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| EXL Service: Refreshing change |
| Bhupesh Bhandari / New Delhi Jun 02, 2009, 00:15 IST |
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EXL Service, the Nasdaq-listed provider of outsourcing and transformation services, has refreshed its logo in blue and orange and come out with a new tagline, “Go Next. Now.”
Rohit Kapoor, the company’s New York-based president and CEO, says this has been done to communicate the changes that EXL has gone through recently to its customers as well as employees. EXL had acquired a company called Inductis last year to gain strength in the field of analytics. That integration has now been completed. Hence the need was felt to communicate to customers afresh.
The company is in its tenth year of operations and has 9,000 employees spread across three locations in India: Noida, Gurgaon and Pune. It has been a roller-coaster ride for EXL. It was set up in Delaware, USA, in April 1999 by a team of professionals led by Vikram Talwar, who was at that time the CEO and managing director of Ernst & Young, and Kapoor who worked with Deutsche Bank.
In August 2001, EXL got acquired by Conseco which ran it as a fully-owned subsidiary. Almost 95 per cent of the work EXL did was for its parent, Conseco. In 2002, Conseco filed for bankruptcy and EXL ran the danger of getting dragged into it. In November 2002, the same set of professionals along with private equity funds Oakhill Partners and FTVentures bought the company back.
In the last one year, EXL has lost some business. Aviva, which had placed in 2003 an order on the build, operate and transfer basis, put it up for auction. It was bought by WNS for $250 million. Orange Telecom decided to consolidate its vendors and therefore axed EXL. (The business went to its other two partners, Convergys and IBM.) Because of the financial meltdown in the US, some financial sector clients too moved out.
The meltdown has made EXL’s transformation business “soft” and the currency gyrations have made matters worse. The company had hedged its foreign exchange at Rs 41 to a dollar, while the greenback hovers at around Rs 48. As a result, the company saw a fall in turnover as well as net income during the quarter ended March 2009.
But, says Kapoor, things are looking up. “In the last three quarters, we have added four customers who can give us a business of $10 million each over the next 12 to 18 months,” says he. The company has begun to offer fixed prices to its customers if they assure it of a certain volume of business. “We will be at the same level as 2008 by the end of 2009,” Kapoor adds. EXL, according to him, is still hiring almost 200 people every month and has drawn up plans to set up a centre in East Europe.
In the last three years, customer satisfaction, says Kapoor, has improved from around 75 per cent to 97 per cent (97 per cent of the customers put in the top two boxes on a five-box scale) and employee satisfaction from 69 per cent to 85 per cent on various indices.
The new identity tries to communicate this mood to the customers, quite a few of whom have cut their outsourcing budgets. (Some others have decided to hasten outsourcing in order to cut costs in double-quick time.) The change was brought about after an internally-led analysis. Mudra helped it add the final touches.
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