BPOWI: What has been your priority since you took over as the Group CEO at WNS?

Keshav Murugesh: It has been seven months since I took this new assignment and my first line of action has been to spend time with the clients and employees to understand what they liked about this company. I also needed to understand the client’s side of the business and the growth trend and general business trends that they are seeing in their businesses. In July, we undertook a strategic planning exercise for SWOT analysis. We involved 40 of the company's tier II and III managers in this. The feedback was given to a professor of organisational behaviour that WNS hired. The key things that came out of this exercise was that while we have grown and have attainted leadership in certain verticals we need to understand what we mean to our clients and what value we bring to them with the changing business environment.

BPOWI: So how did you look at changing the business policies or go to market strategies?

KM: We now have a new mission statement where we are slowly moving away from focusing on cost reductions and efficiency gains to helping clients transform their businesses. Now we have a client-centric approach where we are focusing on talent management, sales effectiveness, transformation services, lean management and two new verticals. We have also brought in more focus into our sales team by separating the client hunting, client farming, and client engagement teams. Traditionally, the sales function has been run as a strategic business unit. We now have key teams in Europe and North America hunting for new clients and another team engaging the clients. For the top accounts having potential to grow, we have created client partner programmes.

BPOWI: What will be the WNS differentiation?

KM: We want to make WNS more relevant to our clients. The focus for us now is to move from full time equivalent-led models to others. We are also looking at new pricing models. One such thing is fixed-price contracts. I'm sensitizing people on new models like fixed price and risk reward. We want to move from the traditional time and material pricing model, which was based on number of staff employed per hour on a project. Moving towards billing on fixed-price contracts will also help the company fight market fluctuation and vagaries of business environment.

BPOWI: Are you looking at expanding your business and delivery centres?

KM: We are looking at new areas for expansion. For instance, we find that Manila is a major delivery centre for the Asia Pacific market. Nearly 90 percent of our business top line is from European clients. We now want to diversify into the markets of China, India and Philippines. Within the next two quarters we would be ready with the India entry strategy. India is currently an offshore delivery centre for us. We are discussing the strategies as this is one market that cannot be ignored. We will need to look at more tier III and IV locations and put one leader to take charge of India business. Besides WNS is also looking at an option of setting up an onsite delivery centre in the US. We get about 30 per cent of our revenues from the US. However, we will look at some kind of acquisition for this rather than setting up all on our own.

BPOWI: What will be the customer focus for WNS going forward?

KM: We see a major business potential in healthcare, logistics and shipping industries. So we have segregated them into separate verticals or what we call the new white spaces. We have already been servicing the segments but now we want to put more focus on this and bring in more domain experts to make the most of the business potential. Till now, WNS has been targeting five broad verticals, including travel, insurance, banking and capital markets, industrial goods and infrastructure, and consumer goods and retail. We will have healthcare, shipping and logistics as separate verticals.