Merchants
Disrupting the business process outsourcing market.
Merchants is a specialist business process outsourcing partner that aims to deliver an excellent customer experience for its clients and customers.
Having decided to enter the North American market, they recognised a dual challenge: a duplicated technology and process estate and a significant, far greater, risk on the horizon: the upcoming disruption of the outsourcing industry through technological change. Merchants sought to gain a first-mover advantage over their competition.
686k
Annual savings through tactical improvements.
8
New guiding principles,
underpinning a new strategy
3
New markets to approach with technology-augmented services.
01 The challenge we faced
Merchants is a specialist business process outsourcing (BPO) organisation, who seek to deliver excellent customer experience for their clients and customers. With offices across South Africa, they operated in markets around the globe.
We were appointed by Merchants to re-imagine their business model in light of changing customer expectations and technological innovation. Merchants had recently acquired a new business in the North American market and sought to leverage this opportunity to create competitive edge. At the same time, Merchants recognised this had resulted in a duplicated technology estate and multiple processes that caused significant financial pain. They needed to fully complete the integration of the new business into their estate to remain efficient and ensure benefits realisation of opening access to new markets.
However, they faced a far greater risk, the legacy technology and practice of the outsourcing industry faces disruption. Merchants sought to gain first-mover advantage on their competition.
02 Tacking the problem
After conducting one-to-one interviews with each C-Suite member, we ran four workshops to determine Merchants’ ‘Clarity of Purpose’, focussing on how they can use digital and technology to augment human delivery of services and better meet the needs of customers - their new vision, ‘Making Digital Human’, encapsulated their desire to bring new technologies to the fore in exceeding the expectations of customers and clients alike.
Visiting offices in both South Africa and Canada, we shadowed employees, ran Wardley mapping workshops with key business stakeholders and service blueprinting sessions to map key processes. We also conducted analysis of their commercial and business practices, understanding how they could better contract with clients to focus on delivering outcomes.
We used Situational Awareness to build Strategic Gameplay options for change, including addressing a significant financial impact relating to staff attrition, simplifying their technology estate, and how Merchants could create ‘wonder’ in the market by disrupting the delivery of business process outsourcing services.
“Rainmaker set the direction of travel for Merchants; for our people, ways of working, and how our services will differentiate us globally.”
Chief Operations Manager
Merchants
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