Embark on a journey through the labyrinth of customer service innovation with Patrick Elliot, the astute UK CEO of Global BPO Business HGS. As we unravel Patrick's storied career—spanning consumer electronics, the pioneering days at Orange, and the strategic chessboard of management consulting—you'll gain a front-row seat to the philosophy that propelled his rise to the top: keeping the customer at the very heart of every decision.
Patrick candidly unpacks the trials and triumphs of the Contact Centre and CX BPO landscape, where the symbiosis of AI automation with the inimitable human touch in service is not just a trend, but the future. His foresight into the industry's trajectory is not to be missed by anyone looking to stay ahead in this dynamic domain.
Prepare to be captivated as we dissect the complexities of delivering multi-faceted customer service, especially within the public sector, through Patrick's expert lens. We contrast the nuances between public and private service delivery, diving into channel integration, and the critical importance of meeting the diverse needs of different customer demographics.
The conversation shifts to explore the transformative influence of hybrid work models on BPO evolution, shedding light on how internal communication, employee engagement, career development, and unshakable business ethics meld to construct a sustainable enterprise.
Patrick's revelations offer a masterclass in navigating the ever-changing tides of the customer experience industry with agility and insight.
Embark on a journey through the labyrinth of customer service innovation with Patrick Elliot, the astute UK CEO of Global BPO Business HGS. As we unravel Patrick's storied career—spanning consumer electronics, the pioneering days at Orange, and the strategic chessboard of management consulting—you'll gain a front-row seat to the philosophy that propelled his rise to the top: keeping the customer at the very heart of every decision.
Patrick candidly unpacks the trials and triumphs of the Contact Centre and CX BPO landscape, where the symbiosis of AI automation with the inimitable human touch in service is not just a trend, but the future. His foresight into the industry's trajectory is not to be missed by anyone looking to stay ahead in this dynamic domain.
Prepare to be captivated as we dissect the complexities of delivering multi-faceted customer service, especially within the public sector, through Patrick's expert lens. We contrast the nuances between public and private service delivery, diving into channel integration, and the critical importance of meeting the diverse needs of different customer demographics.
The conversation shifts to explore the transformative influence of hybrid work models on BPO evolution, shedding light on how internal communication, employee engagement, career development, and unshakable business ethics meld to construct a sustainable enterprise.
Patrick's revelations offer a masterclass in navigating the ever-changing tides of the customer experience industry with agility and insight.
Welcome to CXDiaries. Cxdiaries from the Customer Experience Foundation is our podcast where we talk to the people at the sharp end of CX and Contact Centers the movers and the shakers, the innovators, the detractors and the people delivering in the real world who share their personal stories of their journey through our industry. This week, I'm delighted to be joined by Patrick Elliott, CEO of Global BPO Business HGS. Patrick is a customer-focused leader who has worked across many business services, including outsourcing, as well as mobile telecoms, media, internet and property sectors, as well as merger and acquisition experience, and he joined HGS as their UK CEO about a year ago. Patrick, welcome Pleasure to have you with us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, keith, looking forward to it, ok, so we'll start this back to front.
Speaker 1:We normally ask this question at the end, but we'll ask it at the front today. Tell us a bit about your journey through the industry to becoming a CEO of a Contact Center BPO Business. How did that all come about?
Speaker 2:OK, it's quite a long and complicated journey for me, keith. I'll try and keep it short. I certainly haven't spent my whole career in this industry. I actually began in consumer electronics. My degree was in electronic engineering and I spent a few years working actually in a Philips research lab working on digital radio and digital mobile phone technologies, and then saw the opportunity to go and be part of the if you remember that, far back the mobile phone revolution, where phones went from being bricks to being things that you could put in your pocket, and was part of the team that launched Orange down in Bristol. That was a fantastic experience.
Speaker 2:And then stayed in the mobile industry and moved across to Cellnet, which is now 02, working then more in product management and marketing type roles, and then continued really in that vein and decided to try a different line of business in the same sector, which was management consulting, so joined a small boutique management consulting that was serving the telecom sector but also a range of other sectors, and had a great opportunity there to take part in a management buyout.
Speaker 2:One of the founders wanted to step back and spent a few years building that up before eventually exiting it to a large US trade buyer.
Speaker 2:Stayed with them for a few years as a vice president, so got some experience working in a US backed business and then really made the transition into the BPO space when I joined Circo and spent about four years with them running some of their larger outsourcing contracts, including contact centres.
Speaker 2:That was my first real exposure to contact centres. But then did another segue back to something much more entrepreneurial again came to see over a small global commercial property business which had a really interesting digital play, helped the founder get that sold to private equity and then joined Capita and spent really the last 10 years before coming to HGS at Capita. Ran a number of business units there, wide range of different BPO services, particularly more tech enabled business services. Ended up running the government services division, which was then about 10,000 people with revenues of about 800 million, and then decided I wanted to do something a bit more entrepreneurial again. You can see a pattern here, keith, and that's what attracted me to HGS. So I now run the UK on of the global HGS business and been there just every year and really enjoying it so far.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So what inspires you, what gets you out of bed, and how has that evolved over the years?
Speaker 2:Very good question, I think you know. For me, in the end, it always comes back to the customer, and what gives me a real buzz is understanding the problems customers are facing, the needs they have, and trying to find innovative and creative ways of solving those needs. And and to do that you, you really need to do it well, at least you need to have an outstanding team. So for me, in the end, it's all about how the needs of a customer come together with a really strong team that has the, the mix of skills, the access to the different capabilities and solutions, and the mindset and the will to Really lean in and help the customer solve their problem. So, whichever sect I've been in whether it's been consumer electronics, mobile telecoms, commercial property or BPO those are the two things that really motivate me. It's about working with a client and building a great team that loves and delighting clients.
Speaker 1:And from your perspective, as someone that's, you know, not deeply indoctrinated in the BPO world for 30 years, like many of us are, what do you feel are the biggest challenges the Contact Center and CX BPO industry is facing today?
Speaker 2:And there's quite a few of them, but I think the ones that probably most people are well aware of now is the rapid advance of technology, particularly digital technology, increasingly high levels of automation and Most recently in certainly the last couple of years, that going up another notch with the advent of AI, particularly generative AI, and I think Certainly when I first started in the industry, which was about 20 years ago, it was all about people are managing people better, using IT to help support them and perhaps automate some processes. That mix between the people and technology has been evolving all the way through and it feels what feels like an inflection point to many of us now. I mean, it's very hard to know exactly what's going to happen. I'm not a great one for trying to predict the future here, but the current trend, if you extrapolate it, is for accelerating levels of automation and more and more activities being carried out by bots, by AI engines, and therefore needing to redefine how the human fix into that. Really, I certainly know as a consumer of services that there's plenty of occasions where I'd rather just speak to a person, particularly it's complex or there's a situation which needs a bit of empathy and understanding rather than battle with a bot to try to get to the answer.
Speaker 2:But I think that's going to keep evolving as these automated solutions get better and better, to the point where I Expect an increasing proportion of queries. You'll be able to self serve or they'll be done automatically. And then it's about finding higher added value tasks where humans can continue to add differentiation. Still a competitive market, isn't it? Like any market system, and any organization that can deliver a better customer experience, even if that involves some very high touch elements to it, is more likely going to be able to compete and win in their market. There'll be some services where you can automate it all, perhaps more commoditized services, but anybody wants to earn a significant margin in the customer experience world has to be able to find ways of adding that extra value. So I think that's the key challenge is how does that mix of humans and technologies evolve going forwards and how do we keep adding value to the role of the human?
Speaker 1:and how, particularly HGS, are you facing down those challenges? Whether you are, what have you seen in your 30 months there and what are you? What are you trying to drive?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's actually, if I'm honest, now, being here a year, I can see it more clearly. It's, it's. It's. It's a bit further down the road of being able to offer digital solutions Than I perhaps initially appreciated.
Speaker 2:Remember is a global business. It's been around 20 odd years. So it has a lot of things you'd expect in terms of onshore and offshore delivery capability Across places like the Philippines, india, even places like Jamaica, columbia very soon in South Africa. But it's two main markets for customers are the UK and North America today.
Speaker 2:Hello, again, that's expanding and I think, as well as all things you'd expect, say, in terms of, you know, deep domain knowledge of how to run Contact centers and deliver great customer experiences, there's there's growing amount of digital capability and that's partly built through acquisitions. So the business has made two or three acquisitions in the last four or five years and those are really adding to our capabilities element solutions about five years ago, tech link about two years ago, and we're on the hunt for acquisitions in the UK as well. It's a key part of my remit to be able to bring more analytics, automation and AI capability to existing a new client. So, but there's a lot more here than I previously realized and we're beginning to bring some of that from particularly the US into the UK market.
Speaker 1:Okay, and take that bit further. In the context of global operations, how are HDS tackling the challenge of cultural and language diversity to ensure great service for both your clients and your clients' customers?
Speaker 2:Again, very good question. I mean it is truly a global business. As I said, all the different geographies I just mentioned and management teams from those different geographies are working in a pretty integrated way. I think part of it is just making sure that there's enough mutual understanding of what's worked in one area to be able to bring it successfully to another area. For example, there's some quite neat technology being developed in the US by my colleagues over there, which we call Agent X, which is an AI-based automation suite that can be deployed in various different ways. We're just beginning to deploy that for clients outside the US and also on a more global basis.
Speaker 2:But there's also some of the learning we've developed in the UK. We've done a lot of good work with the public sector in the UK. Certain standards that have to be adhered to for public sector clients in some areas are higher than for other types of clients, and some of that expertise is going the other way. So I think a lot of it is just building teams that are not geo-specific, cross-functional teams across different geographies, and just being very open to embracing something that's worked in one area and being willing to try to deploy it somewhere else. I'm not sure there's a silver bullet, but it does require an open mind, willingness to experiment and try different things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've talked about bot and obviously most service offerings are multi-channel omnichannel. There are many lanes to the customer contact motorway. What strategies do you employ and what do you advise your clients to deploy to ensure that we get high quality customer interactions across all these tough areas?
Speaker 2:Yeah, very good question. Again, I think so much of this depends on the specific customer, the particular service that they're looking to get our help to deliver. So it's very hard to generalize. But I think one of the things we do try to do is do a lot of analysis of the data that we're collecting on behalf of the customers. In quite a few cases we'll do quite large scale speech to text transcription and then run automation tools over that day to try and spot patterns, recurring issues, typical problems and then try to address those more directly in a way that the service is being offered directly to the customer, so those issues come up less frequently.
Speaker 2:In terms of the choice of channels, again it partly depends on the nature of the service and the types of issues being resolved, but increasingly the services we offer are multi-channel, as you said. Is it really just voice? Now it's almost always voice plus chat, often plus web forms, sometimes video email, and trying to get that mixed right just requires a certain level of sophistication on the system side as well, so that inquiries coming in through different channels can be properly collected together and handled in a joined up way so the customer doesn't experience too much disjointedness. But it's a journey is what I would say, keith and it's trying to evolve it. Some customers have very tech savvy end users who are very happy to self serve, others much less so, who would just simply prefer to do everything through the phone, and we've got to be respectful of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you touched on it and we know that HHS do a lot in the public sector, particularly in the UK. What's that sector's particular service challenges, do you feel, and what are some of the solutions that need to be adopted?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's very interesting. I mean, I've worked with the public sector in the UK for probably nearly 20 years and it's very different from working with the private sector. At start they tend to be natural monopolies, if you like. They're not really facing the competition of another provider, but that also goes hand in hand with what you could describe as a universal service obligation. They can't turn anyone away and decide they're not going to serve that segment of the market.
Speaker 2:So particularly high levels of concern for usability, accessibility, being able to cater for disadvantaged users in whatever form, and so, in addition, I'm probably even more concerned for making sure that the data is all kept on shore where required, for example, and that appropriate commitments are made in the way we've derived the solution to addressing social value requirements from clients. That's an increasingly important parameter for public sector buyers. So there's a whole range of facets of working with the public sector. They're quite different the limited ability to offshore some elements of the service, the concern with ubiquitous access and very often, frankly and rightly so, the desire to keep the jobs on shore as well and create employment in disadvantaged communities in the UK. So what was the best practice around the deployment of technology? Some of the fundamental drivers are quite different for the public sector.
Speaker 1:And thinking about satisfaction, both of your clients and their customers, and what metrics are most important to your business.
Speaker 2:HGS itself? If you mean yeah, okay, in terms of how we measure our success. I'm just trying to understand the question.
Speaker 1:Yeah, In terms of how you measure this in terms of how you can actually measure their satisfaction with you and what you're delivering to their customers.
Speaker 2:Well, we've been measuring CSAT customer satisfaction for quite a few years and it's a major metric for us, and we study the results extremely carefully and put in place improvement plans after each survey. So that's really important. We also, of course, track compliance with all the relevant contractual metrics the KPIs, the SLAs as anyone would do, and seek to set a very high bar internally. Both of those measures tie back into the way our teams are incentivized internally to make sure that their objectives are aligned with the success of our customers. But over and above that, if you like, that's almost the hygiene.
Speaker 2:There's a constant impetus to try to find innovations that we can bring to our customers. But then to understand what does AI mean for their business? What sort of pilot or proof of concept could they be running to start to understand the practical benefits to their business? For some clients, it's also exploring new ways of delivering, like, for example, for private sector clients who hadn't considered offshoring before. How might that work? And then what's the optimum decision between automating a function or offshoring it or doing a bit of both? And again, as I said a minute ago, that's all quite different for public sector clients. It's looking at different approaches there, delivering things in English language and Welsh language, for example. But ultimately we try very hard to make sure all the measures that we hold ourselves to are aligned to our customers' success, and that flows straight into the way people are incentivized and rewarded here.
Speaker 1:Okay. With remote working becoming much more prevalent, particularly in our sector, how has your approach to workforce engagement involved and what's your approach to it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we moved, like many other players in this industry, to a predominantly work-from-home model during the pandemic and, whilst we still maintain a number of key delivery sites around the UK and globally, certainly there's still a very high level of working-from-home In many cases. This makes it more attractive to be able to recruit and retain people, to give them that flexibility. Public sector clients are also very happy with that model. There's some economic advantages for them in using it, but there's no question either, it does create a greater challenge to make people feel part of HGS, to feel a sense of team spirit, if you like, and to recognize some of the benefits that they would have got if they'd been going into an office every day. So we've worked really hard around that and tried to bring people in periodically for training and refreshing, to run online events where people can get together more, make sure that they're able to speak to if they're an agent, that they're a team supervisor, on a more regular basis.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't claim we've cracked it. We're still looking at what the evolution of the hybrid model should be, because in most cases we're going to be hybrid. I, for example, have started asking my exec team to come in on a fairly regular basis, so we do meet face to face. A number of new people have joined the team with me and it's just a lot easier to build the trust and alignment within the leadership team if you're just spending more time together and have those side conversations that are just more difficult to do when you're working virtually. So it's actually a key objective for us going into this year as to how should our hybrid model evolve going forward, so I'll keep you posted, keith, on how that evolves.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. This might be a question that you can't answer yet, given what you just said, but I'll ask it anyway. Around how the approach about maintaining high levels of employee satisfaction and also reducing turnover in an industry that's known for high and high term rates?
Speaker 2:Yeah, if I'm honest, that's partly using some systems and messaging tools and communication mechanisms. It's partly also just asking our operations managers and team leaders to be more proactive in reaching out and keeping in touch with people proactively. We work really hard on our internal communications, whether that's through newsletter, whether it's through briefing calls, through all-hands sessions, and regularly work through a cycle of just trying to keep the information flowing and make it a two-way dialogue. So you just have to put extra effort into these things when people are remote, in my view, rather than just rely on osmosis to spread the news. And so we've got a very disciplined communications plan through the year that tries to keep people updated on what's happening in the business, what their own career development opportunities are, where the business is growing UK and globally. So it just takes more effort. You can't rely on it happening, as it might happen in a more office-based environment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wanted to touch on career development. That's something we've covered a lot here at the Foundation over the last 12 to 18 months. How are you going about the career development opportunities within HCS to get that growth and expertise in your team?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's partly done through trying to rotate people around different campaigns and get them experience of working for different clients public sector clients, private sector clients, clients that are mainly onshore, offshore, and so on but it's also investing in formal training and development and we've just actually completed a fresh TNA training needs analysis across the business and identified a number of areas where there's the opportunity to upskill people. Part of that is in, if you like, standard management training and how to do appraisals, how to do start coaching and mentoring. Part of it is also going forward, understanding some of these new technologies we talked about at the beginning, keith, and how to make sense of them and how to start spotting opportunities to deploy them into the work that we do for clients.
Speaker 2:So we're ramping up quite significantly this year our use of the apprenticeship scheme and done that in the past, but looking to do it significantly higher level now and run a range of apprenticeships for our people at different levels across the business. It's part of an ongoing commitment to their development and also, whenever I speak to people in our business, I try and encourage them to just keep themselves up to date. Read the news, try and follow developments in this area. Just increase your own awareness rather than just wait for the training to come to give it to you. That might take a little bit longer in some areas, although we're working through it. So part of it, I think, is the onus is on the individual to keep themselves up to speed and try and remain aware of developments.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Esg is a very high priority for many clients now, if not all of them. In what ways is your company committed to sustainability and social responsibility within the community to operate?
Speaker 2:So we have quite a significant globalised underway right now, looking to refresh and revise our ESG objectives going into the new financial year. So I contributed that through a quite lengthy interview not that long ago with our global lead in this area, and so it's a mix of things that we're looking to do globally where we will choose a few key areas to really focus on rather than, if you like, spread ourselves too thin and not be able to have a material impact in any one key area. But certainly in the UK, a lot of it, and this comes naturally with some of our public sector contracts through the way we add social values, trying to support people in disadvantaged communities, part of the wider levelling up agenda the government government is pursuing and try to find ways to create quality jobs for people where they can have that development, as I talked about earlier, and being able to increase their skills and employability to allow them to go forward with their lives. So I think it's a combination of a small number of key global initiatives that and we're just going through the process of selecting those with something we try to do day to day with supporting people.
Speaker 2:We obviously focus on trying to be welcoming to people from all backgrounds within the business be disability aware, but it's also just a slightly intangible thing. One of the things that attracted me to HGS is the culture. It's just a very friendly, welcoming culture, and that's something I've experienced coming in here, and sometimes it's difficult to bottle those things, isn't it? You've sort of either got that culture or you haven't, and I feel we've got it here, so I'm trying very hard to protect and preserve that as well.
Speaker 1:And, as the CEO, ultimately the buck stops with you. How are you balancing profit making with ethical business practices and community development?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, to me integrity and ethics is kind of non-negotiable really. There's nothing to balance it with. You're either ethical or you're not. So to me that's a pretty black and white issue and zero tolerance of any behaviors that cross that line. Having said that, we do need to grow the business and be imaginative and creative in the ways that we do that. I don't really see a trade-off or tension between those, if you like. But I do see an opportunity to go beyond what we're just being asked for and trying to find ways to suggest innovative solutions, as I said a minute ago, to propose proof of concepts or pilots of different ways of doing things. And I think that business success and being ethical and responsible are in no means contradictory, and it's not a tension we experience at age-years at all.
Speaker 1:And looking ahead, there's been a couple of articles floating around the sector in the last few weeks predicting the death of outsourcing. Do you think the BPO sector is going to continue to grow, and what's going to drive that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I thought about that because I've read the same articles, Keith, and I think I'd say it's not the first time I've heard that. It's been mooted quite a few times in the last couple of decades. What I'm sure of is it will have to evolve and change. But to me it comes back to a fundamental truism, really, which is that there's only so many things any organization or any business can be truly world-class at. Why would it want to spend time and effort trying to put energy into things it can't be the best at? And that in itself naturally means you should work with partners call them outsourcers, call them suppliers, whatever you want who are better at doing that part of your business than you can be, because of scale, because of experience, because of capability.
Speaker 2:I mean, even Apple doesn't manufacture its own iPhones, for example, and nobody questions that it's a world leader and what it does.
Speaker 2:So if outsourcing is good enough for Apple and I don't see any sign that they're planning to change that then I don't see why it shouldn't work for others if they can use it in the same way Now, without laboring the Apple analogy.
Speaker 2:They're also facing some challenges because of that and they're having to evolve where they do some of their outsourcing and how they do it. So I think that I don't personally there's a personal view believe that in another 10 or 20 years' time there won't be a lot of scope in the market for people to deliver outsourced services back to other providers simply because they're better at doing that. They can do it perhaps cheaper, they can do it with added value, they can do more differentiation. But that bar keeps rising and if you're not able to keep improving, the question will naturally come well, should we just take that back in-house and do it ourselves because we think we can do it better? And the only thing is on all of us in the outsourcing industry to show that we're constantly raising the bar and able to add more value than our clients doing these services themselves, because that's the natural alternative.
Speaker 1:I think that's a fantastic answer. Finally, as we begin to wrap up, what would your advice be to anyone looking to enter the BPO industry? Perhaps they're working in CX, maybe they're working for a big brand, maybe they're a contact centre team manager. What would your advice be to them if they were thinking about moving into the BPO sector?
Speaker 2:Okay, very good question. I mean I think I'm great to believe there are people having breadth in their background. I'd encourage them, if they get the opportunity, to try and work in it for different types of clients. As I said, we try to give people exposure to public and private sector clients Within the private sector, work for different sectors. They all have different dynamics, different challenges, and all of that is a learning opportunity for you as you progress through your career.
Speaker 2:I would try and improve. My advice would be to try to improve your understanding of what digital technology is going to mean going forwards and become more aware of the terminology and the concepts and how some of these technologies can be applied. And then I would make sure that you're constantly investing in your own personal development, understanding how to be a manager and then eventually a leader, because that's the ultimate transferable skill, really, and I think one of the reasons I was hesitant to do predictions earlier in the call is because I think the world is fundamentally very difficult to predict. It's so complex and can turn on some quite small events, and therefore I think remaining flexible, remaining agile and being willing to consider lateral steps is just going to be increasingly important for anyone's career portfolio going forwards. There's no straight lines for 30 years in this world anymore. Be prepared to take a lot of zigzags. Yeah, really interesting.
Speaker 2:And finally, how do you unwind and escape?
Speaker 1:from it all. A big area of rig, tough and lonely as a CEO. How do you keep yourself sane?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm quite lucky that I have a family who keep my feet firmly on the ground. So I've been married to my wife Diane for over 30 years, got three adult daughters who love to take the mickey out of me whenever they can, so that keeps you grounded. When I do get some time to go away on my own, nothing I love more than just going off to ride on one of my motorcycles. I am quite a keen motorcyclist off road and on road and really looking forward actually, with my cousin and I going to be heading down across France into northern Spain in a couple of months time for our annual escape. So that's what I do when I'm trying not to think about work.
Speaker 1:That sounds amazing and a lot of fun. Patrick, it's been wonderful having you with us today. I hope our listeners have found this insightful. You can find out lots more about the Customer Experience Foundation at cxfoorg and do check out HGS. Thank you for joining us today and we hope to see you next time on CxDivis.