Innovation strategy in the outside-in view

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” — Steve Jobs 

As organizations worldwide move away from traditional ways of interacting with their customers, they are also moving away from traditional ways of approaching their growth strategy. Organizations are now focusing on the changing customer needs and market trends when building their strategies, as against keeping internal issues and capabilities at the core.

Businesses want to look into the future from the eyes of their customers, to get a complete view of the market such that they can anticipate changes that will affect their business and plan a response.

Over recent years, Teleperformance has witnessed a tremendous increase in demand on Innovation, both from our clients as from our internal departments. As a market leader in customer service, we have been swift in responding to these market trends, adopting an innovation focused strategy – made possible by our outside-in approach.

An all-encompassing approach to innovation and strategy

We closely follow our customers, their end markets, our competitors and the overall customer experience and BPM technology landscape to look at things from an outside-in perspective. The Innovation process at Teleperformance isn’t limited to specific teams, but involves stakeholders across clients, technology partners, senior management, transformation, technology, and operations. Teleperformance manoeuvres intelligence gathered via market research, analyst house publications, client workshops, client TAP assessments, employee ideas (through our ‘All Ideas Matter’ initiative), leadership feedback, Industry conferences, etc. to identify trends that matter and problems that need to be addressed.

This approach enables us to use client preferences and external trends as a guidepost for building and customizing our offering. It helps us devise targeted action plans to support innovation for our clients, as well as internal functions.

We have developed specific processes and have built dedicated teams to keep up with the fast-changing market. The Innovation Working Group (IWG) team at Teleperformance leverages the joint expertise of leaders from Operations, Transformation, Technology & Business Intelligence, to drive innovation.

We have dedicated resources to undertake the following activities to ensure we stay ahead of the curve:

• Generating Actionable Insights based on Customer & Market Research: Our business intelligence, innovation and transformation teams are constantly on the lookout for opportunities and actionable insights for TP basis research of latest industry trends and technologies. Insights and data-based analysis helps us identify areas to focus on and challenges that need attending to. It helps us identify customer problems and innovative ways to solve them.
• Identifying Partnership opportunities for TP (technology specific) to strengthen our partnership ecosystem
• Client workshops, TAP assessments to assess client performance, challenges, emerging needs to offer specific practical solutions
• Events & Thought Leadership: Actively participating in and organizing industry events; demonstrating thought leadership through other channels, including speaking/ moderating at conferences

Teleperformance has built a standard global process for identifying and reviewing ideas, solutions, and potential partnerships for innovation to ensure organization-wide alignment on the outside-in focus.

In Summary

By staying close to our customers and the market, we strive to be different from our competitors in ways that are relevant to our customers.

Our customer centric approach and reinvented focus on innovation have helped us support clients across verticals in their transformation journey. In recent years, we were able to support major brands like:

Teleperformance’s High Tech – High Touch approach and our domain experience is the driving force of all these success cases.

In future, Teleperformance will continue to adopt an external market orientation and carefully study customer and industry trends to support our strategic vision and goals, while keeping an eye on internal processes.