Xerox's Former BPO Effort Goes Independent: What to Expect from Conduent

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Xerox's Former BPO Effort Goes Independent: What to Expect from Conduent

By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC  |  July 06, 2017

It’s official. The business process practice that was once part of Xerox now exists as its own company.

That company is called Conduent Inc. And it made its debut under the ticker CNDT on the New York Stock Exchange in January.

Conduent is a technology and services companies that enters into the world with $6.7 billion in annual revenue, more than 93,000 employees around the world, and an impressive array of top-tier commercial and governmental clients. That’s the good news.

Now the challenge is for Conduent CEO Ashok Vemuri and his team is to drive growth. That’s against the backdrop of a recent history of flat revenue for this business.

However, Conduent already is in the midst of an effort to streamline its business, improve margins, and jump on growth opportunities. And in a January interview with CUSTOMER magazine, Conduent’s Chief Information Officer Carol Kline explained that the company plans to spur growth by getting a larger share of its existing customers’ wallet share.

Many of those customers have very fat wallets, as Conduent works with some of the largest and most important organizations in the world. Indeed, the company serves 76 of the Fortune 100 businesses and more than 500 government entities. And some of those relationships have been in place for decades.

Conduent plays in a market worth $260 billion, noted Kline, and it’s growing at a rate of 5 percent.

“If we get our fair share,” she added, “we’ll have growth.”

Conduent’s mission is to help modernize the businesses it serves. It helps do that by taking over select businesses processes for its customers. That entails providing whatever people, services, and/or technology are required to get the job done.

“We work with customers to automate and improve the services they offer to their end customers,” Kline added.

The specific types of jobs Conduent takes on are broad and varied.

For example, the company runs contact centers for organizations in a wide variety of business verticals. It does ediscovery to help ensure organizations in the financial services space are compliant. And it collects and stores patient records for lots of hospitals.

Conduent also manages the EasyPass system through which states collect data and payments as drivers pass through toll booths. It provides the cameras, collects the data, issues the tickets, and processes the payments related to various cities’ photo enforcement efforts to curb speeding. And it recently worked with the city of Los Angeles to create an application that helps motorists locate available parking spots.

Twenty of the top managed U.S. health care plans, 2,200 hospitals, and four of the five top global phone manufacturers rely on Conduent for business process outsourcing. The company also is the No. 1 provider of parking technology to municipalities in the U.S. It processes 43 percent of U.S. child support payments. And it handles digital payments for 25 million cardholders.

Basically, if the job involves the large-scale collection, processing, analysis, and/or storage of data to enable business and government clients to be more efficient, save money, and focus on their core competencies, Conduent can do it. And it can do just as well today as a stand-alone entity as it could under the Xerox umbrella, said Kline.

Dividing the company was not especially problematic given Xerox already operated as two pretty discrete divisions before the split, Kline indicated. As a result, she said, customers shouldn’t notice much of a change.

Innovation remains a key area of focus for Conduent, added Kline. Here she noted that Xerox has a great history of innovation through its storied R&D effort PARC, which is credited with pioneering work related to Ethernet, the personal computer, laser printing, and more.

Now Conduent is standing up its own R&D labs, including a Webster, N.Y., facility populated with 80 to 90 scientists, and another 120-person strong lab in Bangalore, India.

Conduent relies both on its own homegrown technology and the solutions of other companies to meet its clients’ needs.

Case Management and Virtual Agent are among the new solutions Conduent recently has made available in the contact center realm. Case Management is an automation tool that simplifies the training and operations of call center agents. Traditionally, agents have had to scroll through different screens to serve customers. But Case Management brings all the caller information an agent needs together onto one screen. Virtual Agent, meanwhile, looks at past behavior to predict future customer behavior in an effort to help agents be more effective over time and to assist organizations in building self-service solutions for those customers.




Edited by Alicia Young
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