Xerox dominated the office of yesterday with its copiers, laser printers, and fax machines. Now Ursula Burns is trying to strengthen its role in the offices of tomorrow. Since becoming CEO in 2009, she has increased Xerox’s sales of IT-related services, like processing health insurance claims and managing customer-service call centers. Nevertheless, Burns—a mechanical engineer who has worked at Xerox since an internship in 1980—told MIT Technology Review’s deputy editor, Brian Bergstein, that the company isn’t straying from its technological roots.
The field of business services does not necessarily reward technological innovators. Isn’t it largely driven by how well you lower a client’s costs?
It is. The start of BPO [business-process outsourcing] was basically taking the mess of somebody else and doing it for less. Let’s take business processes that are identical—everybody has to answer calls—and if you can [handle such things for many companies], then you can use scale to your advantage. Then it went to “Can we move it to lower-cost areas and lower-cost people?” So it became labor arbitrage. And where we are now with BPO, and this is the most exciting part about Xerox, is that the next big step is not in trying to go to the next cheapest place.
Why? Have we reached the lowest that labor costs can go?
Not yet, but we’re getting there. The next big step comes in technology. So if you have 100 people answering the phone and they take 10 calls an hour, can you get it such that you have 100 people that take 15 calls an hour? Can you apply technology to make it such that instead
of taking six or seven weeks to train a person in a complex call, you make it take two weeks, or one week? Can you make it such that—most calls are recorded—you can look at the calls after and figure out key things, see patterns via big data? And can you actually apply that?
What’s an example of a services deal you won because of technology you had?
http://www.technologyreview.co...the-services-market/
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