Are you measuring what matters most to the customer?

Aegis is a billion dollar services company with 55,000 employees from 85 nationalities. A truly global enterprise, the company is recognized as a leader in IDC's Marketscape for Worldwide Customer Care BPO in 2013. Sandip Sen, Global CEO, Aegis took the company from less than $60m to $1b during the time he handled various senior marketing and management roles at Aegis. Sandip is a serial entrepreneur and has been in the technology, telecom and outsourcing industry for over 25 years. He sits on boards of several Aegis subsidiaries and is a member of the Global Executive Committee of the Essar Group. Excerpts from an interview with Ed Nair, Editor, Dataquest and Global Services-

What has been Aegis' growth strategy?

First is our continued focus on organic growth. We have been strong in BFSI, travel, health insurance, and telecom verticals. We are looking at how to penetrate more into these verticals; for example if we are serving three banks now, we are looking at taking it to six.

Next is our focus on new verticals. The utility vertical is an example because it is now a deregulated industry.

We look at growth in terms of geos also. We added two new geos-Peru in Latin America and Manchester in UK. We have Costa Rica which is now running out of capacity, so we are looking for another near-shore location. So are Philippines. We are looking at adding more in the region, so maybe Malaysia is our next choice.

Traditionally, we have been a voice company, but now we are doing far more work in processes like F&A, spend management, and social media. As an organization we have become much more integrated.

Operationally, what are your key focus areas?

On the cost side, we have been looking at improving agent efficiency. We constantly look at how to sweat our assets more by improving seat utilization and such. We are also obsessed with improving customer excellence. We have a partnership with COPC. In fact, we have also developed an offering called QPO-quality process outsourcing. It serves as a clear differentiator for us.

Interesting. Tell me more about QPO.

We start with the basic question-are you measuring what matters most to the customer? We started this internally first. We redesigned our quality forms to set up internal quality scores and external quality scores. Our clients helped us perfect the model further. QPO deals with measuring and managing customer loyalty and customer experience.

The market for BPO related to horizontal processes is somewhat slowing.

We are in a unique situation of having the potential to grow our horizontal processes because we were new to this market. Business process transformation was a buzzword. If you are handling only one process, it is a limitation. Therefore we stress on integrating business processes. We do the transformation but we don't call it by that name. For example, for Saudi Telecom, we handle end-to-end processes wherein we do business process transformation.

What about technology capabilities?

Technology has become a great enabler and there is great potential in exploring synergies between business processes, technology and much more. We have a wing of Aegis that handles the entire ERP function at Essar Group, our parent group. We were among the first ones to implement SAP Hana.

What's your India footprint?

We are the largest service provider in India. We have a strong presence in telecom. We have two banks that have outsourced customer management function and both are with Aegis. We leverage tier-2 and tier-3 locations like Jamshedpur and Chhindwara respectively. We don't do outbound. We do high-end work for top tier clients who are willing to pay premium. For example in telecom, we only handle GPRS, 3G. Again it is about sweating the assets more. If you run the domestic business well, it can be profitable as well.