In the last 10 years, Hexaware Technologies grew at a CAGR of 14%, while other IT companies recorded single-digit growth. This was possible because of the company’s stable management, differentiated offerings, and high customer satisfaction, to name a few. As the company prepares for a post-pandemic world, its COO shares insights on how the company tackled pandemic challenges, its technology approach, and future goals 

Two years ago, when IT companies tread into the pandemic, they took a few months at most to adjust to the new normal. A major reason for their early bounce back was because they began adopting digital transformation technologies much ahead of time. Hence, when the crisis hit, along with an acceleration in pace of digital transformation, they began identifying key focus areas to keep their employees and customers going. 

For Hexaware Technologies, the journey was no different. The company put several strategies in place to help its employees and customers transition easily. On one hand, it helped them transition into the WFH model with dedicated infrastructure support teams and global service desks to manage connectivity. On the other, it laid down several principles for customer-centricity such as putting the relationship ahead of the contract, being transparent about its challenges and more. These strategies, backed by a stable management, differentiated offerings, long-term relationship with customers, and high customer satisfaction led the company to grow steadily despite the setbacks. 

With Hexaware now setting its sights on doubling its revenues and becoming a leader in digital transformation, we talk to its Chief Operating Officer, Ram Singampalli, to dive deeper into his views on the future of the IT industry, and the company’s focus going forward. 

What are your top three priorities as the COO, today?

Our first and foremost priority are our employees. We undertake conscious initiatives for employee engagement and to promote their holistic wellness. Our other key priority is to help our customers emerge as digital leaders. We want to achieve this by fueling their digital transformation with our technology solutions like advisory and analytical services, robust frameworks, accelerators and tools. Lastly, we realize our responsibilities as an active part of the larger community and we drive initiatives to support and promote causes that matter. 

From a geography perspective, which are your primary markets?

While we serve customers globally, from a revenue standpoint, North America is the chief contributor, followed by the EU region and APAC, respectively. Currently, the revenue from NA stands at USD 848 million, while EU contributes USD 233 million, and USD 100 million comes from APAC. 

What kind of challenges did you encounter during the pandemic, and how did you overcome them? 

The pandemic did cause a shift in the ways companies operate and we were no exception. Our remote working capabilities had to be ramped up to enable work from home in a secure manner. We also built an ecosystem to ensure employee safety while maintaining service continuity for our customers. For example, on the employee safety front, we created an additional health insurance policy, ‘Corona Kavach’, to cover Covid treatment, additional Covid leave of 14 days, support groups, hospital and doctor tie-ups, mental wellness and equipment assistance. 

IT/ ITeS is one of the few sectors which has witnessed good growth and increased hiring activity even during the pandemic. What are your thoughts on this?

Absolutely, we are observing a healthy potential for business growth in the market. We are glad to have successfully risen to the challenges, growing in revenue and headcount. We have grown our employee strength by close to 20% in 2021. 

On the business front, guided by our automation first mindset and customer-centric approach, we have taken our service offerings based on cloud transformation, digital core transformation and digital product engineering to the market. Our key capabilities in creating digital platforms that will transform customer experience is driving our growth. This is a major step towards meeting evolving customer demands and eventually, achieving customer delight. If we talk about opportunities and business growth across industries, we have delivered steady and secular growth across the industries that we are engaged in.

What steps have you taken towards digital transformation? Specifically, what role has AI played in this transformation?

AI has been a critical enabler of digital transformation for our customers and employees. For customers, our proprietary smart platforms make the digital journey seamless for them. For example, we leverage AI capabilities to build platforms that enable intelligent automation and augment our customer’s organizational and business landscape. We also constantly reinvent our competencies to deliver solutions that keep up with the dynamic landscape of technology. 

For employees, automation steers our progress and we manifest that significantly through the internal adoption of AI. For example, our AI-powered self-help bots Amber and COCO assist our employees in resolving issues while providing meaningful insights. These tools also help in boosting overall employee experience and productivity. 

Where do you see Hexaware 3 years from now? 

We strongly intend to grow our diversity quotient and become an inclusive workforce of over 40,000 professionals globally. We would also like to be known as a company that is a leader in digital transformation and offers highly differentiated platforms. This will translate into doubling our revenue and tripling our enterprise value in the next three to four years.