India's 40 under 40 Brightest Business Leaders

Our values define quality without compromise and connect
with the customer. The very first thing our customers expect
is quality without any compromise. There are many times
when customers push us to deliver something faster than it
really can be delivered. But, when we make them
understand that, if they try to do this, we would, probably,
have to cut corners, skip some unique SKCs etc. and they
do understand. We explain to them that today, we might
deliver sooner. But, if we do it without quality, it has to be
revisited anyway. So, it is better to do it right the first time
around. With all my experience at Xebia, I have seen that
our customers appreciate this fact and, many times, we help
them appreciate that quality without compromise is our
topmost priority.
The second thing that customers really like about us is our
connect with them; we understand their challenges wearing
their hats and analyzing situations from their perspective.
We hand-hold them through the process and extend the
required support. That connection between our
techies/consultants and the customer is where we win the
real challenges.
What are the USPs that highlight your brand/company's
uniqueness in the industry you are catering to?
Our unique strength lies in our people. As an organization,
we want to be recognized as thought leaders in areas that
we work on. To achieve this, we continuously hire
exceptional people. We strive to innovate in everything we
do and ride the latest technology wave. We encourage our
employees to learn new technologies, write a lot of blogs
and books and participate in hackathons.
So, this ecosystem helps us and our techies to be at the
forefront of the technology revolution and helps our
customers understand how we can work with the latest
technologies in a better way. So, that is where our
uniqueness comes into play.
As an experienced professional, what would you like to
advice the budding aspirants willing to enter the
business world?
This is my advice to the people I'm training in business
right now. When one is fresh out of college, either technical
courses or business programs, one tends to focus primarily
on only one of the techniques. As coders, we basically tend
to focus on the technology and, as business graduates, we
tend to focus only on the business solutions.
My suggestion to them would be to focus on three
things—people, process and technology. Irrespective of
whether you have a technical background or business, we
are all humans first. In whatever we do, whatever solutions
we bring, nowadays, most of the users' journey—for bank,
for retailers and for everything—is purely digital.
How you introduce empathy in any process or workflow is
very important because we are moving more towards the
digital world. Basically, we are interacting less with people
and our main medium of interaction is, probably, the mobile
app or the user interface we have built. So, how you
introduce empathy in that entire workflow and how you
collaborate with your colleagues is extremely important.
Then comes the process and the simpler it is, the better.
Many a time, we come across applications and programs
built in the process that become so complicated over a
period of time that, sometimes, we need to look at things in
a much simpler way. So, simplicity wins.
The next is technology. For technology graduates, I suggest
that they not only focus on technology, but also understand
how Agile works because, a lot of times, we see that when a
person is working individually, s/he is brilliant in terms of
coding. But, when put in a team, it becomes difficult for
them to collaborate. That's where the challenge comes in.
So, for coders, learning about collaboration and Agile is
more important and, for business graduates, learning about
technology—having a basic overview of how technology
works, how the software development lifecycle goes and
what the latest technologies are—these are equally so. How
can one mix one's business processes with technological
advancements? That's where we feel fresher's should be
trained.
How do you envision Xebia's operations with the
emerging technologies and automated tools that are
revolutionizing the business world by enabling
innovations?
I believe advancements in technology and entire AI or
automation will help people focus on what they do
best—innovate. For instance, right now, we have a fully
automated process of reimbursements. There are many
people within the administration and finance teams who
have saved hundreds of hours every month and now, they
can focus on something better. Same with the entire
automated billing system, our PMOs and finance team do
not need to run from pillar to post to get the time sheets of
each individual and submit them to our customers. It is a
fully automated system.
With advancements in technology in the current times, you
don't need to be a master of it to use it. If I use it in the
Cloud, there is AI, ML, natural language processing and
image-processing available as a service. It is plug-and-play.
We believe this encapsulation of technology will lead to
more innovative solutions in future.
90 | July 2022 | www.insightssuccess.in