Transforming Employee Experience and Customer Engagement: Startek’s Digital Journey with Oracle

CXOtoday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Abhinandan Jain, Chief Growth Officer, Startek

Question 1: Startek’s Challenges Before Tech/Oracle Implementation

Startek brings brand closer to their customers through personalized, memorable experiences. We strongly believe that a Better Employee/Associate experience delivers a better customer experience. Aegis and STARTEK Combined to Create Global Leader in Customer Engagement Solutions in 2018. In a growth business with operations across different geographies (12 countries) and multiple sites(36 sites) business processes evolve, become localized creating data silos. More so, the 2 companies which came together had different processes on different technology platforms which made cross leverage harder and impacted our employee experience. Hence, we wanted a unified and scalable platform which can enable streamlined, simplified processes, single view of data, Global and local compliance and governance and deliver an exceptional employee experience.

Question 2: How and Why Did You Choose Oracle? Journey Towards Transformation

As a part of our overall strategy, we had laid out a comprehensive digitization blueprint for the company on how we leverage digital and AI to drive employee experience, customer experience, growth, profitability and transparency.  The blueprint spans across all our internal and external processes, including HR. For us it was important that solution we chose is globally scalable, secure and meets our regional needs with minimal customizations. Simplicity of use and integrated processes around entire employee life cycle journey were other key considerations. In our evaluation Oracle stood out from the competition by not only meeting out objectives but also bringing various best practices and learnings throughout the implementation lifecycle which further enhanced the value of the platform. We value partners who are continuously bringing innovation and though leadership to the relationship and Oracle exactly did that.

Question 3: Tech Solutions Implemented – Standardisation Engine, Collaboration Catalyst, Empowerment Enabler and Any Other Solutions

Primarily we have implemented 3 Oracle solutions

1. The Standardisation Engine to drive unified, cohesive processes across our global employee base, ensuring a seamless experience for our associates regardless of their location.
2. The Collaboration Catalyst driving effective real time collaborations across globally dispersed teams. Today leveraging a single integrated platform across geographies, we are driving common best practice people process across all locations. Today if an employee moves rom one location to another then their experience of all employees facing processes remain the same and for their supervisors all processes including (but not limited to) coaching, appraisal, time management remains the same. Managers, HR teams, payroll teams use workflow and collaboration features to drive transparency, accountability and agility.
3. The Empowerment Enabler, with Oracle’s analytics and reporting tools to empower our associates, front line managers and management team with data-driven insights to enable faster decision making and enhanced productivity. Realtime analytics and workflows, provide transparency and ownership, which empowers people to take the right decisions faster, make the organization nimble and focus on customer experience. Additionally, we have leveraged Oracle’s AI and machine learning tools to deploy predictive analytical models which are now allowing us to make more informed decision for future planning driving higher customer satisfaction.

Question 4: Startek’s Future Plans with Oracle

As I said above, for us delivering a better employee experience is a core principle. With that in mind, we are today exploring on how can be leverage advanced Analytics, AI, Generative AI to deliver insights to our business leaders and great experiences to our associates.

Question 5: Startek’s Future Plans in Implementing Trending Technologies Like AI, Gen AI

For us Future is now. At Startek we began our journey in deploying AI and Generative AI to both our associates and customers almost 24 months back. Today we are using AI to train and coach our associates, self-help to empower them, making institutional knowledge available to them in ready to use bites, giving people real time insights into their performance. Advanced Analytics and AI based tools are being deployed and continuously redefined to provide our associates with process level insights and recommendations using which they can not only improve their own skillsets but also recommend to customers actions to drive their customer delight. We see Generative AI as an enabler which works in tandem with our associates to drive higher productivity and more importantly enables our associates to focus on more high-end value-added work. Further, we have launched several initiatives to upskill our teams with aI and Generative AI skills. I am proud of our global team, as we have received several industry accolades and awards for the same.