For the past few weeks, I have been meeting some of the key influencers and decision makers from the travel industry and have been talking to them about IGT’s role in managing the various outsourcing engagements. I noticed that the general conversation with such industry leaders has undergone such a radical change over the past decade or so.

In my early days as an outsourcing champion, my conversations with them focused on how as an Indian company we can help them save costs that how good we are in offering a good quality language support, how many talented engineers we have and the fact that we can transition all their non-core activities. Today, these things never seem to creep up into our conversations. Every senior leader is now focused on deriving maximum value from every relationship. Today, outsourcing companies like mine are not seen as vendors but partners.

Over the past decade, the work relationships with our customers have also witnessed a paradigm shift. Earlier, our association with a customer began and ended with a specific piecemeal project like fare loading or implementation of an internet-booking engine. We were never a part of the overall big picture that the customer organization had laid out. However, today our customers share their vision of future with us and expect us to provide a solution, irrespective to the nature of service, be it IT service or BPO or consulting.

At IGT, we have a strong IT practice and a robust BPO center. Hence many of our customers have been able to leverage the benefits from the efficiency of technology and the empathy of a contact center to provide better service to their consumers.

As our customers graduate from piece meal out-tasking to integrated outsourcing, I also see our technology and BPO teams working together to develop business-focused solutions for our demanding customers. Our quality and project management teams are setting up common governance structure and interlinked metrics that can provide the customer with a single window view.

We at IGT, today stand at the brink of popularizing our integrated solutions, focused towards the travel industry. These solutions center around solving specific business goals like revenue generation, customer satisfaction, new media management etc. The technology and BPO solutions combine to be the means to reach the larger goal. For instance, our ‘Enquiry to Revenue’ solution encompasses all the components of a customer query like a Reservations Desk, Loyalty Management, technology driven Booking Channels, coupled with revenue intelligence services like Debit Memo and Sales Audit to offer a holistic solution that helps airlines drive top line growth while generating significant savings from the Revenue Intelligence Hub.

What is making this journey exciting is leading the change in driving value for our customers. The ability to leverage the strengths of both the IT & BPO teams to offer an integrated holistic solution is indeed changing the paradigms of traditional outsourcing. I am looking forward towards working with more customers in the implementation of these solutions. The future is exciting indeed!!

Today’s business world is full of shifting paradigms and as the market moves through the volatility, a new wave is surfacing – the wave for enhanced mobility, decisions based on social conversations and maximized analytics.

During my visit to the NASSCOM Leadership Forum 2011, I found myself nodding in agreement with the compelling argument that no matter where you look, this new wave of technology seems to hold the key to solving most of the significant problems being faced in businesses today. A boundaryless world is our future, with mobile application, cloud computing and Social media being the key threads binding it together. Everywhere I look around, I see more interactions becoming virtual. Its amazing to see the youth today spend more time on Facebook than on checking their emails or using traditional media.

During my interactions with the Gen Y in my office & other social circles, I realise that we need to understand that this generation does not respond to the same triggers as the ones preceding it. They are dramatically different.They are all about smart phones, socializing on the move, using applications to do a variety of tasks, far beyond the conventional usage of a phone for voice calls only.

While waiting at the airport lounge, I saw many such tech-savvy users SELF-SERVE varied aspects of their travel experience. The dynamic nature of the audience is encouraging service providers to think out-of-the-box to develop applications and solutions that’ll keep them engaged.

These new age technologies are gradually becoming a platform to personalize the travel experience based on the customer segment and business capabilities. GPS, Android, and Geo-location are all new and exciting apps that provide the opportunity to create digital loyalty, better product positioning and influence customer purchasing patterns.

No wonder, at the NASSCOM forum, this shift in paradigm was at the core of the discussion.  The new technology buying pattern of the consumer is  now based on trust, transparency, conversation with friends and family and expert opinions. It is all about empowering your customers by providing them with intitutive choices rather than on- the- face advertisements.

I see all this bringing in a big shift in the way we see our roles in the future. Firstly, we business leaders need to appreciate the transformation of our own roles from chief executives to chief enablers in this new age digital world. Secondly, it is only by empowering and enthusing our customers with new age technologies that we can spark the spirit of innovation, which will be solely needed to tackle the increasingly complex demands the customer of tomorrow is already posing.