Outsourcing: Chris Coles, President And CEO Of HyperQuality (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana: Would you give me a use case to illustrate what you are talking about?

Chris: There are two. One could be a product person and the other could be a call center operations person within a single enterprise. We are looking at a network of contact centers around the globe. The centers can be in the U.S., nearshore, in Europe, in South Asia such as India or the Philippines … [or in a Latin American country such as] Costa Rica. You’ve got a variety of vendor partners doing that. You have your own agents. If you are looking to conduct form creation, which is basically the evaluation score card, you calibrate against that. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Jay Leader CIO, Of iRobot (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra:  And whom do you expect would be solving that problem? Or is solving that problem or is trying to improve that situation? Is it the product life cycle management (PLM) vendors?

Jay Leader: In part. There are a whole bunch of them. I am sure you trip across lots of them – people who would like to sell into the PLM base, right? And the PLM vendors are investing to the extent that they can sell more of their own software or keep more of their license based with them. >>>

Outsourcing: Chris Coles, President And CEO Of HyperQuality (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana: So, let me see if I’ve got this right. You audit the objectives, then you edit the process as it pertains to those objectives, then you audit the tools and mechanisms of implementing those, and finally you audit the calls?

Chris: We audit the calls, then we take a look at the duty analysis and share with the client organization the observations, areas of improvement, and areas that are doing well, so that they’ve got that information. Based on their work with us and their own understanding, we can take action to adjust what is actually occurring in those interactions. >>>

Outsourcing: Chris Coles, President And CEO Of HyperQuality (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

About HyperQuality
HyperQuality is an independent quality assurance company with operations in the United States and India. Founded in 2003, the company uses customer satisfaction as a means to retain existing customers and acquire new ones. It does this by listening to customer–agent interactions, rating them, and giving feedback to clients on which policies or practices should stay and which ones should go. It delivers this intelligence through a SaaS tool called ClearMetrix. HyperQuality is a roughly $11 million company that has approximately 600 employees in both countries. It has served such clients as AOL, Travelocity, Guthy-Renker, and SkyMall.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Chris. Welcome to the Outsourcing series. Would you tell us a bit about HyperQuality to set the context of the conversation.

Chris Coles: Sure. HyperQuality is a company that is a little more than eight years old, and it started from a position of providing cost-effective, higher quality or more reliable, more objective tiers of agent performance. Typically, it’s measured to quality attributes that were held or managed by people in the contact center. That is really the roots of the business. Over the past eight years, it has evolved, as the market has evolved, to work on software solutions for management and workflow, and providing more process and consistency within the context of evaluation. It has also moved from call evaluation and agent evaluation into caller contact effectiveness. It plays to a larger audience within a company as to what exactly is being said by customers. It’s sort of a “voice of the customer” agenda to where is it in the offer or in the PO service or in pricing or in policy that is causing topics of concern or rejection on the part of customer or prospects? So, it is a fairly systematic approach that we take to really evaluating what is going on inside the calls and making that information relevant to a wide array of stakeholders within an enterprise or within a company. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Jay Leader CIO, Of iRobot (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What about customer service; how do you handle this?

Jay Leader: We do have customer service, and we have internal applications we use for this. We use RightNow technologies to manage customer service operations. Part of the call center is outsourced, but we do oversee service issues, obviously, and we mine the service database for quality problems and customer issues and those kinds of things. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Jay Leader CIO, Of iRobot (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

About iRobot
iRobot designs and builds robots that make a difference. iRobot was founded in 1990 when Massachusetts Institute of Technology roboticists Colin Angle and Helen Greiner teamed up with their professor Dr. Rodney Brooks with the vision of making practical robots a reality.

In 2010, iRobot generated more than $400 million in revenue and employed more than 600 of the robot industry’s top professionals, including mechanical, electrical, and software engineers and related support staff. iRobot trades on the NASDAQ stock market under the ticker symbol IRBT.

About Jay Leader
Jay Leader has nearly 25 years of international IT management experience. His areas of expertise include IT management, strategic planning and financial management, and infrastructure and security management. Prior to joining iRobot, Leader was CIO at Nypro Inc., a $1.2 billion injection molding and contract manufacturing firm with 66 locations in 18 countries. He was responsible for worldwide IT operations, managing support and development organizations in the U.S., Latin America, Europe, and China. Earlier in his career, Leader served in IT management positions at Coopers & Lybrand LLP, Groundwater Technology Inc. and Data General Corporation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in government and international relations and a master’s degree in business administration, both from Clark University. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 9)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana: Yes, you can’t have a baby crying at the top of its voice and be able to maintain a professional environment where you need to maybe be on phone and such. There are some issues.

Frank: Right, and not everybody is in the situation where they have created that personal space. I think we are in a transition, because I don’t think it is as simple as you might think. There is a great deal of stigma that also come over time. For example, I have a telepresence unit at home. I did a telepresence meeting with one of our clients. The client was in Europe. I was in North America. The call was at 4:00 a.m. in Chicago, and it was something like 11 or 12 in Europe. You have an interesting dilemma. They know you are in Chicago, but it is a formal business meeting. Do you put on a suit? Does a suit at 4:00 a.m. look weird? I don’t know. I put on a suit. They were amazed with the technologies a couple of years ago, but you get into this kind of funny question of, well, how should I show up? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 8)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: Whenever we see discontinuities in terms of technology in our industry, this opens up opportunities for entrepreneurship. It opens up what’s happening at the cusp. I would be curious to hear your thoughts on blue-sky opportunities that you see that playing to this trend of behavior at home merging with behavior at work and people’s expectations influencing what things should be like at work. What do you consider to be open problems? What kinds of applications would you want to see that you don’t see today? >>>