The building blocks of exceptional customer service!

Building blocks of building customer service from the seminal work - Outside -in paraphrased in my words!

• Service Strategy 
  • Best defined as intended experience, what is the kind of experience that you wish to extend to your users. Is it going to be COSTCO or Apple? Is it going to be an Airtel or LG? It is important to clearly define what is it that you wish to extend to your customers as experience. The strategy, therefore, is an expression of intent more than anything else.
• Understanding of the customer
  • Knowing who your customers are what is it that they want? What their expectations are from the organisation? Understanding customer expectations is only the half job done. What is it that they call good service? Archetypical segregation of customers is a good way to devise a strategy that will fit different kinds of customers that have to be dealt with. The methods that can be deployed range between
    • Solicited feedback and other unsolicited ways.
      • Surveys and using various opportunities to interact with the customers to form an understanding about them.
    • Communicating the findings with the staff is another equally important thing to do as only after they understand what the expectation is, will they be able to deliver on them.
• Service Design
  • Everything between envisioning and implementation of interactions that create the customer experience. It is about being intentional about designing the process, people, technology, platform, and inter-departmental exchanges to tailor the kind of customer experience that the brand wants to extend. It also is about opening a lab kind of a concept in which, feedback from customers and understanding of the staff and the partners on the impediments to excellent exchange between the customer and the company can happen, to be discussed and solutions to be found. It is about making sure that no bad design makes it to the real customer world. It is about bringing intentionality into the entire process.
• Measurement
  • Is a discipline that makes the organisation measure the quality of customer experience by assigning relevant metrics to it, that matter the most to customers, in a consistent manner across the organisation. The end goal of measurement is to give actionable insights to the organisation uncovering areas of improvement, alongside given pointed descriptions of :
    • What must be fixed immediately?
    • What should be improved over time?
    • What should be maintained at the same level?
    • What should be touted as the strength of the organisation?
  • The goal is to understand what are the elements in the organisation that help customers be loyal and then create systems to make sure that those things are taken care of.
  • Another important utility of measurement is to put the quality of customer service parameters right up there with business metrics like sales and profitability.
• Governance
  • If customer experience strategy is game-plan, governance is the referee and the rule book. The job is to constantly monitor and weed out bad causes from creeping into the customer service design. It is responsible for holding people accountable to the commitment to serve. It can be the conscience keeper and at the same time also a practice that has the ability to steer things back on track, if and when things go wrong.
• Culture
  • A set of shared values and behaviours that focus employees on creating exemplary customer service. Culture is the bloodline of any organisation, getting it right is most daunting and time-consuming. It requires constant reinforcement. Three key steps are
    1. Hiring - Hiring for value fitment, “hire for will and train for skill”. Commitment to service, customer centricity are a few traits that must be evaluated in hiring people.
    2. Socialising - The stories of the great customer experience must be told and re-told. The objective is to find the right rituals and the routine to reinforce the need to value customers and act in keeping with the highest standard of customer service delivery in mind.
    3. Reward - It is important to link both formal (promotion, raise, confirmation) and informal awards (spot awards, RNR) to customer experience. Behaviour consistent great customer experience must be rewarded.

Framework for delivering exceptional customer experience!

Customer centricity gets spoken about a lot, don’t believe me? Tune in to any corporate briefing and you’d invariably find executives speak highly and passionately about customer focus, customer experience, and how they find 'excellent service delivery' to be central to their business strategy. Take a brief moment and do your own brief research first, resume going through this article after that.

You back? 

Thank you, know that you are very welcome here!

Tell me, did you not find the observation that I made about organisations uttering ‘customer centricity’ valid? Let’s take this experiment a little further to validate the claims made by these corporations. This research doesn’t have to be extensive or exhaustive. Just take a mental note of the brands that you searched, earlier. You’re most likely to find that these brands, which appear so similar in their assertions on the need to build a customer-centric organisation, seem vastly different, disjointed, and staggered all over the place, in reality, don't they?

Why might that be, you may ask?

If I may borrow from the seminal book on customer service,"Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of your Business”, written by the tremendously talented duo, Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine- No department or single individual does anything intentionally to inconvenience the customer but it is the collective effect of the unconnected, unintegrated and ununderstood actions that cause customers to sometimes get exposed to sub-optimal versions of the organisation. (** I’ve paraphrased from memory, this is not an exact quote from the book)

Organisations, nowadays are increasingly becoming complex, encompassing and encapsulating all manners of diversities and differences to cater to a wide range of and ever-evolving customer needs and desires. In an unforgiving hyper-competitive market organisations are forced to blindly chase their growth targets with maniacal focus and in doing so, in more cases than not, customer-centricity becomes the first casualty. Successful organisations are those that do not let aspiration of growth interfere with their commitment to delivering stellar customer satisfaction, look at Amazon, Apple, Zappos, Hyatt etc.

There is merit in understanding what are the elements that separate these spectacular successes from the forgettable failures. Or in other words, how does one weave customer obsession into the very fabric of their organisation? What are those building blocks that leaders should lay, own and put a lot of effort and focus into preserving? Having spent a lifetime in the customer services industry, I can tell you that - there is as much science in getting customer experience right as there is art in it. I like to think of building customer obsession, as a two-part process. 

1. Disciplines that go into making an excellent customer experience machine.

2. Tacts to building pervasive customer obsession.

# 1: Disciplines

Outstanding customer service departments must focus on organising their efforts around the below three aspects of its set up, with precision and passion.  

• Mechanics of service: It is about getting the arithmetic of the department right. 

• Demand estimation (forecasting): What is the expected volume of service, use historical trends from either your own organization or from your competitors to create a demand chart/flow.

  
  

• Staffing: Taking into account the time needed to handle each class of transaction that customers reach the corporation for, combined with service level aspirations (95/5). Derive from them the kind of support hour that will be required to be made available and therefore how many support staff must be onboarded and of what skillset.

  
  

• Tech stack: Omnichannel/CRM/Social Media stack and physical infrastructure that needs to be augmented to make the support desk functional.

  
  

• Training: Support staff without a proficient understanding of the products and the services that they are to support, will not be able to deliver an excellent customer experience. Hence, intelligent knowledge management systems and practices will need to be developed and operationalized.

  
  

• Quality management: You need to be able to measure if the intended level of service is actually being delivered, and there comes the quality management practices and systems. Shortfall identified by the quality function becomes the input for the training function. 

  
  

• Purpose of the department: This is about getting the philosophy of the department right.

  
  

• Service philosophy: What is the kind of service that the organisation aspires to deliver, it is this question that needs answering. Is there a specific service model of their own that the organisation is pursuing or do they wish to get inspired by another successful service model? From the clarity of service philosophy, emerges details of the kind of capital and OPEX investment that is required to be made in order to enable delivery.

  
  

• Service design: Service design is laying bricks to make the agreed service philosophy come about. It involves ascertaining the process, the platform, the technology and the people that will have to be brought together to realise the service aspiration. 

  
  

• Long-term objective: The measure of success must be determined in advance so that teams can work backwards from it. You could look at the metric that you like, NPS, CSAT, Churn, Repeat Buy, Life-time value of a customer etc. Choose the metric that compliments your overall business strategy well and then optimise your service design for it.

  
  

• Usefulness: On a scale of 1 to 5, how useful would you want your service to be? Customer effort is the metric here. Simply put, how easy or hard is it for the customer to transact with you.

  
  

• Operational efficiency: Benchmark level performance.

• What will you measure? : Operational excellence is key to success. Input metric measurement is being spoken about here. How many people are needed, how long will they take to work on something, how can the time be shortened etc? Process re-engineering routine will have to be adopted to make sure that the delivery mechanism improves continually. 

  
  

• Define target and tolerance: How good is good enough for you? Set targets for every measurable metric that you can think of, define control limits. So that process can be optimised to operate within it. Remember, lesser the variation, tighter the control, and better the experience. 

  
  

• Reward and penalty: Score-card approach is a good way to approach it. Organizations need to define clearly what level of performance they consider reward worthy and the levels at which they think it right to impose a penalty. 

  
  

• Consequence management: Details approach and process documentation to handle exceptions, on every aspect of the service operation. 

  
  

# 2: Building blocks of customer obsession: In this section, we will try to explore the science of building a customer-obsessed culture by talking about its 6 building blocks.

• Customer effort Index: We briefly touched upon it in the earlier segments too. The point that is being made here is that various departments come together to make customer experience happen, therefore, it is important to work with stakeholders to reduce customer effort. The idea is to make availing service or using the product so simple, so seamless and so straightforward and so intuitive that the customer doesn’t have to think before using the service.

  
  

• Anticipating customer need: Careful study of the customer data to preempt customer needs and then work towards meeting them. Latent, unfulfilled needs of the customers are being spoken about here. If we can devise a way to find out what is it that the customers would want next, we can make the thing available even before the customer needs it.

  
  

• Customer feedback: Device the framework for collecting customer feedback, they are the most valuable piece of information that a brand can hope to lay its hands on. Study them intently to take cues on the process and product refinement. Use customer feedback to understand the need Vis-a-vie the capacity of the product and service to meet the customer better.

  
  

• Creating “WOW”: Creating breathtaking and memorable experiences for the customers should be the only goal of the organisation. Make sure that this expectation is understood and people responsible to create these experiences are empowered with resources to do so.

  
  

• A set-up that exceeds expectations: What is great today, will be good tomorrow and just about ordinary the day after, to keep ahead in the race, the organisation needs to keep raising the bar of service. Devise newer methods to meet the customers where they are and to deliver them whatever it is that they expect from you.

  
  

• Let the customer know that they are your number one priority: #1 responsibility of the leaders in an organisation is to make sure that customers remain at the front and centre of every decision, every consideration, and every plan that is ever made. Bring the focus of every organisational process back to the customer, evaluate everything from the point of view of the customer and you will get there.

  
  

Remember, there are a billion known approaches to success in business, not taking good care of your customers, is not one of them.

Go out there and create memorable experiences!

Good luck!

5 step change framework for BPOs and product Ideas!

In the last article, I argued how the winds within the wings of traditional phone-based BPOs are being stolen by cheap, easy, and widely available automation alternatives. I also propounded that weakening prospects of the BPO industry do not necessarily mean a reduction in the overall scope of outsourcing as a business decision. There is a bit of a dichotomy between the two parts of this statement, which at one glance could appear disorienting and that is ok. If you read the 2nd part of the last article carefully (I will link it down below) the confusion will disappear. The more prominent question which the previous article did not answer fully is that if BPOs have to become a platform company to survive what sort of platform company should they really become? It is a legitimate question and that is the inspiration behind this one. It is in order to mention here that overwhelming 80%+ feedback emails that I received from my smart readers were seeking clarity on this very question. So here we go.

Before we get into the specifics of it, I think we should spend a minute thinking about why is ‘change’ important for business, and then when the business does elect to change how is it that the organization should attempt it? Answering the first part of this question is rather straightforward, the needs of an evolving society change over time and to cater to that organization in the business of meeting those needs must change too. Now, on to the tricky part of the question, what is it that the organizations that decide to change try to do when they pivot? Organizations sacrifice products for saving business. Remember the goal of a for-profit organization is to make money and to not make money exclusively from doing 'a thing'.

Now with that out of the way, let’s focus on the element that often startles those who attempt to embark on a change. The strangeness of the new, the absence of familiarity, lack of knowledge in the new arena that they consider pivoting into. Right out of the gate let me concede that the fear is legitimate, 100% so. Imagine that if you woke up in the middle of the night in a deserted desert with icy cold sand under your feet instead of your bedroom and on the warm bed on which you slipped into peaceful slumber earlier that night? The first few minutes would fit the exact definition of hell, will it not? You would then normalize your new situation and think about how did you get there and what are the options in front of you to get back to where you actually slept? You would at that moment be scared, unhappy, uncertain, nervous, and irritated. Would you not be at the sea completely?

Can anyone count that turbulence against you?

Imagine an entrepreneur who has been making XYZ amount of money from a set business, tried and tested product line is being asked by someone to change it to something else because they think that is the future. It is a tough bargain, but then one that must be made because what is today will most certainly not remain so tomorrow. A case for change will have to be continually made and pushed at the right forums, because, as big a force is need for change, the urge to remain the same is also not a weak trap. Torn between the demand of tomorrow and habits of yesterday, the decision-makers feel exhausted, clueless, and sometimes a bit disenchanted too.

I can't claim to have discovered the formula that works in turning key people around, every time. I have failed a fair amount of times myself too, but it is in the times that I did win, I find both my motivation and purpose. So my dear readers, if you are the one pushing for the change, I wish you luck and urge you to try out your own strategy.

I better stick to the part of the puzzle that I am most comfortable with, that is knowing how to carve out the change. It is important to note here that the change that we are referring to here is the change of device and not so much the substance of what is being executed. That is in essence it will still be reaching to a customer to either sell or serve or remind them of the both or either. It would be easier for the brand to sell what it has already sold, it is this core belief that often prohibits the founders from changing. So, as a change managers, we should start from there.

I present to you the framework!

5 step framework for BPOs.

Let's understand how is the current stack of clients/customers stack up. Data probing will be necessary. Here are the questions that you will need to ask and answer.

1. Figure out your area of strength.

• Which industry?
• What line of work?
• Which medium?
• What nature?
• Is there a specific demographic?
• Not just for existing clients but past customers too.
  • Why did the customers who left you did so?

Plot these details on the table.

A quick analysis of these details should reveal to you that which is that technology feature that can fully automate the work that you are now doing in a manual manner. Pick that product and then assess.

1. Would you like to create the product bottoms up?
2. Or you have the wherewith-all to acquire an organization that might already have the solution ready.
   1. If acquisition looks difficult, try merger possibilities.

2. Get critical stakeholders on board with the idea of ‘transformation’.

• Board
• Investors
• Key employees.

It is important to keep critical people in the organization informed of the direction in which the organization is wanting to pivot into. As it is this set of people who are going to make it work. This conversation is best not kept unidirectional, consensus building is needed. Bring the team on board and then get on with the plan.

3. Finding the resources (money and other things).

• Budget.
• See how you’re placed.
• Plan for the shortfall if any.

Change is easier said than done. Resource mining beforehand is critical to success.

4. Getting the team ready.

• Restructuring the organization.
• Hiring the skill sets that would be needed to build/run/manage the solution.

This is perhaps the most important part of the puzzle. Old world conventional leaders do not want things to change because they know it is too late for them to change and they also know that if things change they will become irrelevant. In preparing the team, the leader needs to understand both sides of the story: why is change vital and what is the cost of not changing.

5. Make a new business goal.

• Make a new goal statement of the company and then socialize it.
• Plan
• Act

Both your mission and vision statements might need to reflect the change in plan. Make it happen, socialize it - take it to the last employee. You need the whole of the organization to rally behind the change.

These five steps pulled right should carry you through, without much trouble.

For those of you who are not wanting to get on with the first step right away and wish to think through a few ideas for building platforms, here are a few.

Platform/Product Ideas for BPOs.

1. CRM Solution for managing customer service end to end.

• Dialler.
• Workforce management system.
• Knowledge management.
• Training management system.
• Performance management Module.
• Quality management system. 
• Data and Reporting modules.

2. Creating a solution for the industry where most of your contacts come from.

• Video KYC in BFSI.
• Digital onboarding.
• Social Media command center

3. Systems designed to reducing churn.

• Survey tool.
• Linking usage with trigger points.
• Devising strategies for increased longevity of the customer.

4. Conversation engine.

• BOT.
• RPA.
• Desktop Automation.

5. Vendor management system.

• Client onboarding
• Client sign up
• Life cycle management
  • Complaint and compliment modules.
  • Billing and Invoicing.
  • Change management.
  • Forecasting and supply details.

No matter what you do, you must not remain the same, because those who do not change perish.

On that note I shall end this, take care and good luck.

Link to the last article 

Outsourcing and BPO; the past and the future!

Outsourcing and BPO; the past and the future!

Outsourcing exists because economic inequality has been a persistent reality of our world, and as far as we can tell it is not going anywhere. Both futurists and economists believe that whilst growth infused inequality improves the lives of those on the weaker side of the economy too, in balance, but at the same time, they also admit that it does little to reduce the gap between the two extremes - crazy wealthy and desperately poor. Growth, the world must have, as, without it, anywhere between 1 and 2 billion people across the globe will die of starvation. You might wonder why I say inequality makes the case in favour of outsourcing? “Shift and Lift” & “Same mess for less” were common terms that the western world used when they had to make an unofficial argument to export jobs east.

Yes, it is the snobbery of the developed world, but of a kind that gives hundreds of millions of people in the underdeveloped world a chance at life. Imagine if India did not export the fruits of its cheap human labour to the west, what % of India would have been penniless looking into an abyss of hopelessness? The thought alone will intimidate you, to put things in perspective, it will be close to 150 million people, without any source of income.

All outsourcing however is not created equal.

The society operates hierarchically, and business calls its regime-  ‘band’.

Human history gives enough evidence for us to know that as society progresses and becomes technologically advanced it renders the least complex and the most repetitive of its tasks to machines, leaving smart humans with time and energy to concentrate on solving intricate mysteries of the facets of the ever-evolving world. “Cognitive capital invested on relatively simpler tasks does not give satisfactory returns”, as a principle has been known for ages. Let’s use this frame to understand outsourcing.

Outsourcing exists in every industry that operates on planet earth. Let me give you a few examples. 

• Apple manufactures in Asia. 

• An overwhelming majority of software developers in cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Gurgaon, Pune etc are developing and maintaining software owned by the west. 

• Third world countries (the third world is not an economic classification but a political one, countries that remained unaligned in the cold war era were given this label. Singapore is also a third world country), do financial accounting, transcription, translation and even train machine learning models with real-world data.

• Phone sales, customer service, credit card operations, travel logistics and loan processing - need I say more?

The way to classify the ‘band’, that I spoke about earlier is to judge a task by this simple standard.

• Have the people involved in outsourcing been academically trained in the same field? 

• Specialist outsourcing: If the answer to this question is a yes. Then you know that you are talking about high-value outsourcing. Like software (development and support), hi-end manufacturing etc.

• Generalist Outsourcing: If the answer to this question is negative, you know that what is being spoken about is low-value outsourcing: call centres (anything to do with phones), transcription, etc. 

At this point, you may be wondering why am I only insinuating about stronger currency hiring weaker denominations in the context of outsourcing? And you’re absolutely right, same currency outsourcing is a reality too. In fact, in the absolute share of manpower, it is roughly 60% that of all people working in outsourcing, but in revenue terms, it is just about 30%. You might wonder why 60% of people generate just 30% of the value? It is owing to the facts, listed below. 

• A vast majority of this outsourcing is generalist in nature. So unit pricing is abysmally low.

• The capital that enables politicians to try their electoral fortune comes from corporations, which want the minimum wages to remain as low as possible so that industries can remain competitive in the world market. As a result of which cheap labour is found in abundance, here.

• 98.99% of the tasks that these generalists perform can be automated, therefore, to remain relevant they are forced to operate at a cost that does not give the outsourcer compelling reasons to go all out to automate the workflow entirely.

Thus far we have covered the economic basis of outsourcing. Let us now look at the brief history of outsourcing in India. I shall focus on the BPO side of things, if you know me you’d know why and if you do not, read other articles on this subject that I have written and you’ll know.

Business historians classify outsourcing in these three different eras. 

The beginning of traditional BPOs from the 1900s to Mid 2000s.

• This was a straightforward period when consumerism was beginning to take gargantuan shape. The west needed a cheap solution to sell and service their customers, they started looking for countries that spoke their language reasonably well and offloaded the work to them. As they engaged with the east in this context they understood that they have tapped into an infinite pool of motivated, hard-working, sincere, hungry for growth cheap labour with plenty of skills to pull off generalist jobs well.

• Tasks after tasks kept pouring and India benefited by having an avenue of employment large enough to engulf its vast semi-skilled workforce.

• Wealth creation led to an increse in demand and indigenous manufacturing and distribution and real estate gained from it. 

• A high density of phone connectivity in the west enabled it.

The Medieval BPO Era: Omni Channel BPO 2000s to Late 2010s.

• West felt the need to cap their costs after nearly a decade long free for all outsourcing party. From this directional change, Indian players started offering goodies like process re-engineering, downstream innovation, process transformation and commitment to productivity enhancements, to keep the contracts alive.

• The phone was no longer the king of the reigns, the internet had made its entry into the homes (broadband) and in the hands (smartphone) of people. Asynchronous support channels gained ground, chat and email became popular too. 

• Other forms of work like simple MIS, basic data analytics and accounting processes also boomed in this era.

• In this period, the proliferation of phones picked up in India too and with it, large corporations began outsourcing their tele support, chat and email work to BPO service providers. Domestic BPO became a viable business. 

Contemporary Era (A): Insight-Driven BPO late 2010 and pre-pandemic.

• Corporations that had just come out of the slowdown in the west needed to tighten their belts. With great force, ‘lean and six sigma’ and similar standards became a part of the everyday routine for the Indian BPO industry. Providers burnt the midnight oil to achieve more with less. ‘Cutting waste’ became the mission of over a million people. As a result, a slew of process and product innovation made its way into the still flourishing industry.

• ‘Analytics with process transformation’ occupied the focal point of the industry.

        + Data-led process transformation.

                + Informed Insights-enabled digitisation.

    + Automation

+ Simple fetch and tell BOT.

+ Desktop automation.

+ RPAs.

 

Contemporary Era (B): Automation driven support late 2010 to Pandemic.

• There is a significant overlap between these two phases of outsourcing that is on account of the evolution of the outsourcers. Not every company woke up to the magic of automation at the same time. In Era A we have spoken about how the laggards of the industry reacted. In this section Era B, we are going to talk about the leaders and technology-first organizations. 

• The business landscape for the evolved part of the economy changed to proportions imagined by no one. The start-up revolution completely changed the way the world looked at business operations. Companies decided to trust algorithms for all rule-based tasks. Organisations like Ola and Uber were born, which was completely devoid of transactional support, the ‘application-only-operation’ became a thing. I know some of you are thinking about the brief period when both Ola and Uber used to take bookings on the phone. I must remind you that it was a period in which the organizations were educating the customers about this new technology, app-based operation. As it gained critical mass on the application, phones were switched off.

• Cheap data and economical smartphones came within the reach of the common man and what the west had experienced half a decade ago became the story of the economies of the eastern countries, too. 

• The organisation started working to reduce repeat with maniacal focus. Self-help was made cool.

• These technological advancements made their grand entrance into the scene, as well.

• Conversational AI.

• Advanced context-aware chatbots.

• OCR.

• Speech to Text and back to Speech - the whole cognitive stack. 

• Data modelling and advanced analytics. 

• ML gave machines an edge over humans involved in generalist tasks. 

• The little that was left of the traditional market was overwhelmed by the pandemic, which forced people to not only get acquainted but also comfortable with using support platforms and the internet for fulfilling their needs.

These advancements took away the winds under the wings of traditional BPOs.

• The technological solutions in the medium to long term became economical than a human doing a generalist task. 

• The efficiency gains of machine-made humans look unattractive. 

• Transparency, accuracy and ability to generate rich structured data from automated operations made generalists appear like chimpanzees in comparison to machines.

In the last two years of the pandemic alone the size of BPO has contracted to the extent of 24%, the 2/3rd that is still left is being slated to go down to half, in the matter of the next 12 to 18 months.

Why could the BPO industry as a whole not evolve with the changing market? Is a fascinating question, whilst answering that is an entire article in and of itself, I would say that ‘hyper inward focus’ is to be blamed for the ruins of the industry. The fact that this sector has not been attracting fresh capital for over 5 years now is somehow not catching their fancy. The aged leadership teams (50 Yrs +) has personal stake in keeping the charade on, as this late in the career changing stream would be impossible for them, so they shrewdly keep knitting stories of potential and show the 20% floating clients (who keep moving from one BPO to another) as territory for expansion to the promoters to keep their jobs going.

Much like Kodak, BlackBerry and Nokia were too busy with the make-believe world that they had created for themselves BPOs too are living the illusion of sustenance. The real world however has moved on, taking lesson from colossal failures of these one time giants.

Future of the BPO industry

• BPOs that metamorphose into tech products and platform organisations will survive and come out stronger on the other side of the churning. 

• Organisations like Concentrix, Wipro, WNS, Teleperformance, Infosys and Tech Mahindra are on the right track.

• The BPOs will have to find a way to put the great understanding of customer behaviour, their needs and wants that they have acquired over the last 2 decades, into developing tech products that solve the most pressing support questions of the day.

• They will have to move away from transaction handling and become consultative organisations that handle end to end customer journeys and not just what happens on the phone/chat/emails.

• Designing service philosophy and related processes.

• Budgeting service operations.

• Developing and deploying the platforms for support.

• Owning to the business outcome and billing for output rather than time spent on the job.

BPO that successfully catapults into an organisation that has skin in the entire vertical stack of service will not only survive but thrive.

Remember, what I opened this article with, outsourcing is here to stay - old devices of outsourcing (voice) will have to be given up in favour of new tools (cognitive tech).

With that, I would like to end this.

See you on the other side!

Till then stay safe and take very good care of yourselves. 

Remember vaccinations save lives.