Interview with eClerx Services Ltd

Our business is all about constructing long and deep relationships with large corporate clients that share the same philosophy, affirms Priyadarshan Mundhra, Co-Founder and Executive Director, eClerx Services Ltd.

Can you share your views regarding the revenue mix trends over the last few quarters? What is your outlook regarding the same in the coming quarters?           

The demand environment has been healthy across the board - we have seen a demand for our customer support services, which is everything from quality to customer engagement. We have also seen demand in the financial markets business, in areas like client lifecycle, KYC and client onboarding. On the other hand, looking at the digital line of business, we continue to see a demand in areas like analytics and marketing automation, where we support several Fortune 2000 clients as they look to digitize their customer journey.

In terms of our broad strategy over the last three years, we have identified 5 or 6 areas where we believed that there are large pools of demand available for us to tap and we think that the credentials and skills that we have, allow us a much stronger right to play and to win. And we have invested in creating stronger service offerings in these chosen 5 or 6 areas, embedding analytics and intelligent automation, along with the business process services, where we take the responsibility for driving efficiency and productivity over time. So, I think this has been resonating quite well with clients and more than 50% of our new sales now comes from these selected service lines and we anticipate this growth momentum to continue in the near term.

What are some of the biggest challenges you are currently facing?

One of the focus areas is talent shortages in offshore markets – keeping attrition in mind. It is also hard to predict the trend, but if I were to go purely by gut feel, we can say it is a temporary phase and we do expect it to moderate a bit going forward. I think it's also worth keeping in mind that we made timely people investments to adapt to the strong demand, and did adjustments to the staffing model in terms of hiring freshers, investing in new hire learning, internal movements and creating a large pool of ready skilled resources. In the near term, I think the competitive hiring that has taken place in the industry will also slow down and improve retention.

What are your top three strategic priorities?

We aim to continue developing our deep domain led service offerings and enrich them with more analytics and automation to take the fullest advantage of new and emerging technologies.Investing in our people, and ensuring that we have the right skills for all the key roles is also a vital initiative in a people business such as ours.

Finally, we would like to build on the deep and tenured relationships we have with our strategic clients, and also grow the partnerships with some of our emerging clients to encompass larger and more strategic engagements.

What are your acquisition plans for FY23?

 We recognize that inorganic growth is an important contributor to our growth and we are actively seeking and evaluating those opportunities. The M&A market has been quite aggressive in the last few years, especially with the financial buyers - like private equity firms willing to pay for a given asset.

Our business is all about constructing long and deep relationships with large corporate clients and we look for companies that share the same philosophy. Having done that, there are many other things such as management fit, financials, valuations and so on so forth, and continue to look with an open-minded way at all opportunities that come our way.