Case Study: Technology

Providing rapid scale and high quality for a high-growth, first-time outsourcer

SaaS organization finds back-office efficiency and engaged employees via HGS offshoring

Overview

The client, focused on the financial aspects of travel, engaged HGS in 2018 to assist with processing invoices and expenses. For any financial enterprise, ensuring quality, accuracy, and efficiency in the processing of transactions are of the utmost importance. Educated, engaged employees are absolutely essential for delivery, and HGS has proven our proficiency.

26%improvement by moving from on-prem to on-cloud

265% in productivity improvements post-ramp

2.3%attrition, which has led to better quality and efficiency

Client background

The client is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, providing travel and expense management services to businesses.

Business challenge

With sights set on global growth and executing on an aggressive transformation strategy, the leaders of an online travel and expense management services company were looking to mine the value of outsourcing by contracting out the back-office processing of invoices and expense audits.

The solution

Knowing that many clients choose offshoring for cost savings, HGS constantly looks for further ways to streamline and enhance operations – especially back-office operations. A diverse, engaged, scalable, and long-tenured workforce is key to containing expenses and ensuring quality.

Scalable workforce

HGS has centralized back-office services for this client in Hyderabad, India. Taking advantage of the fact that there are hundreds of colleges in Hyderabad, HGS initiated a program called College Connect. The program ensures optimal recruitment of analytically and technically focused graduates with strong verbal and written English skills. HGS draws from a significant talent pool of approximately 25 colleges ensuring a strong resource base. In the first six months of the partnership, the client was so impressed with HGS that they asked us to increase from 40 FTEs to 106 FTEs. As of September 2022, the program has expanded to 1,450+ FTEs across three locations: Hyderabad and Mysore, India, and Manila, Philippines. We also now support three languages: English, German, and French.

Employee diversity, engagement, and retention

HGS has an active engagement program, and this client got to experience the benefits of it firsthand.

HGS deliberately focuses on the employee lifecycle with motivation via breaks, music, and gamification as stressbusters.

Ensuring a diverse workplace (gender, disability, sexual orientation, race, age, nationality, attitude, experience, etc.) and an inclusive environment is our common way of conducting business. In this regard, we are fully aligned with the client’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) focus.

In 2019, we partnered with two local employment organizations to ensure our work environment was ready for persons with disabilities (PWD), specifically, individuals who have hearing loss. We hired a sign language interpreter competent in Indian and/or American Sign Language and familiarized the interpreter with the training to ensure that the content is fully accessible.

Shortly thereafter, we hired 25 people with limited or no hearing capability. In addition to making the interpreter highly available, we also assigned a buddy/mentor to each new employee for the first three months after onboarding.

Today, our PWD colleagues are some of the highest-performing team members for this account. We also help create career paths for them so that they stay with us for years to come.

Stellar quality

From day one, HGS aggressively focused on beating the client quality targets, with a consistent and stringent internal audit by HGS to ensure the client’s 2% random, real-time sample was a success.

Internal auditing is the secret to our success. The HGS training and quality team – in fact the whole organizational culture – is built on and focused on precision in production, auditing, and training for excellence.

HGS performance shines on the client’s audits, and we take care to act on findings. In just six months, for example, we worked to improve one of our scores of 68.85% to 96.20%. This is a significant 26.21% improvement, which was made even more impressive in the face of our productivity growth, which has been 265% over six months post ramp.

As a true sign of high quality, HGS has consistently received 10 out of 10 on its client satisfaction survey (an NPS of 100) throughout the life of the partnership. Outperforming the client’s captive/in-house business units and a preferred provider of back-office services, we have recently expanded lines of business from general queues to “Dedicated Clients,” which are high-profile clients requiring dedicated teams.