Can Capgemini’s ODIGO Shed New Light on Customer Experience?

Since the acquisition of France-centric Prosodie in 2011, Capgemini has expanded the footprint of the ODIGO SaaS contact center platform throughout Europe. Recently, the service provider has been working to grow Prosodie in North America, where Capgemini has a sizeable business services presence, but has yet to fully leverage the capability with business process services. During Capgemini’s recent analyst and advisor day, we saw evidence of this changing– the emphasis now on integrating the ODIGO cloud-based multichannel customer interaction platform playing a major role at Business Process Services (BPS) Capgemini clients.

Today, Odigo has 400,000 users, ~80% in Europe and a high concentration in its native France. While Odigo is expanding in Brazil and winning deals in Mexico, it has yet to find much traction outside of this area. Currently, the vast majority of Odigo clients are just using the SaaS solution with no Capgemini business process services tied to it. However, with the recent reorganization, Capgemini pulled Odigo into the business services group, hoping to align the capability for platform-based services. Last year, Capgemini launched an offer combining ODIGO and BPS for its IT Service Desk. Now more than 30 clients, including the State of Georgia, Time Warner and HydroOne, are using Odigo as the contact engagement tool supporting Capgemini’s service desk solution. Following this success, Capgemini decided to expand ODIGO into other BPS offerings. Capgemini business process services handle 70 million interactions per year with approximately 7,000 staff operating in a contact center capacity. Business services leadership at the event de-emphasized the voice business, highlighting a focus on increasingly digital channels to address the revolution impacting contact centers today, which plays well into Odigo’s multichannel capabilities.

To be successful, Capgemini needs to accelerate the Odigo product roadmap to build on its omnichannel capability, for instance orchestrating chat and email within third-party solutions.In the past the platform has been ahead of the game, being an early adopter of Visual IVR with its SmartCall capability. And, it has some valuable built-in analytics capabilities around natural language processing. But we believe it will need to do more to keep up. While Odigo offers omnichannel elements such emotion detection in written channels such as email and chat, the roadmap for this offering should also include on-the-fly emotion detection on the voice channel (while someone is speaking to an agent); many of the leading platforms already have it.

The service provider should also emphasize the synergies between the business process capabilities and that of Odigo’s customer experience enablement to sell platform-based services. The DCX/consulting capability will be critical to success—as discussed in our recent Blueprint on Contact Center Operations, all of the leading customer experience management players use customer experience consulting and journey mapping capabilities to promote thought leadership and win deals.

On the other side of the coin, Capgemini BPS can drive Odigo adoption by highlighting productivity improvements, cost reduction, and revenue generation with success stories. The biggest challenge of all will be gaining presence and mindshare outside of France. A recent BPS deal signed in Canada that ties together the business services and multichannel capability demonstrates there is potential for momentum. Continuing to develop tight integrations with leading CRM platforms like Salesforce and Zendesk will help bolster its relevance in the North American market.

While the BPS platform discussion at the event was focused heavily on the iGATE platforms, there is too much potential for omnichannel and customer experience to ignore Odigo any longer. Offered as a tightly integrated package, Odigo/BPS can be offered in a plug-and-play outcomes focused way. The service provider may even want to consider ditching the Prosodie name to streamline the message and unify Odigo as a Capgemini capability. Capgemini leadership seems to have the right forward thinking about future contact center dynamics and needs to emphasize the potential impact of the platform on customer experience outcomes to bring this capability out from behind the shadows.