Prioritizing Customer and Employee Experience

Key Insights

A great digital experience is about delighting the customer. Cooking and business are more similar than you might think. They both require the right ingredients to create a delightful result. Hussain explains, “I’m really delighted that you made that connection because curating different spices and different ingredients to create a flavour, just like a chef does — I think the same analogy can be deployed in creating a digital experience in our day-to-day lives. And it’s actually using different technologies, frameworks, and toolsets to curate an experience for the end customer. So, it’s a perfect analogy that you have drawn. I’m like a chef.”

The prime driver for this growth is solving customer problems. Many factors contribute to the success of a company. But one of the critical drivers for business growth is solving your customers’ problems. Hussain explains, “There are two types of pivoting that we have done over time. Number one was the technological pivoting — from testing into development into consulting. And then, the second one is the client side of the pivot — pivoting from the telco sector into the financial sector and then into the retail sector. So that is how we grew; the foundation of all this has been solving customer problems and making sure we have a better-than-industry customer and employee retention and engagement, and then building on that to deliver a great customer experience for our end users.”

Your employees play a pivotal role in your organization’s growth. There’s a reason we say that people are your greatest asset in business. Hussain says, “Specifically, when you are talking about an organization that has around 400 employees, it’s basically people who are very important. The first thing we did was to make sure we have our own internal recruitment, and we are less reliant on external agencies for our recruitment because choosing the right set of people who echo the same values, as well as reflect the same culture that the organization has, is very critical to growth. So, that has been the number one thing that has been important for our growth. Number two is making sure that people are engaged, and they are committed to the vision and mission of the company.”

Episode Highlights

Employee retention and employee engagement are the two biggest challenges

“People are our IP. We are as good as the last project that we deliver to the customer. And since people are the IP, the retained knowledge and the people we have help us to go from one project to the next project. So, making sure that we have the practices, policies, and procedures in place that help us to retain, maintain the talent, as well as attract the talent — that is the biggest challenge we face on a daily basis.”

Your business mistakes are your greatest lessons

“If you reflect every day in the evening, you would have a bunch of mistakes that you commit on a daily basis. I would term them as ‘lessons learned’ rather than mistakes, but I think the biggest lesson that we learned as we were evolving our entrepreneur journey, as well as developing a business from startup to a mid- to large-sized organization, was to remain focused.”

The importance of customer intimacy

“I believe that professional services are intimate services that you provide to the customer, and you have to have that customer intimacy to be able to understand what their problems are so that you can solve them. You have to have that connection with the service that you’re providing as well as with the client that you’re providing to. And from that customer and business intimacy perspective, the more time that you spend with them, the more intimate that relationship develops into.”