Exploring Further Possibilities in 'Work-at-Home-Workforce' Trend

Dave Pearson, Executive Vice President & CIO, Sykes Enterprises

Dave Pearson, Executive Vice President & CIO, Sykes Enterprises

The rise of cloud computing, social and mobility is impacting the customer service industry. The cloud has been instrumental in making data accessible and cost effective for all. It is the emergence of cloud that facilitated the current rise of social media and mobility in the sector. Mobility is enabling self-service and social communities that are based on the concept of people helping people.

Virtual Desktop Technology has Immense Potential

Sykes is a leader in the ‘work-at-home-workforce’ trend, and, keeps on exploring more possibilities in bringing work to people, rather than bringing people to work. Often, we have to effectively move various task-based assignments from site to site and country to country. Virtual Desktop technology retains the capability to address these concerns. The technology offers security and flexibility in provisioning the applications while reducing end point administration and improving asset utilization. In my opinion, this is one technology with substantially untapped potential.

Meeting the Challenges of a CIO

All CIOs are challenged with balancing the demands of “Run, Grow, and Transform.” Today, there are many opportunities to innovate amidst on-going attempts to manage and develop the business. It is a viable move to integrate core infrastructure into services by leveraging virtualization, cloud computing, and partnering with trusted SaaS providers, so as to materialize an increasingly flexible and responsive IT industry. The resulting mindshare that is free from the day-to-day IT operations could be reinvested in business process optimization techniques and new capabilities such as mobility or analytics for improving our products and enhancing customer services. So, companies like Sykes have to evolve the IT infrastructure in this way within the next few infrastructure investment cycles.

It also remains a challenge to deliver high-quality experience with multimedia content at a price performance ratio adhering to the return-on-investment based approach. Evocative transformation generating totally new revenue streams calls for ideas, speculative investment, trial and error, determination, and in some cases cultural change, and surfaces as a difficult task. Most of the companies invest in transformation yet, the investment capacity and urgency depends on market conditions, financial goals, or level of competition from contemporaries.

Innovation Enhances Cost-effectiveness and Responsiveness

At Sykes, we enable financial modeling of our infrastructure to understand the true cost and benefit that it gives our business, further causing cost-effective and responsive approach. As a technology-enabled services company, methods to improve the efficiency of employees are searched for, further helping them deliver effective and satisfying interactions with consumers, while following the quality standards. With this aim, process analysis methods are employed while comparing the present state to a future state with better outcomes. Further, analytics are empowered to identify correlations and patterns that are not readily observed to validate the benefit of change in process. The analytical approach has been encouraging employees to be creative in re-designing systems to deliver the desired outcomes.