VirtuosExpandsCustomerFootprint—andDeliversItsFirstOverseasCRMProject

The first half of 2008 had been a period of rapid foundation-building for Virtuos.

Customers were being won. Global technology alliances were taking shape. New capabilities were being developed. Mumbai had opened as a new market.

By July 2008, another important transition was underway:

Existing customers were coming back for more.

Virtuos secured additional orders across its KANA Software and Maximizer CRM businesses, demonstrating that its early enterprise engagements were beginning to expand beyond their original scope.

More importantly, one of those engagements took Virtuos beyond India for the first time.

Virtuos had already implemented KANA customer-service technology for Sutherland Global's Chennai operations.

The relationship now expanded internationally.

Virtuos was selected to implement another customer-service solution supporting Sutherland Global's BPO operations in the Philippines.

For the young company, this represented a defining first:

And there was another dimension that made the project particularly significant.

It was being delivered remotely from India.

Long before distributed implementation became commonplace, Virtuos was beginning to demonstrate that enterprise software expertise could travel without every consultant having to travel with it.

This was an early demonstration of what would eventually become a fundamental model across the global technology-services industry:

Expertise can be centralized. Delivery can be distributed. Customers can be global.

Deploying technology was only part of the assignment.

Virtuos also had to enable Sutherland's people to use it effectively across multiple customer projects.

The company adopted a Train-the-Trainer approach.

Rather than attempting to train every end user individually, Virtuos equipped key customer personnel with the knowledge needed to train larger groups within the organization.

The model created a multiplier effect.

A small specialist team could enable a much larger workforce.

For a BPO environment with hundreds of agents, this approach was essential to scaling adoption.

The Sutherland environment was considerably more complex than a conventional small CRM implementation.

BPO operations had to support multiple customer programs, large agent populations and high volumes of customer interaction.

That meant the technology needed to deliver not simply functionality, but:

• Reliability
• Scalability
• Security
• Operational Continuity
• User Adoption
• Knowledge Transfer

Virtuos was beginning to move beyond configuring software toward understanding how enterprise customer-service platforms needed to operate within demanding, high-volume environments.

Another particularly interesting element of the project was infrastructure.

Virtuos' responsibilities extended into Remote Infrastructure Services, including deployment of KANA within the customer's environment together with real-time backup and security software.

That broadened the nature of the engagement.

It was no longer simply:

“Implement the CRM.”

It increasingly became:

• Deploy it.
• Integrate it.
• Secure it.
• Protect it.
• Train people on it.
• Help make it operational.

This was an early indication of Virtuos developing capabilities around the complete environment required to make enterprise customer technology successful.

By July 2008, Virtuos could already point to customer-service and CRM implementations at several prominent organizations:

This was important for a company barely six months old.

Each implementation generated more than revenue.

It generated:

• Experience.
• Referenceability.
• Reusable knowledge.
• Customer confidence.
• Technical depth.

And increasingly, repeat business.

The headline of the original announcement spoke of additional orders from existing customers.

That distinction matters.

A first order demonstrates that a customer is prepared to give a supplier an opportunity.

An additional order can indicate something more meaningful:

The relationship is expanding.

For a young consulting company, repeat business is particularly valuable because enterprise technology projects depend heavily on trust.

Customers are placing critical systems, customer information, business processes and sometimes large user populations into the hands of their implementation partner.

Additional business therefore represented an important step in Virtuos' transition from vendor to trusted technology partner.

Virtuos' expanding customer work was supported by an increasingly diverse portfolio of global CRM technologies.

By mid-2008, these partnerships were giving Virtuos the ability to address different customer requirements rather than forcing every organization into a single technology model.

The common denominator was the customer.

Different platforms. Different industries. One continuing objective: help enterprises build better customer relationships.

The Philippines project deserves special emphasis because it represents more than an additional order.

It was an early proof point for international remote delivery.

Today, global delivery teams routinely collaborate across countries, time zones and Cloud environments.

In 2008, the technology landscape was different.

Remote enterprise implementation required deliberate processes around:

• Infrastructure access
• Communication
• Configuration
• Security
• Backup
• Knowledge transfer
• Remote training

Virtuos was learning those disciplines during its first year.

Those capabilities would become increasingly relevant as the company's ambitions expanded beyond India.

By July 2008, Virtuos remained a very small organization—the contemporary company profile recorded a workforce of approximately 10–20 employees.

Yet within that compact team, several building blocks were already visible:

• Enterprise customers
• Repeat orders
• Global software partnerships
• Industry expertise
• Remote delivery
• Training capability
• Infrastructure services
• International project experience

Scale would come later.

Capability had to come first.