transactions happen, it’s end to end. It’s owned by us. It’s driven by our engine. It gives us access to a very wide community. We’ve started to grow our community organically. It continues to grow at a very rapid pace. And very importantly, it allows us to leverage the crowdsourced communities. It allows us to leverage gig without compromising on our fundamentals, which is being able to offer customer experience in a safe, secure, and reliable manner without compromising on integrity and security, right? So gig today coexists with our traditional delivery models. Whether it’s delivering from office or from home or from customer location, we’re able to coexist gig with that and provide the same seamless experience to our customers, which is really what they want.
Melissa O’Brien — Executive Research Leader, CX, HFS Research[05:21]
Fantastic. That’s great. And you know, we touched upon the people part. I know you guys are process experts, but excited about the technology like the tools there as well. And I think in Navicus, one of the things you’re doing is actually helping your clients develop and think through these journeys, right, that are increasingly influenced by and impacted by technology in particular. And with the dawn of GenAI, that’s starting to get impacted. So what is your take on tech usage and CX delivery in terms of how you find the right balanced approach between humans and tech?
Bharath Vasudevan — Global Chief Capability Officer, Tech Mahindra[05:37]
There’s no doubt that there is significant disruption happening in the tech ecosystem, especially when it comes to CX. I think we’re all seeing it. We’re able to leverage not just what we are organically building in terms of some of this tech, but a very efficient and effective partner ecosystem, right, whether it is CCaaS, whether it is automation, whether it is process mining, digital interaction services. Today we have a wide ecosystem of both organic capability and a network of specialist partners that we’re able to bring together, right? But I often look at these as ingredients, as the raw material. But for you to be able to produce the finished product, which is outstanding customer experience, I think it’s important for us to connect and understand our customers and what is it that they want to do with their end customers in terms of outcomes. And then understanding those outcomes and bringing all the tech at play to deliver to those outcomes is still a human task. It’s still a task that is intrinsically coordinating multiple variables, coordinating both structured and unstructured data, coordinating human emotions, coordinating customer sentiment and customer beliefs, value systems. So I think partnering with our customers and being able to define those outcomes and ensure that we’re able to do it in a manner that is ethical, that is in line with the values of these organizations, I think that is still a very human activity, right, whether it’s the advisory part of our organization that’s helping clients design the journey or it’s our agents and advisers who are helping execute to that promise. I think it is a very human activity, and to us, bringing in that human component while we leverage all the technology that’s at our disposal, really getting the optimal mix, is important. It’s paramount, and that’s really what we’re focused on as a CX organization.
Melissa O’Brien — Executive Research Leader, CX, HFS Research[08:14]
Fantastic. Yeah, I like how you stick with what’s the outcome that we want to accomplish, and completely with you on the human element. I think, and I hope, that technology can help us do our jobs better and be more human and get more satisfaction out of customer interactions and differentiation for businesses and things of that nature. Great, I think that’s all the time we have actually, but thank you so much for joining us, Bharath. Great insights. Thanks for sharing, and thanks to our videocast audience for joining us today. We’ll see you next time.
Bharath Vasudevan — Global Chief Capability Officer, Tech Mahindra[08:33]
Thank you.
