Webhelp partners with Microsoft to stimulate economic growth in Egypt
Webhelp, a global leader in customer experience and business solutions, recently entered a partnership with Microsoft to create 200 jobs in Cairo, Egypt.
An official agreement was signed with a joint mission to grow the Webhelp Egypt business to 1,000 employees by the end of 2021 and expand to more than 4,000 employees over the next three years.
Driven by its vision to make business more human, Webhelp is committed to increasing diversity and investing in programs to promote education and integration in the more than 50 countries where it operates. Already a major employer in Africa and northern Africa, Webhelp is committed to growing its sustainable investments on a global scale.
The news comes after Webhelp signed a three-year agreement with Egypt’s Information Technology Development Authority (ITIDA) to invest EGP 200M into job creation, technical skill enhancement, and economic growth. In line with Webhelp’s impact sourcing initiatives, ITIDA aims to create intensive job opportunities for highly qualified Egyptian youth in information technology products and services.
Last Thursday, Amr Mahfouz, President of ITIDA, Mirna Arif, General Manager of Microsoft Egypt, Vincent Bernard, Group Chief Operating Officer, Etienne Turion, CEO of Webhelp Enterprise, and Alaa El Khishen, Webhelp Egypt CEO, witnessed the event at the official Ministry of Communications and Information Technology office in Egypt.
Microsoft and Webhelp’s collaboration will support remote presales and sales services of Microsoft digital transformation solutions to small and medium enterprise businesses. Webhelp’s enterprise practice has developed strong partnerships with major tech players globally, thanks to its strong expertise in B2B sales in this key sector. This agreement strengthens Microsoft and Webhelp Egypt’s future ambition to generate job opportunities to spur growth and prosperity in the region.
Mirna Arif, Country Manager, Microsoft Egypt, said:
“Our partnership with Webhelp will enable job creation, enhance skills and support our country’s growth story in the post-pandemic era. As we continue to empower public and private organizations across the country to achieve their digital agendas, we will continue to strengthen Egypt’s position as the destination of choice for attracting global investments.”
Vincent Bernard, Group Chief Operating Officer, announced:
“We are proud that thanks to our enterprise expertise and global way of working, we have become a trusted partner of a major player like Microsoft. Our partnership will become part of Webhelp’s ESG initiative to empower new generations through offering the opportunity to become trained and internationally certified in pre-sales services, digital sales, and sales channels. In the coming years, we have plans to invest further in opportunities for youth in Egypt.”
When should your startup outsource?
When should your startup outsource?
If your startup is close to the scaling point: by this we mean that it has reached a stage where its growth is taking off and you need to control it, streamlining your operations in order to “scale” . If you also want to make your customer service a strong and differentiating pillar of this growth, you might want to consider outsourcing as an option for your customer service or customer acquisition – and this is where a structure like The Nest by Webhelp could help you.
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Outsourcing your customer relationship for your startup: good idea or big mistake?
In the early years of building a startup, challenges are everywhere: providing the best customer experience to your customers, keeping the right focus to innovate on products and services, recruiting the best talents, accelerating your time to market, expanding internationally, formalizing your processes while maintaining flexibility…
While customer relationship outsourcing could be a solution to many of these challenges, some startups are still unaware of the benefits of such a service or are hesitant to use it for maturity, growth strategy reasons etc.
Here are some tips to understand if customer relationship outsourcing is a good idea or not to support the growth of your startup (to be challenged of course!)
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Digital empowerment for future leaders
At Webhelp, our motto is “Think human.” That means putting our people first. It means helping them to make the most of their individual talents, to innovate and take risks, and to help each other grow and thrive. To become passionate game changers, and the future of our industry.
Digital adoption is a huge part of that. We believe that a shift to digital ways of working, properly delivered, serves to assist our people in finding their potential. With that in mind, over recent years the Organisational Development team has transformed our management development programmes, with digital enhancements at the centre, to enable our leaders to be the best they can be.
Virtual Classroom
Back in 2018, we upskilled our Management Development Consultants to design, develop and deliver virtual classrooms using virtual software. The goal was to shift the Management Development modules – traditionally only delivered in a face to face environment – into a virtual classroom approach.
To date, the team have facilitated over 160 Virtual Classroom sessions to an audience of over 1000 managers, translating to 2468 hours of learning investment. Not only did this allow us to swiftly pivot our approach when the Covid-19 crisis forced organisations to embrace remote working, the shift to digital training has led to a far greater reach of management development consultants to our managers, which has in turn increased the volume of development available. And we are seeing the results.. Over the past 4 years, the rating of our managers by our front line advisors has increased year-on-year, and is one of the highest rated responses across all sections of our annual employee survey.
We continue to refine and improve our offering and are proud to say that our people can now receive the same industry-leading training with a 50% reduction in learning investment time. They also have more flexibility in when and how they access the learning they need.
Virtual Roadshow
One perhaps less obvious impact of lockdown has been on how we can communicate with our people. It’s incredibly important to us that our people feel informed about the learning opportunities that are open to them, and with our usual face to face opportunities off the table, we needed a new solution.
And that is where Virtual Roadshow comes in.. To create awareness and excitement about the ehancements the Organisational Development team have been making over the last couple of years, we will be talking virtually to all operational leaders and support colleagues over the course of the next few months. We have complemented this roadshow with an innovative, interactive digital booklet, complete with informative videos on all programmes and learning opportunities breaking down all the important developments across the business. This allows colleauges to digest this and reflect on what it means for them as and when they chose.
We are proud to be transforming the learner experience, and have already seen the benefits it’s bringing. Taking a unique approach to showcasing our management development products through our interactive booklet truly demonstrates the digital capabilities we have developed. I’m excited for the new possibilities that this gives us, as we continue to grow and transform.
Judith Ferguson, Director, People Business Partnering & Organisational Development – UK, South Africa & India
Social learning
As part of our Leadership Development Suite, we set out to revolutionise our learning & development proposition, by providing high-end, blended and self-directed learning options for our people. When COVID hit in March 2020, we wanted to find a way to support our managers rapidly, and enable not only open communication, but a community approach to solving problems. We wanted managers to support other managers, and learn from each other.
Our solution was to provide open access to our Leadership Development suite, with over 85 learning programmes currently available. We’ve created a fully virtual solution in the form of a Social Learning community, enhancing communication, and allowing over 900 colleagues (and counting) to find and organically share their learning and information. This allows for years of experience to be fed right back into the business, for those who know to share with those who want to know.
We’ve made some significant changes, both before and during lockdown, to our ways of working. We’ve changed how we develop our people. We’ve changed how we engage with our people.
These changes have helped us to keep connected through learning during lockdown. More significantly, though, they’ve given our people the tools they need to help each other grow. They’ve helped make personal development open and available for everyone, regardless of their role or location.
Interested in finding out more about our journey? Please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Webhelp named as leader by NelsonHall for Customer Care and Sales Capability
Webhelp was recognized as a leader in NelsonHall’s 2021 Vendor Evaluation & Assessment Tool (NEAT) for our exceptional customer care and sales capability on social media. We were also ranked highly for our online reputation management, content moderation, and trust and safety capabilities, validating our teams’ ongoing dedication to support our global partners’ customers and brand reputation.
NelsonHall recently published a social media customer experience (CX) services profile highlighting Webhelp’s capabilities, specialization, and technology enablement. The profile also touches upon our people-first approach to ensuring the health and wellness of our team members.
Ivan Kotzev, lead CX analyst and author of the report, stated:
“In the breakneck dynamic of social media content moderation, Webhelp maintains a strong position with a combination of proprietary moderation and agent assistance platforms, strategic partnership, investments in employee wellbeing and resilience, and industry-specific services.”
NelsonHall’s custom report presents the NEAT vendor evaluation findings for social media CX services in the Customer Care & Sales Capability market segment, displaying a graph of our performance analyzing our social media CX services and the latest market trends.
Besides our solid B2B social selling capability, the profile elaborates on our social media CX consulting, design ability, mature content moderation, and trust & safety experience. This high rating in NelsonHall’s assessment validates our extensive capability and growing global footprint enabling our teams to go the extra mile to deliver real value to our clients.
The report evaluated 21 leading industry players to compare and highlight their offerings, delivery capability, benefits achieved on behalf of clients, customer presence, positioning, innovation, and more.
Ivan continues in the profile, “Webhelp has a mature consulting and design practice able to analyze clients’ CX demand and identify social channels’ suitability within an overall CX approach.”
The NelsonHall NEAT assessment defines a leader as a player who exhibits high capability than their peers while delivering benefits for clients at a developed ability to exceed client expectations.
Bots, Bias & Bigotry: safe scaling of AI
In the first of our Risk & Innovation series, James Allen examines the barriers to overcome when scaling AI.
Now that we’re well into the fourth Industrial Revolution (also known as Industry 4.0), we expect to see some fundamental shifts in how businesses operate and serve their customers.
Here’s what we see as the three big pillars of Industry 4.0:
- Digitisation of product and service offerings
- Digitisation and integration of supply / value chains
- Digital business models and customer access
The shift toward Industry 4.0 has become more important to many brands, and has accelerated during the Covid crisis as a result of significant changes in supply chain and consumer behaviour.
In fact, a recent McKinsey survey highlighted that 65% of respondents see Industry 4.0 as being more valuable since the pandemic, with the same survey revealing that the top 3 strategic objectives for Industry 4.0 are:
- Agility to scale operations up or down in response to market-demand changes (18.4%)
- Flexibility to customize products to consumer needs (17.2%)
- Increase operational productivity and performance to minimise costs (17.2%)
Yet when the same respondents were asked if they had successfully scaled Industry 4.0 initiatives, only 26% had managed to do so successfully.
According to Rothschild & Co, the market for Industry 4.0 is expected to top 300 billion dollars, and with AI and connectivity projected to reduce manufacturing costs by 20% (or 400 billion dollars), it’s essential that companies find a way to scale safely, at pace.
Artificial Intelligence evolution
AI has been in development for years, starting with the first computers in the 1940, with which scientists and mathematicians began to explore the potential for building an electronic brain. In 1950, the “Turing Test” proposed that if a machine could carry on a conversation that was indistinguishable from a conversation with a human being, then it was reasonable to say that the machine was “thinking”. This simplified version of the problem allowed Alan Turing to argue convincingly that a “thinking machine” was at least plausible, and the paper answered all the most common objections to the proposition.
Fast forward many years, and many millions of pounds of research investment, and in 1997 perhaps the first publicly recognised AI computer was developed. This came from IBM in the form of Deep Blue – a chess-playing computer that beat the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
But machines like Deep Blue were incredibly complex, extremely expensive, and inaccessible to all but a few large technology companies. In the past few years, however, the interest and opportunity presented by AI within Industry 4.0 has exploded.
This is due to a number of factors:
- Wider availability of computing and access to cloud environments with large processing power
- Development of deep learning algorithms
- Big Data platforms
- Development of Artificial General Intelligence
AI – learnings and barriers to scale
Whilst many companies see the potential presented by AI, companies are also rightly concerned by the risks that it presents, as well as the barriers they need to overcome when scaling.
The most common challenges we tend to come across are:
- Access to specialist skills
- Cost of processing in cloud environments
- Inability to demonstrate fairness, lack of bias and integrity of AI algorithms
- Risk of unintended consequences
- Regulatory understanding
- Ability to seamlessly switch between AI powered processes and regular business processes in the event the AI fails
This presents organisations with a real conundrum. AI use raises questions over ethics, safeguards, interpretability and more. It’s only right that organisations probe these issues and take the learnings from those that have gone before them.
Here’s a few public examples of where AI has gone wrong:
Footballer or felon
A facial-recognition system identified almost thirty professional American footballers as criminals, including New England Patriots three-time Super Bowl champion Duron Harmon. The software incorrectly matched the athletes to a database of mugshots in a test organized by the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Nearly one in six athletes were falsely identified.
CEO gets spoofed
In 2019 the CEO of a UK-based energy firm got a call from his boss at their German parent company, instructing him to transfer €220,000 to a Hungarian supplier. The ‘boss’ said the request was urgent and directed the UK CEO to transfer the money promptly. It turned out the phone call was made by criminals who used AI-based software to mimic the boss’ voice, including the “slight German accent and the melody of his voice,” as reported in the Wall Street Journal. Such AI-powered cyberattacks are a new challenge for companies, as traditional cybersecurity tools designed for keeping hackers off corporate networks can’t identify spoofed voices.
Get me out of here!
US airlines were subject to widespread criticism after their AI powered pricing systems charged customers up to 10 times the price of a regular ticket, as they desperately tried to escape Florida ahead of the arrival of hurricane Irma. The systems did not have a kill switch. “There are no ethics valves built into the system that prevent an airline from overcharging during a hurricane,” said Christopher Elliott, a consumer advocate and journalist.
Navigating the risks and enabling safe scaling of AI
Webhelp and Gobeyond Partners have developed a comprehensive framework to support the safe scaling of AI, including assessment of risk, key controls, human-centred ethics principles, algorithm management and data handling. This framework includes open source methods that can be used to demonstrate the integrity and explainability of AI algorithms.
Questions your organisation should consider
Although AI presents a huge opportunity to transform both business operations and customer experience, this is not without risk. Here are some of the long term strategic questions that we recommend you consider, for your organisation:
- What role does AI have in the working environment and is there such a thing as a post-labour economy? If so, how do we make it fair?
- How do we eliminate bias in AI?
- How do we keep AI safe from threats?
- Is it right to use AI in cyber defence? If so, where is the line?
- As AI capabilities become more integrated, how do we stay in control of such a complex system?
- How do we define the humane treatment of AI?
Feel free to get in touch, to see how we can help you safely fulfil your Industry 4.0 ambitions at pace and at scale.
Innovation is necessary, safety is crucial
James Allen, Webhelp’s Chief Risk & Technology Officer, introduces our new series taking a deep dive into risk and innovation.
Risk and Innovation don’t tend to appear in the same sentence very often. Innovation is, of course, essential for businesses aiming to survive and thrive in the 4th Industrial Revolution. But with an increasing weight of regulation, and with data becoming more valuable than oil, how can companies simultaneously innovate while staying ahead of emerging threats?
Here at Webhelp and Gobeyond Partners, our mission is to be leaders and experts in delivering low risk solutions that help our clients to innovate and stay safe.
In this new series, we’ll be providing some insight and perspective into some of the key questions that we work to solve in partnership with our clients.
- AI has huge potential to transform customer experience in my business. But how do I safely move from small scale experimentation to deployment at scale?
- In a world of increasing regulatory burden, how can I use digital technology to automate compliance activities?
- My firm is part of a critical national infrastructure, but I have a large amount of legacy applications that provide critical economic functions. How can I accelerate transformation of my business without putting these at risk?
- My business has made massive investments in digitisation, but my control environment is still analogue. How do I pivot to the new without losing control?
- How do I attract new skills in digital, analytics and cyber into my Risk function?
- Now that home working is part of the new norm, how do I deliver leading edge cyber security with world-class colleague experience?
End-to-end collaboration
By encouraging and facilitating collaboration between different teams, this helps teams reach outside their own comfort zones, think differently, and better consider the customer and colleague experience from beginning to end.
Understanding new technology
New developments in technology are the cornerstone to enabling businesses to innovate, operate effectively, and react quickly. But with the adoption of new technology inevitably come new risks, and new challenges. Foremost importance should be placed on understanding these implications, and ensuring the safe deployment of the new technology.
At Webhelp, we work every day to drive innovation, with control by design. We adapt and innovate – in our technology, our mindset and our operational practices – and continue to push the boundaries of what we can do for our clients. But at the heart of everything we do is a focus on delivering low risk solutions, helping our clients to innovate while remaining safe, now and in the future.
In Risk & Innovation, our new series of articles and white papers, we’ll be exploring how emerging technologies can be used to help companies stay safe while maintaining necessary growth and agility. The first in the series, Bots, Bias & Bigotry- Safe scaling of AI, will arrive on Monday March 22, and will address the fairness, privacy and operational safeguards you need to consider when incorporating AI into your operational model.
Interested in more content from our thought-leader James Allen? Check out his earlier pieces on Taking a human centred approach to cyber security and How AI and data analytics can support vulnerable customers.
Webhelp solidifies footprint in Latin America with Dynamicall
Paris, March 9th, 2021.
Webhelp, the European leader in Customer Experience and Business Solutions, announces today that it has acquired Dynamicall, a leading Peruvian BPO player with over 4.500 employees based in Lima. This acquisition is the latest in a line of sizable and strategic M&A activities over the past five years.
Olivier Duha, Webhelp’s co-founder and CEO, declared:
“Dynamicall is an impressive organization, with a strong cultural fit with Webhelp. We have been partnering to serve several major brands successfully in 2020 and are excited to now welcome their talented teams into the Webhelp family. With its superior track record in delivering high-quality services and its attractive client base, Dynamicall reinforces our unique best-shoring capabilities for our clients.”
Dynamicall enhances Webhelp’s service portfolio in several strategic areas including Spanish and multilingual operations with on/nearshore and offshore delivery capacities for the local and international Spanish-speaking market and North America, and the potential to expand coverage for global and multilingual clients.
Latin America (LatAm), as a region driven by strong economic development, is of key interest to Webhelp. With its broad range of services tailored to clients of all sizes, from start-ups to global conglomerates, Webhelp is keen to serve its clients’ in and from this region while contributing to the local economy and creating career development opportunities. With the acquisition of Dynamicall, Webhelp now has two own sites in Latin America, in addition to the existing operations on the premises of clients in several countries in the region and greenfield sites in the pipeline. The Latin American operations will work together closely with Webhelp’s established Spanish teams, with Julio Jolin extending his responsibilities as CEO to lead LatAm.
Julio Jolin Vargas, CEO of Webhelp’s Spanish operations said:
“The incorporation of Dynamicall in the Webhelp family will strengthen our service offering for Spanish-speaking and global companies alike, looking to reinforce their operations with state-of-the-art services in the LatAm region and the world. We are very excited for this new opportunity to expand our support further for both our current clients and those to be.”
Enrique Beltran, founder and CEO of Dynamical, stated:
“We’re thrilled to take this next step in our partnership with Webhelp and merge with such a dynamic and solid leader. Thanks to the dedication and skills of all people at Dynamicall, we get to serve some of the world’s most exciting brands, and together with our new parent company, we get to expand even further, not only internationally but also in terms of capabilities.”
Webhelp will celebrate its 21st anniversary this year and has become one of the global leaders in the sector thanks to steady organic growth and acquisitions. Driven by a vision of making business more human and a strong and unique company culture motivated by an agile, start-up mindset, and over 75.000 Webhelpers bring their smarts and hearts to the table every day to help clients in a way that makes a real difference.
About Dynamicall
Dynamicall is a leading Peruvian BPO-Contact Center industry provider, offering a stable and formal employment to more than 4500 collaborators from its 2 sites in Lima. Its client portfolio includes major brands, leaders in their respective industries, across all regions of LatAm, North America, and Spain. Dynamicall’s services range from Customer Care, Sales, Back Office, Technical Support among others. Founded 13 years ago, Dynamicall has become one of the most important references in the local industry with a revenue of over 30 million USD per year.
B-Case – How does a bank manage KYC in a B2C marketplace… by using a non-dissuasive process?
Webhelp supported a major international bank to manage all financial flows for its B2C marketplace customers through its specialised internal electronic money institution. Webhelp KYC Services carried out the entire vendor identification and onboarding process : a solution that means it was able to validate more than 10,000 vendors worldwide in just a few months.
This bank’s B2C marketplace customers offer their platform to thousands of vendors from around the world.
- This sector of activity is regulated by the Sapin II law, which targets money laundering and financing of terrorism. Non-compliance fines are on the rise and are expected to exceed $400 billion by 2020 in Europe and the US.
- This regulation requires that sellers and beneficiaries must have been formally identified by a KYC procedure (Know Your Customer) before they can operate in the marketplace.
The bank does not have an international task force to manage the KYC vendor registration process in the marketplace.
- Legal constraint: where the vendor is a legal entity, beneficiaries must be personally identified when registering and then periodically as soon as they hold more than 25% of the capital.
- The specific language and administrative requirements of each vendor’s country of origin must be taken into consideration.
- Each country has its own specific requirements regarding connections to administrative databases.
- Procedures for identifying and onboarding vendors must be fast and efficient enough not to be dissuasive, and reliable enough to comply with regulations.
In order to manage complex, multilingual and multi-country KYC procedures, Webhelp KYC Services has developed a project methodology that was rolled out in seven weeks. The organisation is based on five simultaneously processed areas: data collection (HMI), exchange security, APIs, acceptance rules, and management of reminders. Using our multilingual KYC hub, KYC identification operations can be managed in over 40 countries and in 15 languages. This takes into account each country’s specific administrative requirements and the KYC validation practices particular to the ordering parties. Generally speaking, only 55% of onboarding files are complete the first time around: Webhelp KYC Services uses a reminder program to optimise file completion.
The +: Onboarding a new vendor takes just a few minutes. Additional human verification, when necessary, is carried out in under twenty four hours.
“Unique in the market, our People & Solution procedure combines two components: a dedicated technical platform and multilingual operators trained in KYC verifications. It makes it possible to operate a multilingual, multi-country KYC service with a file rejection rate of less than five per cent.”
Hervé de Kermadec, president of Webhelp KYC Services
Webhelp Ranked Highly Across all Aspects of Social Media by Leading Analyst NelsonHall
Firm announces host of analyst accolades
Paris, France , 11 February 2021
The leading global customer experience (CX) and business solutions provider, Webhelp has been recognized by top-ranking industry analyst, NelsonHall, for its social media capabilities.
The firm was recognized across three core areas: customer care and sales capability; online reputation management capability; and content moderation, trust and safety capability.
NelsonHall’s Evaluation & Assessment Tool (NEAT), part of a “speed-to-source” initiative, enables strategic sourcing managers to assess vendors’ capabilities to identify the industry’s best performers during the sourcing selection process. The methodology specifically evaluates the quality of players’ abilities in several categories, such as technology and tools, service innovation, geographic footprint, and scalability, amongst others.
“We are thrilled that NelsonHall has recognized our social media capabilities. Now more than ever, and in an increasingly digital world, businesses need to deliver high-quality and trustworthy customer experience interactions. Webhelp has a diverse range of digitally enabled services, which allow us to support global brands with their social media interactions and reputation and work with social media platforms and marketplaces themselves to support a safer online environment for users. We are very proud of our achievements in this space,” said Webhelp Co-Founder Olivier Duha.
Ivan Kotzev, NelsonHall CX Services analyst, said:
“Webhelp’s strong performance in social media support and sales is built on a fundament of proprietary technology, channel management experience, and CX consulting capability. Notable is the company’s expertise in lead generation and sales activities on social channels, an increasing priority for brands looking to meet their customers on these channels.”
Webhelp’s extensive capabilities and growing global footprint continue to be validated by the analyst community, with esteemed U.S.-based analyst, Gartner, naming Webhelp as a Niche Player. This builds on the analyst’s reporting of Webhelp as a Rising Star in 2019/20, as the business further establishes its reputation as an industry disrupter and credible alternative to the more traditional players in the North American market.
These recent accolades amplify Webhelp’s current positioning by global analyst Everest Group as a Leader in Customer Experience Management (CXM) in its PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2020, as well as a Leader in its CXM in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Services PEAK Matrix, recognizing Webhelp as being particularly strong in terms of both vision and capability. The Everest Group positioning extends to a new report where Webhelp is recognized as a Major Contender in work-from-home solutions amongst other global players.
Everest Group wrote in its WAHA (Work at Home Agent) CXM Services PEAK Matrix Assessment:
“Webhelp is driving digital transformation through cloud adoption, CX consulting, and automation by partnering with technology vendors such as Amazon Connect, MS Azure, and UiPath, utilizing their platforms as per clients requirements.”