Impact sourcing is an ethical outsourcing practice that intentionally focuses on maximizing societal and business outcomes ♻️. Over the years, we’ve witnessed growth in impact sourcing globally, specifically in customer experience management (CXM) by both traditional providers and impact sourcing specialists👥.
Impact sourcing delivers many benefits for workers, the communities around them, and businesses employing them; however, there are also barriers.
📢Watch this LinkedIn Live recording as our analysts and Global Mentorship Initiative CEO, Jon Browning, break down the benefits impact sourcing workers experience and the challenges businesses face when recruiting them.
Any organization interested in learning more about sustainability, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives, and impact sourcing and is looking to get started with an initiative of their own should attend💻.
What questions does the event address?
✅ What are the key trends and drivers leading to impact sourcing demand? ✅ What are the key benefits of impact sourcing for providers and buyers of outsourcing services? ✅ What are some significant impact sourcing initiatives by traditional service providers and impact sourcing specialists? ✅ What are the recommendations for implementing impact sourcing and challenges faced by buyers and service providers? ✅ What is the future outlook of impact sourcing?
Strategies for Customer Experience (CX) Success in an Uncertain World
The global customer experience (CX) outsourcing market has grown tremendously. The current market size is more than US$105 billion, and CX remains a key focus area for enterprises.
However, the CX market is now facing a new set of challenges influenced by the increasing need to provide differentiated experiences to customers – while managing mandates to reduce costs.
Join our CX experts as they explore key trends and provide recommendations on what to prioritize and how to navigate the challenges to deliver exceptional CX.
What questions will the webinar answer for the participants?
What is the CX industry outlook for 2023 and how can enterprises reduce costs?
What are the potential challenges and trends that will impact the CX industry?
Which actions can enterprises and service providers take to build their CX strategies for 2023 and navigate potential challenges?
With the advent of chatbots reaching human-like sentience and mannerisms, and banks being at the forefront of adopting conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI), the question arises whether ChatGPT threatens the likes of Google, other AI platforms, and the non-critical workforce in the technology and services industries. While its promise remains high, will the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector unearth ChatGPT’s full potential? Read on to find out.
ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm and has become a trending sensation overnight. This AI-powered innovative chatbot has taken the world for a spin and is generating a big buzz among millions of professional users experimenting with it. Microsoft has also invested billions in the tool.
But what is ChatGPT? Developed by OpenAI, it is a generative language model that has been trained over large volumes of text to generate human-like responses. Like a search engine, it curates answers for queries but is designed to answer in a more conversational flow that goes beyond chat and delivers a richer experience with an intelligent chatbot. The AI engine generates solutions for all sorts of queries, including R, Python, and VBA codes.
Let’s explore ChatGPT’s potential to impact the future of AI and its usage in the technology and services industry, particularly by financial institutions, banks, and insurers.
What makes ChatGPT approachable and different to use?
The amount of data used to train the GPT model
Human-like interaction
Versatility and variety of responses
Low data input requirements
Highly scalable
Adjustable coherence and adaptability
What does it mean for banking and financial services?
Banks can use ChatGPT in several ways to enhance their operations and customer experience. Here are a few examples:
Assistive chatbots: ChatGPT can be used to build natural language-based chatbots that can assist customers with common inquiries, such as account balances, transaction history, and bill payments. The chatbot also can guide customers through more complex processes like applying for a loan or a credit card. It also could help increase agent efficiency by aggregating requests by type to the appropriate departments
Automation of simple and repetitive tasks: ChatGPT, along with other conversational AI models, can be used to automate simple and repetitive tasks, such as customer service interactions, order processing, and data entry. This can increase efficiency and lower costs for service providers and their clients
Customer service: ChatGPT can assist the human agent in answering customer questions, improving efficiency and response time, and providing more accurate and detailed information. This can improve customer service and satisfaction and employee onboarding
Marketing: Banks can use ChatGPT to analyze customer data and build personalized marketing campaigns that target specific customer segments. It also can generate personalized responses to customer inquiries by fine-tuning the model to a specific client, enabling it to generate tailored responses to their needs
Decision Making: With the right database connections and integrations, ChatGPT can be used to analyze data to generate insights that can be used in decision making
Learning and development: ChatGPT can be used as a learning and development tool. It can be trained with a company’s pre-existing data to create learning tools and modules and as an onboarding tool for new employees
Current mapping of ChatGPT to the BFS BPS value chain
Current use cases of ChatGPT in banking and financial services (BFS) and business process services (BPS) operations are limited. Building capabilities around conversational AI and incorporating ChatGPT into offering portfolios can help BFS and BPS firms unlock innovation. Enterprises such as Microsoft, AWS, and Meta are developing their capabilities internally or through partnerships with conversation AI specialists.
Industries leading in innovation investments are becoming early adopters of ChatGPT. Microsoft is reportedly investing US$10 billion in OpenAI and plans to introduce it along with its Azure OpenAI service bundle in the Bing search engine. This furthers Microsoft’s stake in the market, where it already has a working partnership with OneReach.ai, one of the market’s leading conversation AI providers, since 2019.
Current capabilities still have hurdles to overcome
Although ChatGPT appears to have multiple uses and strengths, some limitations include:
Biased and inconsistent output: Content generated by ChatGPT depends on the trained data, making it prone to biases. It is difficult to achieve the same level of consistency in output generated. Cases requiring more context and complexities may lead to biased and inconsistent output. When training for complex operations such as trade reconciliation, exception management, and know your customer (KYC) remediation, the subject matter experts (SMEs) must be well-versed with minute details, which can’t be guaranteed when using ChatGPT
Standardized data requirement: ChatGPT cannot process different file types or extract information from them. A lot of consumer data is often received in varied file types and formats that require intelligent operations to skim through and sort, which is beyond ChatGPT’s current text-based data capabilities
Largely text driven: Its text-based generated content can fall short of expectations for the coming generation of users that desire more visual stimulation. Dashboards and descriptive analytics have become a basic requirement of all transaction-intensive industries that ChatGPT cannot fulfill
Limited ability to handle sensitive customer information: ChatGPT may not have the necessary security and privacy measures to handle sensitive customer information, such as account numbers or personal identification numbers. With the ever-evolving compliance norms varying across industries, it doesn’t yet have the capability or the secure framework to process, analyze, and interpret KYC or transaction data
Outdated information: ChatGPT’s information database is limited to data up until 2021 and can result in outdated opinions and facts. Deals, news, and updates in recent years aren’t recorded. For a constantly-evolving industry like BFS, where new deals and contracts dictate the capital markets, this makes the source of information unreliable
Ethical concerns: As artificial intelligence improves, the lack of proper credit for AI-generated content is becoming more widespread. The distinction between content created by AI and content created by humans is becoming less clear, causing confusion, mistrust, and ethical dilemmas
System Integration issues: Incorporating new technology with outdated systems can be difficult due to potential incompatibilities and differing protocols or data formats. This can decrease efficiency, add complexity, and impair interoperability
Where will the future take ChatGPT?
While ChatGPT’s future looks promising, it is too early to say the product will revolutionize banking and financial services. Before it gets integrated into banking products, it needs to overcome several hurdles, including:
Responding to competition from rising financial technology (FinTech), regulatory technology (RegTechs), and other AI/Machine Learning (ML) service providers
Meeting regulatory, compliance, and cybersecurity requirements
Catering first to front-office requirements for low-critical queries and then for more complex queries and back-office operations that have not yet been explored
Maintaining high operational efficiency, accuracy, and customer satisfaction
Expanding variation in output categories
Overcoming the lack of recent factual data
Though ChatGPT use cases are promising, it is still a machine learning model that needs modifications to be used in real-world applications. The model would have to consume specific industry data to build domain depth and be programmed to manage contextual nuances for various tasks. Its ultimate success would depend on end customers’ user experiences.
While the road is being paved for innovation, ChatGPT still has a long way to go before making strides into banking and financial services.
To further illustrate the nature of results and drill down on the capacity of ChatGPT, below are some screenshots for financial crime and compliance queries (platforms, codes, advisory):
Everest Group says growth in CXM outsourcing will continue as enterprise seek to maximize customer retention in face of recessionary climate.
DALLAS, January 10, 2023 — Following pandemic shutdowns in 2020, the global outsourced customer experience management (CXM) market spiked in 2021, with the fastest year-on-year growth (12-14%) in recent history, according to Everest Group. Growth of the CXM outsourcing market, which currently stands at 31% of overall global CXM spend including in-house contact centers, outpaced GDP growth in all economies in 2021 after a decline in 2020.
Everest Group says the CXM outsourcing market will continue to grow, albeit at a more normalized rate (7-9%), despite the uncertainty presented by a looming recession. In fact, the recession will act as an indirect market driver; to compensate for low buying sentiment, enterprises will focus on customer service and retention, thereby spurring continued growth in CXM outsourcing over the next few years.
Additional growth drivers will include the following:
A considerable shift of contact center operations toward a hybrid delivery model, with greater emphasis on gig and work-at-home (WAH) workers to enhance delivery capabilities
The increasing use of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to decrease reliance on full-time equivalent (FTE) employees while delivering better CX outcomes
A foray of first-time outsourcers into the CXM market, especially driven by the small and midsize business (SMB) segment, which will continue to grow rapidly.
“The future of CXM service delivery will be defined by a combination of locations, technology and delivery models to create unique solutions that are flexible, scalable and tailored, based on each enterprise’s requirements,” said Shirley Hung, partner at Everest Group. “The service providers who are growing faster than the market average are those who offer end-to-end CXM solutions that include advanced digital tools, front- and back-office services, and advisory and consulting services to provide bespoke solutions tailored to their clients’ requirements.”
Everest Group also notes interesting geographic dynamics in the CXM market, including:
Numerous mergers and acquisitions primarily focused on expanding geographic presence.
Multiple new multilingual hubs emerging in the Eastern European region
The linguistically diverse ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) region being considered for Asian language capabilities
Africa experiencing increasing demand from customers in the MEA (Middle East and Africa) region to provide quality CXM and from other enterprises who want to diversify their service delivery footprint by shifting work away from India and the Philippines.
These findings and more are detailed in Everest Group’s recently published report, “Capturing the Post-pandemic Resurgence: Customer Experience Management (CXM) State of the Market Report 2023.” In this report, Everest Group examines the CXM market in the wake of the pandemic, factors affecting market growth, and changes in service delivery models. The report also addresses differentiating factors for service providers, buyer satisfaction performance, key investment themes, major acquisitions, and future trends in the CXM market.
About Everest Group
Everest Group is a leading research firm helping business leaders make confident decisions. We guide clients through today’s market challenges and strengthen their strategies by applying contextualized problem-solving to their unique situations. This drives maximized operational and financial performance and transformative experiences. Our deep expertise and tenacious research focused on technology, business processes, and engineering through the lenses of talent, sustainability, and sourcing delivers precise and action-oriented guidance. Find further details and in-depth content at www.everestgrp.com.
Key Issues for 2023: Rise Above Economic Uncertainty and Succeed
As we look toward 2023, economic uncertainty is prime and center. Rising inflation, interest rate hikes, and GDP contraction – matched with low unemployment rates and high talent demand – have left business leaders unsure of what to expect and how to prepare for 2023.
Join Everest Group’s Key Issues 2023 webinar as our experts provide insights into the outlook of the global IT-BP industry and discuss major concerns, expectations, and key trends expected to amplify in 2023.
All the data is based on input from global leaders across enterprises, Global Business Services (GBS), and service providers.
Our speakers will discuss expectations for 2023, including:
The outlook for global services
Top business challenges and priorities
Changes in sourcing spend and service delivery costs
In-demand digital services and next-generation capabilities
The evolving strategy for talent, locations, and the workplace
Superior customer experience management (CXM) is even more vital in tough economic times when enterprises want to retrench. But through strategic CXM outsourcing, organizations can generate significant business value now and emerge stronger when conditions improve.
Geopolitical tensions causing supply-side disruptions, the highest inflation numbers since the 1980s, and rising interest rates creating tremendous inflationary pressure on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth have put many of the world’s largest economies on the brink of recession.
Importance of enterprises’ investments in CX during an economic downturn
During recessions, consumer sentiment and confidence drastically fall, making it even more crucial for enterprises to deliver superior customer experiences. Continuing to invest in CX can be worth it for these key reasons:
Customer retention is cheaper than customer acquisition: Failing to maintain good customer service during a crisis can reduce customer confidence, severely impacting brand trust. Superior customer experience is a must-have to retain customers and enhance their lifetime value. This becomes even more important during recessions when gaining new customers is more difficult. In uncertain times, people double down on brands they trust rather than risk spending on unknown products that may disappoint them
Experience management is necessary to understand customers’ changing needs during a crisis: Customer expectations change in a down economy. Understanding the effects of fast-eroding customer confidence and the impact of emotions on customer relationships is crucial to addressing changing customer wants and needs. This shift also represents an opportunity for enterprises to gain a competitive advantage by addressing changing customer requirements
Superior CX helps organizations avoid price wars: Consumers are even more price sensitive during recessions. By delivering superior CX, an organization can stand out without having to cut prices to compete
CXM outsourcing is a viable option during an economic downturn
In this challenging environment, enterprises’ immediate goals are to reduce costs, streamline operations, and achieve quick and tangible benefits from all their investments.
A strategic third-party service provider can help organizations achieve these objectives, enabling them to better manage the downturn and accelerate their recovery. Providers can deliver the following benefits:
Cost effectiveness: During recessionary times, demand for major enterprises’ goods and services takes a hit, affecting top lines, while fixed expenses remain stagnant. Through CXM outsourcing, organizations can convert these fixed expenses into more variable costs representing huge cost savings for many organizations. Selective outsourcing is one of the many effective strategies to control a company’s budget without compromising work quality
Flexibility in managing resources: A global slowdown can force enterprises to reduce hiring, freeze salaries, or reduce their workforce. CXM outsourcing offers the flexibility to ramp resources up and down depending on need without having to lay off employees and hurt overall organizational morale
Enhanced efficiency: Third-party CXM providers offer extensive pooled experiences, knowledge of existing and upcoming technologies, and awareness of best practices in the marketplace. These teams of experts can provide valuable insights to guide an organization’s CXM strategy and maximize efficiency
Providing the necessary digital push: Investing in internal digital initiatives in uncertain economic times becomes difficult – even when long-term benefits are clear. Leveraging a third-party provider to support digital CX initiatives in a strategic partnership-led model can allow enterprises to accelerate their digital road maps while avoiding upfront costs through innovative pricing models
To thrive with a looming recession and emerge on top when economic conditions improve, enterprises need to look at their business strategies now and evaluate the potential opportunities to outsource all or part of their customer experience management services.
Enterprises should begin by identifying key areas that could be outsourced, such as lead generation, payment collections, and technical support. As they achieve success, organizations can then expand contracts – striving to outsource their end-to-end CX services while strategically engaging with service providers to generate significant business value.
Top Healthcare Customer Experience Management (CXM) Services in North America
The healthcare Customer Experience Management (CXM) market has grown steadily after the pandemic due to the increasing focus of healthcare enterprises on member and patient experience and care management. The rising demand for customer engagement touchpoints for a more frictionless experience for customers has led many healthcare payers and providers to offer digital-led CX services, either by building in-house capabilities or by engaging with CXM service providers. Providers have strengthened their non-traditional and non-voice channel offerings and enhanced their digital CX toolkits in automation, analytics, conversational AI/chatbots, omnichannel delivery, and cloud-based contact centers.
However, enterprises are increasingly looking for more strategic and transformative long-term CXM services and solutions to support growing enrollment, improve experiences, and address the talent shortage.
In this research, we assess 19 healthcare CXM BPS providers featured on the Healthcare Customer Experience Management (CXM) Services in North America PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2023. Each provider profile provides a comprehensive picture of its service focus, key Intellectual Property (IP) / solutions, domain investments, and case studies.
This report provides a detailed analysis of 19 healthcare CXM service providers and includes:
A relative positioning of the providers on Everest Group’s PEAK Matrix® for Life Sciences Operations Services
A comparison of the providers’ capabilities and market shares
Everest Group’s analysis of the providers’ strengths and limitations
Scope:
Industry: healthcare
Geography: North America
The assessment is based on Everest Group’s annual RFI process for the calendar year 2022, interactions with leading healthcare CXM service providers, client reference checks, and an ongoing analysis of the healthcare CXM services market
The PEAK Matrix® provides an objective, data-driven assessment of service and technology providers based on their overall capability and market impact across different global services markets, classifying them into three categories: Leaders, Major Contenders, and Aspirants.
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.
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:
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.
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.
