The energy crisis in Europe and macro-economic headwinds are weighing on the outlook for IT service segments like retail, manufacturing, and automotives, analysts said.
The EU and UK may already be in the throes of a hard landing, and their firms are under severe cost pressure, said Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO of Everest Group.
View the event on LinkedIn, which was delivered live on Wednesday, September 14, 2022.
Sourcing teams strive to be more agile in how they support their business to meet rapidly changing needs🏃♀️. DNB, Norway’s largest financial services group, and its sourcing team developed an innovative and effective approach to its sourcing strategy by leveraging a DevOps model.
🎤Join this session to hear a conversation with DNB’s Robin Oberst and discover the shifts and improvements that DNB incorporated into its sourcing strategy. Our speakers will highlight the challenges faced by the company in its traditional sourcing approach and discuss how it adjusted its sourcing strategy to become more agile, collaborative, and efficient🌐.
Key questions our speakers will explore:
👉What challenges did the DNB sourcing team face in their traditional sourcing approach?
👉What did the team learn as they moved to a DevOps model?
👉What changes did they make to be more agile in the sourcing market?
Delivering exceptional customer experience has become essential to meet changing expectations post-pandemic. But various challenges – from data analytics to talent – can prevent companies from delivering the highly personalized interactions consumers crave. Learn what issues keep customer experience officers (CXOs) up at night in this blog.
The outsourced customer experience management (CXM) market has seen historic growth in recent years, rising about 12% to 14% last year to more than USD$100 billion, according to Everest Group estimates.
While COVID-19 increased demand for CX-related services, it was not the only driver. Senior business leaders now realize delivering exceptional customer experience is no longer a “nice to have” but a “must have” to grow their businesses and thrive in an increasingly competitive market, especially with tough economic times forecast.
As a result, greater focus is being put on customer experience (CX) and customer service (CS) leaders to deliver an exceptional experience. From our conversations with senior business leaders, they all face the following six similar challenges:
The CX or CS leadership role has gained greater significance in recent years as the world has awoken to the importance of delivering great customer experiences. While challenging, the obstacles these leaders face are not insurmountable with the right insights, data, and teamwork.
To discuss CX trends further, contact David Rickard at [email protected].
Learn more about how to optimize your customer experience strategy in our LinkedIn Live session, “How are Leading Organizations Delivering Exceptional Customer Experience?”
The expanded remote work environment post-pandemic and increasingly sophisticated security threats have compelled organizations to increase their focus on protecting contact center data. Learn how to build a holistic framework of best practices for technology, the business, and agents to shape contact center security in this blog.
Securing the landmine of customer data – from credit card numbers to health records – that reside in contact centers is a top concern for all businesses, particularly outsourced customer support. Data breaches can have serious financial, reputational, and legal consequences.
As new security threats constantly emerge and regulations change, strengthening contact center security is like aiming at a moving target. Now with the increase in remote work and more intricate ways to compromise data, this challenge has become more critical than ever. Let’s explore how it can be tackled.
Organizations should implement many different types of contact center security best practices related to the following three areas:
Contact center security protocols can vary based on the delivery model. The complexity has increased as contact centers have evolved from entirely brick-and- mortar-driven service delivery to remote service delivery with Work at Home Agents (WAHA) and BYODs, which allow agents to choose their work location and use their own devices to conduct work.
As organizations move from working at offices to remote locations, contact center leaders need to be more vigilant to keep customer data safe. While the WAHA and BYOD models bring more operational agility to the workforce, they add heightened security concerns around endpoint safety management and agent monitoring.
The below graphic illustrates how the complexity increases with the newer work models:
Illustration 1: Everest Group
Defining a BYOD security policy is critical to maintaining company security. Stakeholders from different departments are key to the policy planning process and bring important input. Leadership, human resources, finance, IT operations, and the security team should be part of a BYOD project management team and be asked to contribute to policy development.
Failing to routinely update machines with the most updated security patches is one of the biggest cybersecurity risks. Often this failure is simply due to not having enough IT resources. Even with in-center deployments, manually patching each device is a huge drain on time and resources. This challenge is further complicated in a remote/hybrid working environment where the device is off-site.
The patching process is a key part of vulnerability management. By employing best practices that expose any conflicts with existing systems configurations on which the patch is being installed, potential downtime can be avoided. For organizations with tens of thousands of network endpoints, remote patch management offers greater control over potential vulnerabilities caused by outdated patch versions, wherever they may be located on the network. This help ensures the threat is resolved as quickly as possible.
An automated patch deployment feature gives system administrators the ability to deploy patches missing in their network computers automatically without requiring manual intervention. While automated patch rollouts seem like a no-brainer for WFH and BYOD models, they also must be considered for in-center models to reduce the resource strain on the organization’s IT department.
Identifying the most critical security issues and software updates requires strong asset and software inventory management, which can be achieved using an automated patch management tool.
After that, creating a dedicated remote patch testing environment identical to the production system (using virtualization) can help run “smoke tests” to ensure behaviors/programs do not fail before moving to production. Alternatively, an initial test can be applied to less critical systems and expanded if they perform as expected. Even with a thorough patch testing program, organizations should have a contingency and rollback plan in case something goes wrong so systems can be restored to their pre-patched state.
While most security practices are agnostic of the model in which operations are run, WFH and BYOD models require an additional layer of security considerations to stay clear of any potential cybersecurity threats.
Contact center leaders must look at a holistic framework of technology, business, and agent best practices to shape their security organization. The below table encapsulates some of the strategies leaders should consider:
| In-center model | WFH Model | BYOD model | |
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Illustration 2: Everest Group
As infrastructure and networks grow in size and complexity, manually managing security and compliance checklists has become increasingly difficult.
Manual operations can result in slower issue detection and remediation, resource configuration errors, and inconsistent policy application, leaving systems vulnerable to compliance issues and attacks. Automating security update rollouts can help prevent unplanned and expensive downtime and improve functionality.
This approach needs to be complemented with good governance of the security landscape, ensuring the contact center is following the latest security frameworks based on their industry. Finally, organizations need to train agents on these standards and track and monitor their devices in real-time to ensure no security gaps exist that potential cybercriminals can leverage.
To discuss contact center security solutions in more detail, please reach out to [email protected] or [email protected].
Learn more about cybersecurity, incident detection, investigation, and response in our blog, “Is Managed Detection and Response (MDR) the Holy Grail for Cybersecurity Services?”
The pandemic’s effects on the digital landscape are long-lasting. Businesses are evolving to rely on the intelligent process automation market (IPA) to promote growth and keep up with competitors. Read on to learn more about five growing IPA trends.
In a world becoming increasingly reliant on technology, financial services organizations are digitizing and automating more processes to keep up with the competition. The intelligent process automation market, growing by about 20% across all fields, is now becoming ubiquitous.
IPA is defined as automation in business processes that use a combination of next-generation automation technologies — such as robotic process automation (RPA) and cognitive or artificial intelligence (AI)-based automation, including intelligent document processing and conversational AI. Solution providers are offering solutions across RPA, Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), and workflow/orchestration, as well as crafting innovative solutions such as digital Centers of Excellence (CoE) and investing more in as-a-Service offerings.
In our recent Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) – Solution Provider Landscape with PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2022 report, our analysts ranked IPA technology vendors and looked at the market for IPA solutions. Based on the research, the growth of IPA technology and reliance will expand to around 25% over the next three years.
The question of how to become faster, more efficient, and more resilient is the focus for just about any organization undergoing digital transformation. Very often, the answer to this question is at least, in part, intelligent process automation. In the near future, we can see five emerging IPA trends:
A greater proportion of cognitive elements is finding its way into the intelligent process automation market. About 60% of new automation projects involve more advanced cognitive tools such as IDP, conversational AI and anomaly detection. As the maturity of AI-based solutions increases, cognitive automation will be in greater demand. All-round adoption of IPA will be fueled by providers entering new geographies and organizations starting IA initiatives.
Although many organizations are trying to adopt intelligent process automation, the real question is if it can be scaled up or, in other words, if it can be brought across the organization. To help enterprises scale automation, solution providers are investing in expanding their partner ecosystem, strengthening technology capabilities, and enhancing their services portfolio.
Providers are also expected to help enterprises scale up through more effective change management and CoE set-up strategies. Aided by the prevalence of process intelligence solutions to form robust pipelines and orchestration tools to facilitate holistic automation, enterprises are better equipped now to move away from siloed applications of IA to scaled-up automation implementations.
Many organizations are experimenting with what they can do with citizen development, especially with the current talent shortage. Citizen-led development also holds the power to disrupt the current state of building automation and addresses the issue of talent availability. Solution providers are expected to invest in citizen development and low-code/no-code technologies enabling business users to build automation, consequently also addressing the talent shortage in the market.
Solution and technology providers are also expected to invest substantially in developing the low-code/no-code capabilities of their platforms to enable business users with limited technical exposure to build automation solutions on their own. A few solution providers are implementing citizen development programs in their own organizations and are planning to leverage the learnings to develop effective governance programs for enterprises.
Packaged solutions are gaining traction in the IPA market due to their ease of implementation and quick Return on Investment (RoI). Solutions for F&A are the most prevalent in the market. These solutions will need training on particular data sets to make them functional for a particular process, but they will speed up implementation. Providers are expected to take conscious steps toward promoting sustainable AI by developing solutions complying with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) parameters. They are also investing in AI solutions that are transparent about their working and usage of data.
There are a host of technologies, including RPA, conversational AI, process mining, and process orchestration in the IA ecosystem. Very often these IA solutions need to talk to the various other systems. Many IPA service providers are driving innovation and crafting new solutions to keep pace with the fast-moving IPA market and create a more holistic integration process. One such method is offering enabling capabilities like pre-built connectors for a faster and less complex implementation.
If you would like to learn more or discuss the intelligent process automation market and IPA trends, reach out to [email protected].
Learn how the healthcare industry is utilizing intelligent automation, digitalization, and telehealth as fundamental driving forces to transform and evolve in the webinar, How Intelligent Document Processing Is Transforming the Healthcare Industry.
The Ukraine-Russia War has hindered the progress of nations and businesses toward achieving global sustainability goals. Along with its humanitarian and economic consequences, the crisis has altered investment in energy, defense, and autocratic states. Can the enthusiasm the world felt just seven years ago about reaching Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) be recaptured, and what does the future hold for sustainability enablement service providers? Read on to find out.
The optimism around achieving SDGs, also known as the Global Goals, has waned since its adoption by the United Nations in 2015 with the promise of improving people’s lives and preserving natural resources.
Global sustainability initiatives have been impacted by the Ukraine-Russia War, the pandemic, and supply chain issues. According to the UN, income for about 60% of the global workforce declined during the pandemic. Supply chain issues further exacerbated the economic contraction and humanitarian losses by inflating food and fuel prices.
The war is impacting progress in accomplishing SDGs, directly through its humanitarian and economic consequences, and indirectly through its effect on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investments.
The following three major challenges have emerged due to changing perceptions about ESG investments in light of this crisis:
The Ukraine-Russia war has slowed down the global energy transition to renewables in two ways:
Increased metal and gas prices slowing renewable technology investment – The region is a leading supplier of “energy transition metals” like nickel, palladium, copper, and lithium. Russia accounts for 7% of the world’s mined nickel and 33% of the world’s mined palladium, which are used in electric vehicle batteries and to reduce automobile emissions, respectively. Ukraine is the largest supplier of noble gases like krypton, which is used in renewable technologies. The war has reduced the already sluggish rate of renewable technology investment by increasing the prices of these metals and gases.
Ramped up coal production and fossil fuel investment – Russia accounts for 17% of the world’s natural gas supply, which is perceived as a transition fuel globally. Before countries develop sustained sources of renewable energy, natural gas is replacing fossil fuels due to its lower carbon emissions. The issue is more pronounced in Europe, as about 80% of Russia’s natural gas is exported to Europe, fulfilling about 40% of Europe’s gas demand. The war has inflated gas prices. Although the US has agreed to supply more gas to the region, this raises the question of sustained gas supply and puts pressure on European governments to accelerate their net-zero strategies. The market is optimistic that Europe will transition to clean energy faster than expected because it needs to become energy self-reliant.
Slow investment in renewable energy has further dipped since 2018. While renewable energy requires patient and risk-tolerant investors, fossil-fuel investment generates considerable returns quickly due to the massive existing hydrocarbon infrastructure. In the war’s wake, fossil fuels are seeing an investment frenzy, with Canada, the US, Norway, Italy, and Japan increasing production. Many countries across Europe again are ramping up coal production to avoid depending on Russian gas. In the short run, it seems that the world has taken steps back on global warming
Before the war, steering away from investing in arms and ammunition was considered prudent and ESG conforming. However, the war has brought back fears of traditional warfare. Now, many nations have started taking a U-turn from this narrative by categorizing defense investment as sustainable for national security and global alliances. Many global defense suppliers’ share prices spiked upward the first day Russia invaded Ukraine.
Many European nations, including Germany, Poland, and Sweden, have announced increases in their defense budgets. SEB Investment Management, a leading asset-management firm in the Nordics, has revised its sustainability policy to allow some of its equities and corporate bonds to be invested in the defense sector. With skepticism associated with traditional warfare restored, investors and governments are bound to pump more money into arms and other defense products.
Investors are facing heightened reputational risks for associating with authoritarian regimes. The boundary between investing in government bonds of an autocratic state and investing in companies conducting business in/with the autocratic states is now blurred for investors. Western investors are striking Russia off their investment list, especially if the investment is ESG-compliant. This can dampen investments in other autocratic states and the businesses associated with them.
The war has temporarily derailed the uptake of renewable energy investments. To start, this will impact enterprises’ Scope 2 emissions reduction goals. Scope 2 emissions are generated from purchased electricity, and reducing these emissions requires enterprises to turn towards renewable electricity sources.
The sustainability enablement technology industry also will experience a short-term supply crunch of semiconductor chips, which is an important input in producing sustainability technologies.
To deal with these choppy waters, organizations will need help from consulting and technology providers to shift their sustainability mix to access net-zero strategies to still achieve their committed targets for global sustainability initiatives.
Moreover, as the sustainability ecosystem matures, forward-looking investments in scaling undertakings such as enhancing trust in data and reporting (avoiding greenwashing claims), scaling operations to accelerate net-zero targets, and creating persistent governance systems will continue to create momentum.
To further discuss global sustainability initiatives, contact [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected]
You can read more about the impacts of Russia’s military action in Ukraine on services jobs and global sourcing in our blog, “Will Ukraine’s Invasion Have a Domino Effect on Other Geopolitical Equations?”
Four-day weeks, on-demand pay, “rural” talent, and digital workers – in recent times, we’ve heard these ideas accompanied by seemingly teleological questions about work as a construct. With the work landscape rapidly evolving, questions arise about what the future of work will look like. Read on to learn more about how technology, location, and talent can be utilized to reconstruct our understanding of work, as well as gain positive lasting effects for companies.
With the rise of digital labor pyramid issues, the after-effects of a global pandemic, and the desire for more meaning in work and convenience through remote work, the work landscape is being met with a promising possibility of re-examining and perhaps reconstructing work for the new era. But, beyond the clarion call, what exactly does it entail? How do we understand the future of work trends and how do we design for them? Fundamentally, we can break it down into three distinct components: the how, the where, and the who. Let’s take a look at the trends shaping the future of work.
As we look at the adoption of cloud and AI technologies in the workplace, it becomes clear that the nature of work will change considerably. Robotic process automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based automation can significantly reduce the number of transactional tasks delivered manually, in addition to a few judgement-oriented tasks. The universe of tasks that can be automated or simplified will expand as these technologies mature and systems of record become more scalable, data pipelines are streamlined, and meaningful data itself becomes more accessible. This further enhances our ability to use data to derive insights and make informed decisions.
Everest Group’s future of work research shows adoption of these technologies has accelerated during the pandemic. More than 70% of organizations have invested in digital in the past 12 months, and about 50% expect to invest more in the next six to 12 months. Naturally, all of this has implications for the kind of work that then falls to the human workforce. With transactional tasks largely automated, judgement-, expertise-, and empathy-oriented tasks and related skill sets (including “soft skills”) become more important. But this is not a doom and gloom job-loss scenario; digital hardly ever is. Digital will also create jobs for talent who can acquire skills related to automation, AI, analytics, and the cloud.
In essence, the nature of work is changing. Enterprises will need to prepare for these eventualities by ensuring they have adequate skilling programs in place, starting by building skill taxonomies for the future, assessing current skill sets, and building out continuous learning, upskilling, and reskilling programs to enable a future-ready workforce.
Our research indicates that over half of today’s enterprises expect more than 40% of their employees to continue to work from home over the next two years or so. The pandemic has dispelled certain notions about remote work while highlighting its challenges. No longer do we question if remote work is efficient or even a possibility; video calling and conferencing tools, collaboration technologies, and the potential of the metaverse have meaningfully reduced the friction that deterred work from home. Employees have benefitted from shorter commute times, greater flexibility, and proximity to family.
On the other hand, 55% of enterprises see employee engagement as a key challenge in a remote-only environment, and 50% see organizational culture as difficult to maintain with full-time work from home. The middle ground (hybrid work) seems destined to be lasting among the future of work trends. Enterprises need to redesign physical and virtual workspaces, embedding information security as needed and changing management styles to accommodate the hybrid working model.
As remote working has gained more acceptance and mature economies have aged, the time has also come to de-link talent from geographic locations. Beyond the US and India, emerging technologies such as AI and automation have sizeable talent pools in multiple countries across the world. The enterprise of the future should seek to leverage this talent, applying similar guiding principles as those for hybrid work with an additional focus on local compliance, managing cross-cultural teams, and customizing policies.
As work and workplaces evolve, so will the talent we need. We already spoke to the need for a geographically distributed and suitably skilled talent. The future workforce will also be diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Diversity will, in some ways, be necessitated by the need for a variety of in-demand skills sets and changing labor pyramids, but beyond that, it is a fairly well-established fact that diverse workforces simply do better and bring a variety of perspectives to the table, enabling enterprises to serve their clients better too. From this perspective, in the digital age, organizations will need to bolster their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, define concrete goals and metrics, and mobilize internal and external resources to help meet these goals. DE&I will be among the trends shaping the future of work to watch for.
As we look to fulfill specific skillsets for future work, organizations will also do well to consider contingent or temporary workers in addition to traditional permanent ones. Contingent workers are in greater supply now and will offer a good pool of talent to tap into, particularly for in-demand and next-generation skills. This will require careful consideration on the part of enterprises, as not all roles will be suitable for fulfillment. Even among the contingent workers, some skillsets will be in higher demand.
Attracting talent also will pose a challenge for enterprises. Today, a large portion of contingent programs are run through procurement. A holistic program run by HR (including contingent and permanent workers) that can communicate the employer value proposition well, help with engagement, and leverage data to improve program management might just be needed as we transition to this new construct.
The future of work is neither esoteric nor mundane – it is somewhere in between, and it is here already. It will require us to question well-established paradigms, rethink the framing of work in our lives, and push us to redesign and reconstruct. Enterprises that move the needle now stand to gain a lasting competitive advantage.
To learn more about the future of work trends, contact us or reach out to Everest Group Partner, [email protected].
At Everest Group, we help clients navigate their digital transformation journeys and provide assistance in implementing digital technologies. Currently, we are offering assistance to companies that are launching Web 3.0 and Metaverse initiatives with a complimentary outline of definitions and use cases. Request a summary.
Everest Group Partner Nitish Mittal will be participating in the opening panel of GSA’s Festival of Sourcing in which they’ll discuss the current state of the sourcing industry in a session titled “An Analyst View of the Current State of the Industry.”
Everest Group is a proud sponsor of the IT Procurement & Sourcing Summit Nordic, which takes place from 8 – 10 June at the Radisson Blu Scandinavia Hotel, Copenhagen.
David Rickard, Vice President, Sourcing Vendor Management & Business Process Services and Ricky Sundrani, Vice President, Pricing Assurance will be leading a Challenge Your Peers workshop on “How sourcing can impact your ESG strategy.”
David and Ricky will also be joining the pre-event ice-breaker, the networking dinner and all interactive sessions and presentations on both days.
Use our discount code (VIPCLIENT@EVERESTGROUP) to get a free Standard Event Pass (value €2,595) here.
Financial services organizations are digitizing and automating more processes to keep up with competition, and intelligent process automation (IPA) — which has been growing in use about 20% across all fields — is now becoming ubiquitous. Market research firm Everest Group in a recent report ranked IPA technology vendors and looked at the market for process automation.
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