EXL Service: Excellence is the guiding mantra

Punita Jasrotia/New Delhi

WORKCULTURE: EXL Service

“Excellence is our mission”, reads the mission statement of EXL Service, a wholly-owned subsidiary of EXL Service Inc, USA. Incorporated in October 2000 by Vikram Talwar (the former country head of Bank Of America and Ernst & Young Consulting), the company is considered the third largest remote services company operating in the manufacturing and financial domains. With offerings ranging from transaction processing (accounting, insurance claim processing, underwriting) to Internet and voice customer service areas, EXL is all set to make a mark through excellence in its service offerings. Working in the area of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), the company plans to convert it into a strategic management option to achieve world class operational excellence and competitive advantage. And for this, the organisation has already started working towards the Six Sigma processes.

Presently targeting the financial and manufacturing segments, EXL plans to set up two separate remote service facilities at Noida (near Delhi) by this year, which will look at providing transaction processing, Internet and voice customer services. At present, the company has a remote services facility with a capacity of 500 seats per shift and plans to increase the number to 1,500 seats. Once the new facilities start, the number of employees will be increased to 4,500 by the end of 2002.

“With excellence as the key mission, accountability and ownership are the qualities that we most cherish in our employees,” says Smriti Ahuja, vice president, human resources, EXL Service. “We believe that employees should be self-initiating rather than just relying on the organisation to take care of everything. Having a sense of purpose and responsibility towards their work is what we aim to inculcate.” To make this a possibility the company has chalked out two areas — ‘leadership-enablement’ (employee-centric approach) and ‘process-enablement’ (proper co-ordination of different processes). For leadership, EXL believes in creating a superior people-driven organisation enabled by world-class quality processes. To ensure this the company has a well-scrutinised appraisal system. According to Smriti, in the BPO arena the main challenge for the organisation is to manage customer expectations, do effective problem-solving, keep a tab on the achievement of targets and help an individual evolve in the organisation.

In case of ‘Process excellence’, the prime concern is to formulate a work culture, where customer focus and continuous improvement are the key guiding factors. “At EXL Services, the process excellence approach concentrates on speed, cost and accuracy, in improving our client-servicing endeavour,” she says. According to her, the whole mindset should revolve around customer-driven approach and this should reflect in the culture of the organisation. There is a continuous effort by the HR to achieve competency, productivity and satisfaction of the employees. “The idea is to ensure that nobody takes anyone for granted, but work with the idea of respecting and understanding their responsibilities, so that each individual gets equal opportunity to develop. Once the employees are able to understand the depth of individual accountability, that reflects on the professionalism of the organisation,” she says.

According to Ahuja, the company believes in maintaining transparency with the purpose of having foolproof systems within the organisation. An individual is assessed mainly under two core areas. First, is competency in terms of goal accomplishment and the second is in terms of process accomplishment (as to how one goes about it). “Our purpose is to ensure that the appraisal process (which happens twice a year), is as transparent and credible as possible,” she says. There is a strong emphasis on maintaining the quality of team managers and team leaders, who influence the other employees. For this, the company has a separate management support process, which takes care of the issues of team leaders and keeps a close check on their performance.

There is a continuous emphasis on making EXL a close-knit organisation, with an active participation by the top management. And this spirit is reflected in the company’s in-house corporate forum, which is a platform for the employees to voice their concerns, issues and queries. According to Ahuja, rather than having a monthly ‘open house’ for all the employees, EXL has opted for such a forum, twice a year, for interaction between the employer and the employees. “The purpose is to make it a platform for self-expression without hesitation. This also helps us test the communicative spirit of our employees,” she says. Besides this, each team regularly has a brainstorming session to be in tune with the core organisation values. Usage of Intranet to give and receive feedback is also practiced.

“We encourage every kind of feedback, except the anonymous ones,” says Ahuja smilingly. Though the company does not have a set-system for grievance solving, the effort is to respond as soon as possible. According to her, this boosts the credibility and enthusiasm of the employees. Though apparently the environment looks formal, the spirit is to have flexibility and informality in different processes. The company does not have an ‘open-house’, the weekly informal meeting of each team goes a long way in putting the company’s flexible work culture approach into practice. “We motivate our employees to solve their issues by a face-to-face approach, rather than having a complex system of layers,” she says. On inquiring about the company’s policy to refrain from set-patterns or structured processes, Ahuja points out that the entire top-management team, have had their share of structured processes in their professional career.

“It has been our experience that structured processes are not always successful, if the employees inherently are not ready for participation. The purpose should be to mould them to adapt through set-channels of communication for the future development of the organisation,” she adds.