CSS Corp becomes Movate to emphasize its culture for innovating with customers

Emerging from the pandemic, we have entered the true era of IT and business services as the market surpasses two trillion US dollars in annual spending this year.  With wage prices soaring and access to talent at an all-time premium, this is the time to forge innovative partnerships with service providers who want to be paid for performance and incentivized to drive real innovation and business outcomes.

Ambitious organizations have viewed the pandemic as an opportunity to go back to the drawing board and rediscover themselves comprehensively, some even rebranding and repositioning themselves for the future. If done well, this soul-searching and subsequent rebranding and repositioning can consciously drive a positive cultural change and set the organization up for thriving in these volatile times. One such service provider that has embarked on a similar journey is Movate, rebranding from its former identity CSS Corp.

Movate: the new brand name and identity the firm will use as it sheds its CSS Corp moniker

Founded in 1996, CSS Corp has built a reputation as a trusted provider of customer experience (CX) and technical support services. CSS Corp has diversified its geographic delivery and chalked up revenue growth above 25% in recent years.

The company has made a strategic shift to its cultural outlook, business focus, and service portfolio in the last few years with a concerted focus on transforming customers to digital CX solutions and a real breadth in insights-driven services in areas like marketing, conversational, and CX analytics.  We will discuss in more depth how the CSS Corp rebrand to “Movate” is amplifying this change in focus and culture of the company.

Now, traditional services notions and legacy brand identity are no longer aligned with CSS Corp’s internal transformation and the value it brings to clients. Enter, Movate: the new brand name and identity the firm will use as it sheds its CSS Corp moniker and looks to the future. In a fireside chat with Sunil Mittal, CEO of Movate, HFS Research learned about the firm’s bold new vision to embrace a new company identity, including re-envisioning how services are delivered, to drive value-focused outcomes and innovation in the industry .

We needed to rebrand to signal our internal transformation and the good work done by our teams. We needed a new name that could be a visible symbol of change, a flagbearer of a new purpose and ambition.

— Sunil Mittal, CEO, Movate

The successful Services partner in the future will be a value orchestrator, not just a service provider

Today’s enterprises are pressured to continuously change at the pace of market shifts and evolving customer expectations. Yet most companies’ ambitions for change end up as incremental changes that focus on core business survival. Increasing cost pressures with economic uncertainty mean enterprises will seek outsourcing as a tried-and-true approach to reduce cost pressures. However, outsourcing as we know it is changing, and companies are expecting more. Successful service providers are moving toward a value orchestration value proposition to be better poised to help clients.

Enterprises leveraging third parties for business services should move beyond a play for merely cost savings and efficiencies to become a critical strategic lever that enterprises can pull to stay ahead of market shifts and react to changes in customer expectations. To do so, service providers must shift to provide data-driven insights and become more strategic partners to enterprises in the face of disruption. Process excellence and efficiencies are table stakes; the role partners can play in helping to drive fundamental transformation will determine the playing field of the future. Most enterprise buyers in Exhibit 1 see these changes happening and expect more value from service providers.

Exhibit 1: Enterprises seek strategy and insights from their service providers

Sample: 602 executives across Global 2000 enterprises
Source: HFS Research Pulse Study, August 2022

To respond to these increased expectations, service provider partners must rise to the occasion to provide not only higher-value services but also greater agility. Now more than ever, buyers of these services are looking for flexibility and speed from their partners in addition to tried-and-tested dependable partnerships. The Movate rebrand reflects the company’s philosophy about pivoting to help buyers digitalize their operations and reimagine the way they provide services to customers. This new brand also reflects some of the company’s significant investments, including acquisitions to become an agile partner for clients.

There is hope that this industry can course-correct its outmoded ways of behaving, with two-thirds of enterprise leaders preferring an outcome-based approach

New research, which HFS developed in partnership with Indian IT association NASSCOM is revealing an industry primed for some fundamental changes as the current “effort-based” model becomes more and more misaligned for clients seeking better data, better performance, and much more dynamic partnerships to help them operate effectively in the current climate:

Exhibit 2: Two-thirds of BPO customers would prefer to pay for outcomes and data

Sample: 388 executives across Global 2000 enterprises
Source: HFS Research in partnership with NASSCOM, September 2022

The purposes of client and provider must be aligned, or the relationship ultimately fails

When engagements are priced on the number of people, there is very little incentive to explore new methods of creating value, such as automation, AI, quality data, etc. The service provider is incentivized to maintain/increase the staffing levels, not invest in programs to reduce manual dependencies.

Enterprises need to pay for performance, not effort if they ultimately want to benefit from sharing a common purpose with their provider.  Net-net enterprises and their service partners must be motivated to achieve the same goals if they want to enjoy a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship.  This is why Mittal and his leadership have been so keen to rebrand and reshape how they engage with clients as Movate.

Movate is evolving the talent model to meet an unprecedented need for speed and agility

Service providers bring value to clients by providing flexibility and agility; those with a special place in the market as mid-size players are known for giving focused attention to clients and creating a customized offering best suited to their business goals.

Directly OnDemand (now called Movate OnDemand) is an asset that’s been added to Movate, a 100%-gig platform leveraging expert power users to solve clients’ problems with high CSAT levels. The OnDemand acquisition has enabled a hybrid services model that blends gig experts, traditional full-time support teams, and artificial intelligence and automation platforms, bringing a smorgasbord of talent + technology levers for enterprise clients to pull. Clients gain flexibility and the scale of gig peer experts, the benefits of automation, and the stability and reliability of full-time traditional agents, and they pay only for resolution. Most importantly, this integrated model brings to life the promise of aligning to outcomes that HFS evangelizes in its OneEcosystem in Exhibit 3, where digital + people + process excellence enables alignment across CX, EX, and PX and drives profit with a purpose.

Exhibit 3: OneEcosystem brings experiences together for aligned outcomes

Source: HFS Research, 2022

Movate, as a partner, helps us provide a workforce skillset that’s more diverse and enables us to dynamically meet the needs of clients. They help us explore different ways of communicating with customers providing us with more flexibility in how we connect and support customers.

— Rohan Patel, Global Head of Support, SAP

Growing geopolitical uncertainties coupled with trends like The Great Resignation and quiet quitting are challenging when sourcing the right talent. Crowdsourcing is an emerging opportunity in the industry; enterprises want to leverage the crowdsourcing economy but with the assurance of control on quality and performance. Movate is developing a gig-enabled capability offering the flexibility and scalability of gig plus the reliability of a regular workforce; it’s finding traction from clients for this compelling proposition.

The proof is in the pudding, with several case studies showing business outcomes at scale

During COVID, the gig platform allowed us to flex up 300% in a day. The difference with gig is you get people who are excited about the work and the brand, and they’re selecting themselves into it. The nature of people engage—we get people with an affinity for the brand who understand our product. And CSAT is better overall in this model.

— WW Support Leader and Delivery Partner Management, global software company

In addition to this acquisition, Movate has also significantly focused and invested in strengthening its digital capabilities.  The outcomes from these investments are significant. For example, the new On Demand-powered capability of Movate allowed the firm to flex its interactions up 300% in one day to meet unexpected demand at the beginning of the COVID crisis. For a sizeable cosmetic conglomerate, a virtual reality-based adaptive user experience design enabled a 2.5x increase in direct-to-consumer business revenue. Other use cases of digital operations resulted in considerable faster time to market, improved CSAT, significant OPEX and TCO reductions, and improvements to response time.

A real partnership is one that focuses on outcomes while sharing the pains and celebrating the gains

Providers and enterprises are rethinking and redefining services for digital transformation and future readiness. Consulting, IT, and business services are converging to drive outcomes instead of focusing on effort to produce outputs. This is a positive shift for companies willing to take the leap and allow a partner to become a true transformation partner; the good news is that most are embracing new types of partnerships. Most services buyers in Exhibit 4 seek transformation partners, are willing to share risks and outcomes, and see a future of services around growth-oriented models.

Exhibit 4: The very nature of partnerships is shifting to embrace new sources of value

Sample: 300 CX decision makers
Source: HFS Research, The Future of Experience in a Hybrid World, September 2022

The Bottom Line: Movate is more than a rebrand; it is a culture and mindset shift around the value of services and how they are delivered.

Movate made its bold brand shift during a time of much uncertainty, especially concerning talent. With its investments in alternative delivery models, such as a gig economy, Movate is tapping into new sources of talent to deliver for clients nimbly. With technology partnerships, proprietary platforms, and a solid understanding of the outcomes clients want, Movate is building the right ecosystem and capabilities to be a real value partner for its customers. Movate is making industry-leading changes while staying true to its roots and core values: employee-first, technology-led CX solutions and helping growth-oriented companies succeed.