One year seems to have gone by so fast. I joined Premier BPO as the CEO in 2022 and as I come up on my premier year anniversary, I wanted to share some observations and notes. These are based on my personal trips to Manila, Lahore, numerous town halls, market research, one-on-one sessions, and our sales kick-off earlier this year.
I joined at a pivotal point for Premier. We have been laser-focused on our purpose of being a seamless extension of our client’s business and providing high-touch service, especially for first-time outsourcers.
Outsourcing is Strategic
While some firms look at staffing and adding “bodies”, I’ve found that our clients take a different view on outsourcing. Our COO calls this “co-sourcing”. This is the ultimate true partnership between the client and BPO provider in that we can truly live up to our purpose and be a seamless extension of their business.
Our clients look to us for strategic insights and collaborate together to enhance their business. They think of team members collectively, regardless of borders. And together, we not only have been growing together over the last year but also having fun!
As travel eased up, I’ve started visiting our clients and hearing reinforcements of how strategic we are to their business. This makes us want to work hard to help add value to the business. It’s a “we” and “us” mentality regardless of what level we engage at.
Expanded Services
At the beginning of 2023, we also added an offering we call “Strategy First”, an off-shoot of our in-house strategy team. Clients saw the value we realized with this in-house team and we’ve been working on making this available to clients as well. Whether it’s customer-centric exercises to understand the buyer journey and improve customer experience or it’s more foundational in terms of identifying the values and mission so everyone can be aligned with a north star. We’ve also provided growth-based strategies such as researching and identifying clients’ ICP (ideal customer profile).
With the labor market tightening, we saw growth in several functions this past year including accounting, finance, digital marketing, and HR (recruiting specifically). Our IT outsourcing unit continues to raise its value with custom software development and more recently, AI and Chat GPT-related services. Clients are relieved that they can work with us across the spectrum of services given our multi-country footprint to source the best talent for their unique needs.
New Capabilities
Tapping into my prior experience at Indeed.com and ADP, we took a multi-year outlook on adding additional capabilities once I came into the role. We are looking at geographic expansion to provide services to our clients in other markets and adding more capabilities that may be unique to certain industries. A few of these are in motion and we look forward to sharing the details soon. Some of this is the result of our focus on innovation.
In 2022, we held a Shark-Tank-style “pitch fest”, across all our locations to see what ideas our team could come up with. In the months since we’ve been working on bringing these innovations and efficiencies to market.
Growth
One measure of success is growth in our business. We had very solid double-digit growth in revenue, which meant that we needed more space for our growing team. We moved into new offices in Manila and are looking at expansion in our other service delivery centers too.
To ensure we continue to provide best practices and consistency across all our centers, we also centralized some of our operational functions. These include our workforce management, business intelligence, quality assurance, and program-training teams.
Partners
In 2022, we formally rolled out our Premier Partner Program. This allows us to engage more formally with partners from the industry as well as technology companies.
Services
With our centralized service function and our strategy team in place, we’ve been able to provide services to new and existing clients in a few broad areas:
a. Contact Center: answering calls, chats, and emails on behalf of our client and often with the end customer of our client including customer service, scheduling, troubleshooting, support
b. Back Office: helping to increase productivity across finance, accounting, HR, and operations with services to reconcile data, analyze data, including supply chain management, invoice processing, customer verification and onboarding, timesheet processing, travel & expense management
c. Digital marketing and Inbound Lead management
d. Strategy services
At Premier BPO, we understand that our customers are at the heart of our success, and we are committed to providing them with the best possible service. To that end, we created a support services department that is made up of highly talented individuals who are focused on delivering quality assurance, business intelligence, automation, compliance, training, implementation, and workforce management services.
I look forward to 2023 kicking it into the next year with a lot of foundation set during 2022. I’m appreciative to our entire team at Premier, our clients, and partners.
Regards,
Ali Din
CEO
