Genpact Picks up Design Firm on Digital Journey to OneOffice

Genpact is stocking up to partner with its clients on a digital journey to business outcomes. Its latest acquisition is of TandemSeven, a customer experience design firm with a dynamic journey mapping tool. The focus of this combination is on designing for end-to-end customer-centric operations, and integrating the front-, middle- and back-office people and activity into operating as OneOffice.

When HfS published the Design Thinking in the As-a-Service Economy Blueprint earlier this year, we looked at how service providers are working with clients to integrate person-centered design and experience in business operations through the use of design thinking expertise, methods, and tools. Genpact and clients shared with us how it’s bringing design thinking into the Lean Digital framework to combine with its heritage strengths in analytics and use of agile methods and artificial intelligence platform Rage Frameworks for innovation. However, Genpact lacked relevant design thinking tools and IP, breadth in capability, and experience. Until now, it relied primarily on partnerships with design firms and leveraging its delivery centers for developing prototypes.

To this end, TandemSeven adds a couple of key components to Genpact:

– Dynamic journey mapping tool and integrated principles: Challenges that we’ve heard with design-thinking innovation for services and operations include: moving from design to action, engaging stakeholders who were not in the original design activity, and measuring impact. TandemSeven’s UX360 is cloud-based journey mapping software that includes a set of templates to lay a foundation for custom journeys that can then be customized as needed and benchmarked for progress. Users can integrate with analytics and lifecycle management tools. It can also be shared for collaborative efforts, and we expect it can be used across organizations as individuals and teams enter and exit projects, keeping everyone on the same journey to the targeted outcome. In addition, TandemSeven emphasizes the need to tailor information in the map to business stakeholders and identify qualitative and quantitative metrics, such as customer satisfaction surveys and web analytics, and key performance indicators. Genpact will need to figure out how to integrate UX360 into its Lean Digital method and toolset and the implications of licensing and sharing to scale it over time. However, it does fill a critical gap here and provide something unique for the service provider.

– Design thinking expertise: While Genpact launched a credible training effort internally over the past two years on design thinking methods and principles, it lacked depth of expertise and experience. TandemSeven adds designers, consultants, and technologists and a client list that ranges from the Fortune 500 to startups and includes public companies and private organizations, e.g, Humana, McDonald’s, Royal Bank of Canada, Pfizer, Southwest Airlines, and University of San Francisco. It is North America centric so it does leave much of the world “uncovered” in terms of local offices and expertise, but can tap into and partner with Genpact’s broad global delivery network.

 
A critical aspect of unlocking the value is in “loosening up” the culture

As with any acquisition, the “proof is in the pudding” and just like with the recent acquisition of Brilliant Basics by Infosys, the move comes a little later versus its peers in the services industry and will need to focus on integrating it into the corporate culture. We hear from clients that Genpact comes across as very well planned, structured and executed – almost too much so. And this rigidity is contrary to the flexibility and emotional aspects of design thinking. However, Genpact and Infosys both have the advantage of design thinking becoming increasingly accepted and viable as an approach to reimagining the way people work, create stakeholder experience, and impact business outcomes; and having prepared their organizations for such a move. 

Bottom line: The way forward is all about managing customer-centric change. 

Genpact is clear in its intent to integrate design thinking into its Lean Digital way of working, and orient itself 100% on “customer first” not “process first”.  The UX360 tool and team of professionals it is bringing in through this acquisition is intended to help orient, design, and realize this vision by being an integral part of what Genpact has in place with its strengths in targeted industries (e.g., banking), process, analytics, and technology. This acquisition positions Genpact to work with clients in a more integrated fashion over time – with an human-centered reimagination of how to better use talent and technology together in “OneOffice” to create experiences and impact business outcomes.