Tag: blog

How the Russia-Ukraine Crisis Can Impact Customer Experience Management Services and Alternative Locations to Consider for CXM Outsourcing | Blog

With Eastern Europe serving as a major hub for Customer Experience Management (CXM), the Russia-Ukraine crisis poses a serious threat to service delivery. Now is the time for enterprises with large presences in this region to diversify delivery locations and mitigate risks.

Read on for our expert analysis on the state of CXM outsourcing here, the potential disruptions, and alternative countries to consider for multilingual customer service and tech support to ensure continued CXM services.      

Just as the world was looking to emerge from the global pandemic that caused a seismic shift in work and collaboration models, another highly disruptive crisis looms on the horizon. The recent geopolitical developments in Ukraine and Russia have caused the whole world to take notice, and with new sanctions kicking in every day, many are already preparing for adverse scenarios.

Given that this rift involves nuclear heavyweights in Russia and the NATO countries, the consequences could be far-reaching for the entire world. Consequently, these tense developments have created a lot of uncertainty and consternation for companies having a presence in the affected region.

Eastern Europe, which forms the immediate vicinity of Ukraine, is a major hub for delivering a plethora of customer experience management services for end-users both within and outside this region. Let’s take a look at the potential impacts to CXM outsourcing and alternative locations for CXM services.

Eastern European region CXM snapshot

As a strategic location for CXM services, eastern Europe offers strong multilingual capabilities, relatively inexpensive skilled talent, and cultural similarities and a minor time difference to western Europe. Leading global enterprises and Europe-focused players have a significant footprint in this region, putting them at risk in the current situation. The heatmap below illustrates the country-wise vulnerability index based on the number of delivery centers and corresponding CX agents present in each of them.

Screenshot 2022 03 23 084703

Potential CXM services disruptions and alternate solutions

Due to its skilled and relatively inexpensive IT talent pool, Eastern Europe is highly leveraged for its multilingual support for not only the regional languages such as Russian, Czech, Serbian, etc. but also for many of the major west European languages such as German, French, English, Spanish, and Italian. Poland and Romania also are sizeable talent sources for technical support.

Major cities in Ukraine such as Kyiv and Dnipro have been the most severely impacted by the armed conflict with Russia, and enterprises must accelerate Business Continuity Planning (BCP) measures to relocate affected CXM agents to safer parts of the country or outside of Ukraine to provide immediate relief.

If the conflict escalates beyond the borders of Ukraine in the coming weeks, major cities in Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria – which have the highest concentration of CXM delivery centers – could also be directly impacted.

We also envision a potential threat of cybersecurity breaches in Ukraine, inevitably causing collateral damage to its neighboring countries as well. While no one can foresee how the situation will unfold or its duration, enterprise clients must stay well informed and start devising backup scenarios and activate disaster recovery plans if needed. Although we believe the disruption will be temporary, a long-protracted war can’t be ruled out.

Alternative locations for CXM support services

Considering the uncertainty and volatility, let’s look at some viable alternate locations to help enterprises mitigate their emerging risks:

  • Multilingual customer support – Enterprises should consider new offshore and onshore locations to support major European languages for CXM outsourcing, as illustrated below:
    table
  • Tech support – The best strategy for enterprises is keeping their complex tech-related support in-house through onshore locations. However, for simpler queries, alternative nearshore locations such as South Africa and Egypt offer similar advantages that Eastern European locations can provide at lower price points without any dip in the talent pool. Even offshore locations such as India and the Philippines are suitable alternatives to consider as long-term tech support outsourcing locations

Mitigate risks

The last two years have taught enterprises the glaring importance of risk mitigation as a strategic priority to ensure service continuity, and this year seems to be behaving no differently. Customer experience has established itself as a true differentiator for enterprises of all sizes and shapes in every industry. As such, ensuring that customer support services run unhindered is vital for enterprises to achieve their business outcomes.

Now, more than ever, diversification of service delivery locations will become increasingly relevant to counteract the rising instability that the current geopolitical tensions between Russia and Ukraine as well as similar such events could bring in the future.

While we hope that this devastating humanitarian crisis comes to an end as soon as possible, enterprises that closely re-examine their service delivery footprints and proactively mitigate their risks will be better positioned to absorb any shockwaves that could potentially arise in the coming months.

With the continuing escalating events, it is important to stay informed on the latest developments in this region. Contact us at [email protected] or [email protected] to discuss your situation and solutions.

Discover more about the impacts to the service delivery ecosystem in our LinkedIn Live event, How to Manage the Ukraine-Russia Impact on Service Delivery.

You can also keep up on the impact of service delivery from Ukraine and the CEE region in our  resource center where you’ll find our consolidated coverage.

Short-term and Long-term Picture of Talent Shortage | Blog

Fiscal policy and spending, inflationary pressures, combined with the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic recession, resulted in our current overheating economy that demands a larger workforce. Combine that demand with the multi-year global talent shortage plus the social dynamics of the “Great Resignation” and early retirements post-COVID. This adds up to far more than a short-term staffing and attrition dilemma. At Everest Group, we have studied this situation and what it means for short-term and long-term business concerns. Read on to discover the reality of what’s ahead.

Read more in my blog on Forbes

Unleash the Potential of Design Tools: The Importance of Design in Software Development Goes Beyond UI and UX | Blog

Everyone wants the human-centric design and seamless experience that today’s software design tools can provide. But these tools have the power to do more than simply improve the user interface and experience. Design tools have evolved to drive standardization, productivity, and scalability across organizations. Read on to understand the importance of design in software development and learn why your enterprise should invest in design tools.

This is the third in our series on design and prototyping tools. For more on what capabilities enterprises should look for when selecting design tools from leaders like Figma, InVision, Sketch, and Adobe XD see our previous blog on Redesigning Design: Top Design Tool Capabilities to Look for in 2022.

Three lasting benefits design tools deliver

All enterprises allocating budget for design initiatives or selecting tools should view design tools with a wider lens. While improved product interface and design are the most tangible and short-term outcomes, using design tools can provide numerous long-term benefits, including:

  • Standardization: Design tools are used to standardize design practices throughout an organization to deliver consistent design and brand recall for all of its products. Enterprises are building design playbooks to familiarize employees with standard design practices and workflows. Large enterprises also have centralized design teams to manage and advocate design tool usage, design standardization, and best practices throughout the organization
  • Productivity: Design plays an important role in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Lack of prioritization and missing feedback often leads to broken workflows, imperfections, and reworking the design process throughout the SDLC. Design tools help to overcome these issues and increase employee productivity by enhancing the efficiency and stakeholder experience through the SDLC. Employees of global companies like Zoom, GitHub, and IBM are increasing their productivity by using design tools for effective collaboration, communication, prioritization, and performance tracking
  • Scalability: Using design tools makes it easier to create design systems that designers or stakeholders getting added to the workstreams can leverage. These design systems can include design principles and tokens, user experience (UX) development guidelines, user interface (UI) patterns, page templates, and user flows. This approach reduces the dependency on any stakeholder while scaling up or down

Following the lead of consumer-facing enterprises

Consumer-facing industries are taking a lead in investing in design tools that business-to-business companies (B2B) should follow.  

When we think about software product design, we instantly connect with software applications from the business-to-consumer (B2C) domain, where good design makes the product easy to use and delivers an enhanced user experience.

The same outcomes can apply to B2B software products. While consumer-facing industries have greater design tool adoption, enterprise-product companies like SAP and Salesforce have also increased their focus on design to reduce cognitive load and improve efficiency and experience.

The exciting news: Design tools are evolving from a project-centric UI-UX development tool to an organization-wide design workflow mechanism to drive standardization, productivity, and scalability.

Design tools are seeing increased traction from enterprises across industries with particularly high adoption in the technology, media and entertainment, and retail sectors. With digital transformation initiatives in industries such as manufacturing, utilities, and others, the investment in design tools will only rise.

Market players like Figma, InVision, Sketch, Adobe XD, and others currently offer industry-focused design templates, user flows, and reusable kits that designers can leverage as a base template instead of building from scratch.

Exhibit 1: Enterprises investing in design tools for long-term benefits

Picture1

The bottom line: End-user experience is only one of many factors to consider when purchasing design tools. Enterprises need to start thinking more broadly about how investing in design tools can improve efficiency and agility throughout the SDLC.

Stay tuned for our updates on this fast-growing space of design and prototyping tools. To share your thoughts on the benefits of design patterns in software development, please contact Ankit Gupta, [email protected], or Swati Ganesh, [email protected].

You can also discover more about the end-user experience in the gaming industry in our LinkedIn Live event, Gaming! What It Takes to Reach the Next Level.

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