Xerox will bring a greater mobile CEM focus to its call centre services following the acquisition of WDS, according to its Group President of Telecommunications and Technology, Chris Tranquill.
Tranquill said that the acquisition, scheduled to complete some time in the next two months, would bring "true CEM" capability to Xerox's outsourced and managed customer care offering, delivering a higher value to its operator customers.
Xerox currently generates $600 million a year in the telco call centre and transactional services space, and has around 13,000 of its 48,000 employees working in its technology services division. Tranquill said that adding WDS, a 2,000 strong company, would enable it to provide greater "knowledge-based" depth to its wireless support solutions. He singled out WDS' GlobalMine platform as of particular relevance. GlobalMine analyses technical support interactions across different mobile device types so that service providers can access actionable data to anticipate and react to device or service-specific issues.
"The GlobalMine data base is a key asset that allows WDS to offer so many types of service to their customers. That will serve as a differentiator for Xerox: offering types of service offerings that spin off that database that we don't see elsewhere in the marketplace," Tranquill said.
Where applicable, Xerox will offer WDS' products to its existing customer base, Tranquill said, but retain the WDS name and transition all WDS' staff to Xerox. "Our intent is to keep the WDS name and make WDS a Xerox company and operator within Xerox services," he added.
Tim Deluca-Smith, VP Marketing at WDS, said that WDS had been trying to "cut through the noise" around CEM to "apply a degree of science" to working out how an operator controls the customer relationship.
"We've got quite far, and have engaged several Tier One carriers with our network-wide CEM solutions. This news [the acquisition] will allow us to add scale to truly take that proposition global. There are huge synergies between the work this group has already done and the carriers and manufactures they [Xerox] have been working with," Deluca-Smith said.