<div><strong>Sandeep Soni'</strong>s association with Hero BPO began in May 2010. With its focus on social media and data analytics, the 13-year-old company is spread across 4 geographies with around 40 million customer contacts. The <strong>President and CEO of Hero BPO </strong>talks to <strong>BW Online's Poonam Kumar </strong>about how emerging technologies will have impact on business<br /><br /><em>Excerpts: <br /></em><strong>When did Hero's BPO business start and what is its role in the growth of the Hero Group?</strong><br />Hero BPO was established in 2000 and is a part of the $5-billion Hero Group which has over 30,000 employees and around 23 operating companies as its subsidiaries. Hero BPO has leveraged the Hero Group’s legacy and expertise into one of India’s leading BPO services provider.<br /><br />With over 13 years of experience in serving blue chip companies, we are spread across 4 geographies with around 40 million customer contacts for our clients. The Hero Group is one of the leading and diversified business conglomerates of India and Asia Pacific with key industries that drive economic growth, enjoying a leadership position in automotive industry, engineering and design, infrastructure, financial services, consulting, logistics, education and information technology.<br /><br />Hero BPO has won several awards and accolades over the last decade and some of them include Nasscom's top 15 Indian BPOs, CCA Global Excellence Award 2010 and Top 100 Most Innovative Companies 2009: NeoIT & Global Services. We are an ISO: 27001 certified company. <br /><strong><br />What is your focus area? What kind of services does Hero BPO provide to the customers?</strong><br />Our focus is on social media, as well as data analytics. We follow/implement a multi channel communication strategy with customers to ensure a seamless flow of excellent customer interaction and experience. Our analytics include the examination of business information using statistical analysis to discover and deduce historical patterns and make predictions to improve business performance. We apply classic and proprietary analytical techniques to customer data with clear business goals in mind and deliver findings that are both understandable and actionable.<br /><br />We, at Hero BPO believe that for increased customer satisfaction and growing market share one needs to maintain a perfect balance between online and offline media presence. With our experienced skill set and workforce, we make sure that the customer gets to choose from an array of languages and channels to communicate. This, we believe is the most important part of forging a more trustworthy relationship with the customers and adding value to overall company asset. <br /><br /><strong>Who all are your customers?</strong><br />Our customers choose to partner with us because we provide an effective solution for cost reduction, increase in revenues, and improved brand value for clients, thereby reducing their spend on advertisements, which helps to further bring down costs, as well as a continuous focus on improving customer experience and satisfaction.<br /><br />Our rationale is to focus on building brand advocacy which means optimising the chances of our client’s customers in having positive conversations about the client’s company. This is crucial because today brand perception and delivery is becoming all the more important for the survival of any business. Standing out from the crowd in a positive way makes it more likely that a business will secure opportunities from competition and increase customer retention.<br /> <br /><strong>What are your growth markets?</strong><br />For Hero BPO, the growth areas are spread across Europe, US, and Australia<br /><br /><strong>What opportunities do you see in India?</strong><br />Opportunity lies in the growth of two key areas - social media and data analytics. We believe that the chance lies in increasing customer interaction via stronger social media presence, effectively using the latest technology to promote customer experience and thereby improving upon company’s image and building on a stronger brand value. <br /><br /><strong>Some facts about the extent of social media in India...</strong><br />India has 45 million Facebook users and will have the highest number of users by 2015. The current male to female ratio is 73:27 while the highest usage is in the age group of 15-25 years, mostly from non-metros. Hence, such demographics give an idea about the kind of audience that exists and remains untapped. Media presence is saturated via traditional methods however, innovative ideas can help change the perception of a company when they cultivate an image according to the age group and help build a longer customer relationship.<br /><br /><strong>You have created job opportunities for multi-skilled people India and abroad. Can you elaborate?</strong><br />In an attempt to increase efficiency and slash recruitment costs, we are constantly training our employees to turn into a multi-skilled workforce. We provide training in different domains and skills to cater to the current requirements as well as the new integrated deals which the company is pursuing by providing varied options to the clients i.e. data, customer service, sales, back-end and voice skills by a single team. This has helped increasing efficiency, improving turnaround time and in turn gave us an efficient number of employees with an aim to optimally using our manpower for varied organisational requirements.<br /><br /><strong>What are the emerging technologies that will have impact on the business according to you?</strong><br /><strong>Context-based Services</strong>: The connection between where you are and what you are doing would drive the next wave of digital services. Services that know the users’ needs and wants inside out will take businesses ahead. These services need to assist the user in the next step of a decision they make or a query they submit. This will start form letting a brand know about what trends its loyal buyers and potential buyers follow, to letting those buyers know more details about the brand pre and post their purchase decision. <br /><br /><strong>Converging Data Architectures</strong>: Though keeping to the old approaches of structured forms of data may make the IT leaders feel in control, but adapting to a new approach to manage unstructured data can give a completely different control- the control to provide a whole new conception from a set of data. <br /><br />IT leaders should be evaluating their data portfolios for opportunities to rebalance the use of relational and non relational databases. Today’s data architects now have more choices for solving unstructured data problems than simply jury-rigging relational databases to do so.<br /><br /><strong>Industrialised Data Services</strong>: Companies dynamically look for data within and without their own organisations and even look for opportunities to share their data outside. But this data sharing is mostly ad hoc, approach needed next is the data management. This would enable the business to leverage data and gain insights that can facilitate better product development, customer loyalty and relationship management. <br /><br /><strong>Social-driven IT</strong>: The one window into the mind of the consumer, in the words shared by the consumer himself is via social media. This cannot only enable one to gain insights from online audience but also facilitates one to communicate customized messages. The initiating of leading organisations to take to social media has started but this still needs to go a long way.<br /><br /><strong>How do you think cloud technology is going to evolve further?</strong><br />The future of Cloud technology is huge. It has penetrated human lives to such an extent that it is becoming an intrinsic part now. In the next 5 years, we will see an exponential growth in mobile applications. Also, the untouched “big data” is another key area of growth in the use of cloud-based technologies not only to manage the huge amount of data but also to extract useful information and business intelligence data at anytime, from anywhere. Increasingly, IT companies of all shapes and sizes are turning to this new technology since it lessens the time spent on lower-value activities and allows the team to focus on bigger strategic activities that have greater impact on the business. Industry experts believe that this trend will only continue to grow and develop even further in the coming few years, since it is probably the most cost efficient method to use.<br /><br /><strong>How do you help customers adapt to shifting business environment using emerging technology elements?</strong><br />Most businesses work on a model which incorporates increasing the point of contact with the customers. For instance - footfalls in a mall/shop which is further drilled down to various other parameters such as revenue, sales, after sales and customer experience. So a typical business would be focused on increasing footfalls but may neglect customers who are also exploring via the internet media. We basically assist customers who have set up an alternate line of business via online shopping and explore such web enquiries and effectively help the client to close the leads and increase sales by converting those enquiries that the client is otherwise unable to focus on.<br /><br /><strong>What percentage of your customers rely on emerging technologies and others to drive business?</strong><br />These emerging technologies are yet to be deployed. Though, the next decade is likely to witness an increasing trend in the use these technologies and the future looks extremely bright for companies that will go on to incorporate such technologies. However, the current viability of most of these technologies is questionable since they are still in the nascent stages of development. At the most 5-10 per cent of our current customers would actually incur heavy expenditure to improve their business revenues.<br /><br /><br /> </div>
