Revolutionising Customer Experience with Freelance Models: Claas van Delden's Journey with Yoummday

Prepare to be captivated by Claas van Delden, Chief Growth Officer at Yoummday, as he unveils the transformative world of freelance models in the customer experience sector. 

Our conversation with Claas is more than just an interview; it's a treasure trove of insights on how flexible work opportunities are not just a perk but a revolution for agents and clients alike. 

He reveals the inner workings of Yoummday's technology platform, which is reshaping how global networks of freelance agents deliver top-tier services, while also ensuring their happiness and growth – a true game-changer in brand building and client satisfaction.

In a landscape where AI and international expansion are buzzwords, Claas steers the conversation towards the heart of what makes a business excel – its people. Discover how Yoummday's unique KPIs, such as the Talent Net Promoter Score, are a testament to a thriving workforce and how low attrition rates aren't just numbers, but stories of fulfilled agents. 

Through interactive training and virtual team-building, freelancers become integral to the company's culture, heralding a sea change in the future of the global contact centre and BPO sectors. 

Claas's journey from digital investment to operational leadership adds a personal touch to this narrative, proving that innovation and empathy can indeed go hand-in-hand.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:33

Welcome to CX Diaries. Cx Diaries from the Customer Experience Foundation is our podcast where we talk to the people at the sharp end of CX and contact centres, the movers and the shakers, the innovators, the disruptors 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 Klaus van Delden, who is Chief Growth Officer at Umday. Klaus, pleasure to have you with us today. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 2: 1:01

Great to be with you, Keith. Thank you very much for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:04

Thank you. So at Umday you run very much a sort of freelance gig sort of model. Can you describe that for us?

Speaker 2: 1:12

Yes, happy to do so.

Speaker 2: 1:14

So, first of all, yumde, as a name is short for you, made my day and that is the feeling you will hopefully have once you've interacted with the company, be it as a client or as a talent that's how we like to call our agent or as an end customer.

Speaker 2: 1:33

And you can think of Hyundai first and foremost as a technology platform that is structured as a marketplace. So on that marketplace, on the one hand side, we currently have about 14,000 talents, as we like to call them. Now these are freelancers working from home out of 60 different countries, from all over the world, and they have been quality checked and vetted by us. And of all the people who register to work on the platform, only about 7% to 8% actually make it through that quality test. And on the other hand side of the marketplace, we have about 100 clients, anything from past growing upstart companies to very large corporate enterprises that run all or part of their customer service and sales work through the platform. Now, we don't like to think of ourselves as gig actually, because gig is always a little bit like project-related, untrained kind of work. We perform the regular BPO tasks only in a remote fashion and with freelancers, so that's how we describe it with freelancers.

Speaker 1: 3:00

So that's how, how we uh describe it and how would you say that model um, both for clients and your people, different differentiates from a traditional contact center and bpo business?

Speaker 2: 3:07

yeah, that's a great question and actually it's two things. It's when we look at the talent side, two things. When we look at the talent side, because of our model as a marketplace, we can save on a lot of costs, right? So we don't have to maintain physical locations. We have our own software platform, so we don't need to pay for expensive software licenses. And especially, we can save because we have a much lower attrition rate in our workforce.

Speaker 2: 3:37

And most of these savings we pass on to our talents in the form of a higher compensation, which, in return, gets us a very high quality of talent, simply because it's a very attractive job. You work from home, you get to choose who you work for, the brands you would like to work for, you get to choose your work hours. Our team takes care of the shifts being fully staffed and you get better pay. So this is highly attractive On the client side. So we pass on some of the savings to the clients as well. Try to be a little bit cheaper and at the same time, we can offer a 100% performance-based compensation. So with Yumday, you don't have to pay for capacity. There are no minimum volume requirements, no commitments. You pay for performance. You pay for what you're actually getting.

Speaker 1: 4:39

Right, okay. What inspired the decision for Yumdei, right at the beginning, to adopt a freelance model? Where did that inspiration come from?

Speaker 2: 4:50

So Yumdei was founded back in 2016 by a German serial entrepreneur named Klaus Harisch and his two sons and Klaus. Actually, he had founded his first businesses back in the mid-1990s and he had some great entrepreneurial successes. Now, all of his companies had one thing in common they had large call center operations. So he knew about call center operations for a long, long time. And then he was approached by his two sons, who had recently graduated from university and they wanted to found a marketplace business simply because they saw the Ubers and Airbnbs of this world popping up and becoming really successful.

Speaker 2: 5:34

And they looked at a number of industries and they found that in the call center industry, not much had changed In Germany back in 2016,. It was pretty much like it was 20 years ago, and there was a lot of unhappiness in the industry as well. So agents were unhappy. It was poor pay, the working conditions were not great, clients were not really happy with the working conditions were not great, clients were not really happy with the service they were getting, and end customers had to face long queues and poor quality of delivery. And so they figured what about if we can build a model based on technology in which we connect the best possible talent from all over the world, with great brands, and we pass on most of the compensation to the people that are actually performing the work, which is the agents, or the talents in our case, and that is what they have pursued ever since, and that's how Yumde came about.

Speaker 1: 6:37

Great and thinking more personally as a chief growth officer what challenges are there in driving revenue with such a unique operational model in the BPO space?

Speaker 2: 6:50

Yeah, as you can imagine, I mean my job is about growth, growth, growth all day long. And we're still a small and fairly unknown company, especially internationally. So one of the core challenges is building the brand and making sure that people actually know about Yumde and that they become comfortable with the delivery model, Because in the beginning, as you can imagine, there is a lot of hesitance. You know people say, ah, work from home freelancers, they sit all over the world, they work on their own devices. This sounds a little bit scary. Now, if you test it, you will find it works perfectly well and it has a lot of advantages the performance-based so if clients are not happy with what they're getting, they don't even have to pay, because we really would like clients to try it out and experience by themselves that it's a really good model.

Speaker 1: 8:13

And experience by themselves that it's a really good model. Amazing Thinking operationally about your challenges and your solutions. What are some of the biggest challenges you have and that you face with a freelance-based workforce and how do you address those?

Speaker 2: 8:29

So one of the things we faced, especially in the early days, was that all of the traditional work was built for physical locations and, for example, let's take training that was in-classroom training. So the materials we would get from clients, they were made for in-classroom settings and we really had to adapt that to a remote setting, and remote requires a different approach. You can't just do the same that you did in a physical location and basically copy it to a remote setting. That won't work. So you have one of the things, for example, when it comes to training, is you need to give the talents more authority over when to take the training, how much to take at a time.

Speaker 2: 9:25

So it needs to be snackable content. It needs to be very practice oriented, get them to perform the work as soon as possible. It needs to be a little bit gamified, a little bit a playful element to it. And then there's the element of team building, because obviously, with everybody sitting in their own home office, you might think that it feels a little bit lonely for them, but there are so many elements that you can add to the work in order to really make them feel part of the team and also feel part of the client's brand, and that is what we have worked on for the past nine years.

Speaker 1: 10:24

Now we've become quite good at it, but still, when there's a new client that comes with the standard training material, with the standard processes, it requires this adaptation to the remote model. Yeah, interesting, and you work internationally. How does your organization ensure compliance with all the various international labor laws and regulations?

Speaker 2: 10:34

that must be quite a task so actually, what we do as part of our onboarding process is we make sure that talents are really self-employed under their local law and that that's part of the vetting process, and without that they're, they kind of start offering their work on the platform. So that's a key thing. And then there are a number of regulatory requirements, which are? They vary from country to country, but generally speaking, they're more or less the same. Generally speaking, they're more or less the same.

Speaker 2: 11:13

When you deal with self-employed contractors, for example, they need to decide who they want to work for. They need to have authority over when they work, they need to bring their own equipment. So there's a checklist that you can go through to make sure you'll be compliant, a checklist that you can go through to make sure you'll be compliant. And then, apart from that labor law topic, you always also have the question of remote security, and this is something that we've also become really good at by now. We offer a we call it a five-layered security approach, where we can even offer managed devices basically all over the globe, and these are really important aspects of our work when it comes to dealing with our clients.

Speaker 1: 12:08

Yeah, amazing. What role does technology play in managing and supporting both your freelance workforce and the clients?

Speaker 2: 12:19

Well, it's at the core of what we do right. Without technology, we wouldn't be able to exist and the way you can picture our platform is actually like a virtual global call center. Our platform is actually like a virtual global call center, so if it and it has these two sides there's a client view and a talent view and if you go on the client view, you basically have you start with um, you define your program, then you recruit your workforce, then you go through training, then you go to workforce management and you go through operations. We, we recall, we record all of our calls, then it comes the the quality check. So it's really like a virtual call center and all of that. Um has been built in the past couple of years and it's obviously evolving. So right now we're looking at a lot of different AI applications to help talents improve their productivity and to help us find the right talents for the right programs.

Speaker 1: 13:26

Okay, I'm thinking now about customer satisfaction, loyalty growth. How does the freelance model deliver better outcomes across those?

Speaker 2: 13:38

Well, one important factor is that our freelancers choose the brands that they would like to work for, and that gives them a strong degree of identification with the client brand and they are, by definition, great brand advocates because they love these brands. They they have and you can really tell. We have a number of telco brands that we work for, and sometimes we have these team events where we bring talents from different programs together in a physical location and you can really tell how there is this competitive edge between people working for, let's say, deutsche Telekom or people working for Telefonica, and that's great to see because typically all of these talents are working from home right, they're in their own home office but there are so much advocates of their brand that's really lovely to see.

Speaker 1: 14:43

Really interesting. It's a very British phrase what's your secret sauce? What's the secret from V&A? I'm thinking particularly post pandemic and during pandemic, where a lot of traditional organizations suddenly had to develop a hybrid or a fully remote model and all the challenges around that. How has that impacted you? How have you stayed ahead of the competition?

Speaker 2: 15:11

So obviously the pandemic gave us a boost on the MDA platform, simply because it became clear to everyone that work from home is possible. And actually it's not only possible. Oftentimes it yields superior results, results and um. However, as I said before, you cannot just copy what you did in a physical location. You need to have this, these, these twists, these adaptations, in order for people to really feel connected, feel part of a team. And so I think, what? What really? So?

Speaker 2: 15:56

There's two KPIs that express how our model stands out. One is what we call the talent net promoter score. We measure talent net promoter score on a quarterly basis per program, and the talent net promoter score in the last quarter was 63. And it is always north of 60. So there's really this element of happiness that talents love what they do and how they do it. And the other KPI we look at is what we call unwanted attrition of the workforce, and unwanted attrition on our platform on average is 11%, and I mean you're familiar with the industry KPIs. There. Attrition is a challenge for everyone and I think that's a very, very good, very low number to have, and obviously that's to the client's benefit.

Speaker 1: 16:57

Yeah, and unpacking that a bit further, how do you ensure that your freelancers feel connected to your company's culture and values?

Speaker 2: 17:06

So there's a lot of different things we do. Obviously it depends on the brand, but it starts with the training, with the materials we give them, with the interactiveness of the content. Then there are team building events, that we do virtual team building events, we do virtual escape rooms, we do virtual wine tastings, that kind of stuff, virtual wine tastings, that kind of stuff. And then you obviously have your daily and weekly and monthly routines in the teams in order to make sure that everybody is connected to the latest developments on the client side, you know, to product updates, to process updates and all of that. And then what is really vibrant is the chat. So during the work hours there is always a frequent communication on the chat going on between team leads and talents, but also between talents among themselves, and it's fascinating to see, for example, how they help each other out if there's a problem, if there's something they have difficulties dealing with, and that's how we keep it vibrant and very much alive.

Speaker 1: 18:23

Great. Going back to the role as a chief growth officer outside of the pandemic, in the last maybe year or two, what other market trends or economic shifts have you seen across your markets has impacted your business?

Speaker 2: 18:40

So obviously, we see a lot of AI coming up now and there's various aspects to that, various aspects to that. Some of the AI that we see helps us to improve productivity on our platform, but some of the AI also helps us to automate certain tasks and basically take the burden of the more tedious tasks off the talent's shoulders and let them focus on the real important parts the conversation with the client, the empathy and all of that. And I would say that's currently the biggest technology driver and that's probably going to remain the biggest driver for the next couple of years, I would assume.

Speaker 1: 19:38

Great, looking forward, looking to the future, what adaptations do you think you might make to your model to stay competitive and responsive to the market?

Speaker 2: 19:51

For us, a big topic is continued international expansion. As you know, we are now also targeting the UK market and the US market. We have a number of clients in the UK and a number of clients in the US already, and this obviously also means new sourcing regions, for example, new languages, new skills that we need to bring on the platform and I think that will keep us busy for the next couple of years. Also, the introduction of new technology, like I said, on our platform and how we can make that, let's say, productive in a way that also our talents are really benefiting from it.

Speaker 2: 20:49

Yeah, we have an annual client conference, which is taking place in September every year, and this year's theme is does your AI make you happy? And we want to ask that of the clients, but also of the talents, because ultimately, ai should not be, you know, just out there for the sake of being out there. It serves a purpose, and the purpose is to give a better customer experience, but also to produce a better experience for the stakeholders that are involved in this ecosystem. First and foremost, the talent, okay.

Speaker 1: 21:36

You mentioned your international expansion. Are there any particular sectors either that you're planning to explore or, with your experience, work particularly well with this kind of freelance model?

Speaker 2: 21:47

Yes, so we are targeting four industries Telecommunications, the energy and utility sector, travel and mobility, and then the whole technology, e-commerce, software sector. Those are the industries in which we see, let's say, the greatest willingness or openness to innovate and to try new models, and that may be because regulation is a little bit less intense there. We compare it, for example, to healthcare, to financial services, and that's why we think the model has an advantage there. However, we are also seeing the first financial services companies coming onto the platform, seeing the first financial services companies coming onto the platform, and we think it's a question of time until we can address these sectors as well.

Speaker 2: 22:42

Really interesting and thinking personally, klaas what's been your biggest learning and experience in managing such a dynamic business? Actually, I joined Yumde only two and a half years ago, and before that I did something completely different. I was for 15 years. I was in the digital investment sector, so I invested into digital businesses, and as part of my last job, I was responsible for a portfolio of different B2C businesses, and three of them had outsourced their customer service to Hyundai. That's how I actually got to know the model from a client perspective and it worked really well for our companies, and so I was intrigued by it and happy to join. But it's a completely new role, right? Because before that, as an investor, I'm looking at business models and the strategy of things. Now, as a chief growth officer, it's very much operational tasks, very much down to earth, every day, trying to improve what we're doing, trying to generate more traffic for the website, trying to improve client pitches and all of that. So it's been quite an interesting journey for me as well.

Speaker 1: 24:08

Fantastic, and what's your take? You've got a fairly unique insight into the global contact center market and the global BPO sector. What's your insight and what do you think is going to happen over the next year or so in the market? What's your take on that?

Speaker 2: 24:28

So I think I mean one of the questions out there right now is how is the overall outsourcing volume going to develop? Will the market grow or will it shrink because of automation? And we've all read these news about Klana and how it impacted teleperformance, the stock price and all of that. Now our firm belief is that the overall volume, the overall market, is going to increase because of three factors. First of all, with technology improving, it becomes easier to outsource. You can outsource tasks that you could not before. Second thing is, we see new work coming because of AI. All of the data, labeling, the annotation, the trust and safety work all of that is increasing. And then, because of AI, there's this explosion of content and that content will have to be managed and regulation will require that content to be managed and that is additional work and therefore we think the market is work and for the more complex work you need more qualified workforce, and that's why we think, with our model, we're in a very good position, because we can provide that.

Speaker 1: 26:09

Fantastic, klaas. Thank you very much. It's been really interesting having you with us today. Hope our listeners have also found this insightful. You can find out lots more about the Customer Experience Foundation at cxfoorg and do check out yundaycom. Thank you for joining us on CX Diaries and we hope to see you next time.