Sri Lanka is the base for our global development in next few years: IFS

IFS Chief Customer Officer Michael Ouissi 

Daily FT sat down with Swedish-based global enterprise company IFS Chief Customer Officer Michael Ouissi to discuss how the company delivers exceptional customer service through 

IFS Applications, 

Sri Lanka’s instrumental role in IFS’ growth over the last 22 years and how the company aims to further contribute to Sri Lanka through IFS Foundation.  

Michael is a passionate advocate for customer centricity being the most critical differentiator in today’s digital world. Focusing on supporting customers with effective solutions rather than specific products, he is also a believer in change and has built a reputation for enabling customers to use technology to create competitive differentiators and operational efficiencies. Below are the excerpts of his interview

Q: The art of delivering exceptional customer service is undergoing dramatic change. Across different touchpoints, customers regularly expect highly personalised services. Because of this, customer experience has become a strategic business imperative for modern businesses. How does IFS view and address this particular aspect?

 If you look at the whole customer journey, we are in the B2B (business-to-business) space so it is a very distinct way of delivering excellent customer experience. To start with, we have a methodology which is called Business Value Engineering, which looks at and makes sure that within the customer internally and also between the customer and us, we are aligned on the business initiatives that a business want to achieve and what KPIs (key performance indicators) will indicate whether or not the business value has been achieved. 

We call it a ‘Six Box Model’ where we go through what other business initiatives, what is holding us back today in terms of IT architecture, what is the impact of those obstacles, how should an architecture look like, and then identifying what the enables should be to get there and then also quantify the benefit of it. 

That is the start of every customer engagement. Then hopefully we’ll get an order, there we prove that we can deliver on that, we get an order, and we deliver the project. Traditionally, when it is delivered, IT companies have defined that as done. That is not how a customer perceives it as he or she has 15, 20, 25, 30 years of trying to extract value from their investment. 

That is why we have launched new services, which are life cycle services, which are the success of IFS. You tick a box of what you need – there is application management service, safeguarding service, value assurance service included which ensure that they are pointed to ‘this is what I want as an outcome as a customer’, and we deliver against that outcome. 

There is also a success offering called IFS Select, where we are embedded in the customer’s organisation. We are proactively including all the services I mentioned earlier, but on top of that we are correctively engaging with architects from our side, who are embedded to understand what the customer wants to achieve, and how their business changes, and what that means to IT architecture and how we can help to make that transformation and that change happen. 

We are trying to engage across the whole life cycle, and have very personalised services for our customers – during pre-sales, during the delivery phase, and after-sales. 

Q: Innovations across artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and behavioural analytics are enabling progressive companies to capitalise on data to deliver highly personalised customer service engagements. How do you think organisations can leverage these emerging technologies to support exceptional customer service?

 At the moment, many of those projects are not delivering real value, because they are done in isolation and for doing its sake. So I need to do an AI project, I got budgets to spend on it, but we are missing a big trick. You will always have stable core transaction platform in your architecture that will help deliver that value. 

In our architecture, we have application services on top of that which can be external platforms, external products, which then pragmatically deliver AI for example, or robotic processes or automation where it matters, and then actually make them useful. 

As an example, if you want to have a robot as part of your field service force and then have that robot learn how to interpret meter data. That robot could then actually move around, read meters, understand that correlation of meters. If you then have a stable transaction platform, you could immediately place work order. 

The robot can then dispatch a human engineer that could go, monitor the issue, fix it, take the right tools for that, understand what the issue is before going there, and maybe even understand this is a security issue where he needs to have certain measures in place to save himself from any danger. 

There are practical applications, but you need a transactional platform behind it that can then actually execute. AI as such is not beneficial if you cannot combine it with execution. That’s our philosophy – AI and any new technology must make a difference in terms of how I then actually deploy something to your customer.

You need to start working on what you want to achieve. AI is not a benefit in itself. You need to understand what your business initiative is, coming back to our Business Value Engineering approach, and if AI is one of the capabilities combined with a transactional platform and the answer to solving this issue, then it makes sense, and that’s the pragmatic way of applying AI, IoT or any other emerging technology. 

Q: Last month’s IFS’ Q3 results showed a sixth consecutive quarter of growth exceeding 20%. Part of this growth exemplifies IFS’ growing customer base across the globe. What are the key pillars that IFS focus on when it comes to servicing, attracting and retaining your customers?

 First and foremost, we need to understand what good looks like before we engage with a customer. If we do not understand it, we cannot deliver it. So we will not engage in projects where we have a poor understanding of what we want to achieve and how we can achieve it. That’s paramount. 

And the second piece I think is in our challenging culture is that we will challenge our customers, whether or not this is the right thing to do, then we will advise on what we have seen elsewhere, and what we think is more pragmatic or a good way achieving the results. 

So we want to be a partner, and we want to be seen by our customers as a partner and not just a delivery engine. And that is really important to us. Being a partner to the customers also means to advise them, and to make sure that we are acting in their best interest. 

Those are the focus areas and obviously providing a consistent global consulting experience, consistent global support experience, providing all those life cycle services, to make it a good customer experience. At some stage, we will face issues and will need to resolve them and as a company that is as a partner to our customers, we will not run away. We will stick to it and we will make sure it works whichever way we can do that when we are a partner. 

Q: The Sri Lanka team has been playing an instrumental role over the years to foster IFS’ growth in the global ERP and Cloud markets. How does this team help IFS in accelerating your global footprint as well as take customer service to the next level?

 In many ways. Number one is, we have 1,400 people here now, growing at a rate of 40% over the past year, which shows our commitment to Sri Lanka and how instrumental it is. And it’s more than a third of our global platforms. The sheer number of people and the talent we have gotten here is hugely important to IFS, and we rely heavily on it. 

Secondly, we have a lot of challenger minds here. We have people who are actually developing innovative functions in our products, challenging our thinking, and making sure that we have right tools for development at IFS Labs here, working with cutting edge technologies like AI and IoT and so on. 

In terms of global consulting, we are developing much more quality practice here so now we can give a global experience to our customers. In many ways, with the access to talent that we have gained the right to have here over the 22 years in Sri Lanka, we have executed educational programs and we are working with local universities very closely to identify the right talent for IFS. 

We have got great access to a great talent pool here as well. So in many ways, Sri Lanka is a huge part of our success, and we rely on it big time. I think we show it by the investments we are making – 400 additional people just in the last year. 

Q: To celebrate the success of your customers, IFS launched a unique initiative called ‘The Challenger Champions’. Whom do you consider as a challenger? How does it resonate with IFS’ legacy and modern customer base?

 I think it is a mindset, and it is best described with an example. There are large companies which have become complacent and not growing; they are not innovative anymore. At some stage, they believed that they are the best in the world, and they did not challenge themselves anymore to think differently or to think out of the box. 

As opposed to them, Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos for example, has been adamant about day one culture – treating every day as the first day of your start-up company and thinking radically different, empowering people to experiment, make mistakes. 

That is a challenger mindset that we are looking for. We are looking for that in ourselves, and we are looking for that in our customers as well. Because what we deliver is differentiation, to customers in their verticals which we play in, we are very proud to be very vertically driven, and that means if you’re a challenger customer and you want to change and transform your business and the game you are playing in, then you fit our culture and we will have very positive, long and fruitful relationship. 

Q: In conclusion, how does IFS look to contribute to Sri Lanka in the coming years? How do you see Sri Lanka’s growth?

 We will continue to grow Sri Lanka, probably at the same rates we do today. There is going to be an enormous demand for input coming from Sri Lanka. I can see that both in R&D, support, global consulting services, and also in our sales and pre-sales teams, that we have gotten out here. So there is a tremendous opportunity for us, and we heavily rely on Sri Lanka as a base for our global development.

But we also want to give back to Sri Lanka because we have been relying so heavily on this community, and of the next two-three years, and you probably know about out IFS foundation program, which we have in addition to the scholarships and educational programs, we are working on giving back to local communities, both in terms of infrastructure, helping to build the infrastructure, and to help refurbish the critical infrastructure around education, around sanitisation and water supply and so on. We are adopting villages and we are continuing to develop more of those in coming years through IFS Foundation. 

It is a win-win situation for us; we take a lot of significant input and talent in Sri Lanka that helps our growth so we want to give back from the IFS foundation.