How will we inspire more holistic, value-driven customer experiences with ONE KELLTON?

There is nothing new about business realignments. In fact, most companies are always aligning themselves better to achieve the rigor and scale needed for growth.

However, growth wasn’t our only thought when we decided to realign Kellton as a single entity. Building a holistic, well-rounded customer experience strategy—underpinned by an agile mindset, more impactful innovation, diversified solutions, and the need of reorienting our workforce around what matters the most—was!

The realignment, which goes by the moniker ‘OneKellton,’ at its simplest, focuses on uniting Kellton is global businesses, driving an integrated ecosystem of people, partners, and processes to improve customer service while at the same time consolidating the company’s stance as the strategic partner for Digital Transformation.

The post-pandemic world calls for fresh models of doing business. The seed of our initiative, OneKellton, was also sown to build an onshore-offshore hybrid delivery model that will move the needle on a broad set of performance indicators and consolidate the place of Kellton as a category leader in digitally resilient transformation.

We continue to realize the full scale of the opportunity and seek to cast the idea’s net wider as more business cases materialize.

The outset

A clear analysis and understanding of a company’s operational and financial environment are critical to defining what should be on the agenda. As we joined our heads on formulating a strategy for the future and involved ourselves in scrutiny, we realized that we couldn’t truly leverage our business synergies despite an uptick in our organic and inorganic growth. We could not harness the power of inter-business capabilities, which in this case, was an eye-opener.

Our visionary leaders sat to discuss and dig a solution with an all-hands-on-deck approach. We came to realize that we operated in business unit sandboxes. Silos were a cardinal issue, and the lack of a unified strategy blurred the vision of achieving shared success. The existing operational model limited Kellton is core competencies to specific geographies and impacted the professional growth of our people: the Kelltonites.

The leadership decided to overcome the operating obstacle to take the company further, and the call for integrating global operations under one umbrella was the choice that drew a ‘yes.’ In the second half of 2021, the board appointed an ‘Expert Growth Advisor’ to reimagine how our company should be restructured to unlock the true revenue potential.

OneKellton was hence born with the vision of creating an integrated, more robust Kellton.

The groundwork

OneKellton held a colossal promise of transforming Kellton from a ‘cluster’ enterprise to a ‘cross-collaborative’ enterprise. It typically meant:

• Breaking down silos to enable hybrid collaboration. 
• Combining capabilities across digital and enterprise practice hubs. 
• Giving more solution choices to customers.
• Allowing access to experts and ecosystem partners beyond geo lines. 
• Streamlining and turning delivery that powers agile transformation.

By the looks of it, it was safe to say that achieving OneKellton, from paper to reality, was a tall order. We organized a series of virtual exchange sessions, where we dwelled on several practical ideas for our mission. After much deliberation, the starting point was discovered, and it involved three main approaches:

a. The Development of More Impactful Centers of Excellence to continuously revisit and reimagine existing technologies while introducing new, innovative capabilities in a synchronized environment.

b. The Enablement of Four Operational Pillars — Delivery, Practice, Support, and Sales — to build a more relevant service and delivery framework that powerfully delivers on its vision of being a customer-centric organization.

c. The Realignment of Roles and Responsibilities to unlock a more dynamic and collaborative organization that drives agility to transform and innovate.

In addition, new job roles were thought of and created to create the proper foundation of skill and talent and make OneKellton deliver fast. We emphasized recruiting for sales and support functions to drive the shift of the organizational model, better spearhead the realignment, and bring the advantages of learnings and core business strengths to the entire organization.

The status-quo

OneKellton, understandably, is the growth theme for Kellton in 2022. A two-way dialog has already been opened to communicate what OneKellton is and help our employees work harmoniously to reach a mutually beneficial transformation. Our leaders are communicating and taking up doubts, if any, on OneKellton with buoyant optimism.

Business integrations under OneKellton have opened a recruitment pipeline. Our HR teams are actively hiring candidates for several positions pan-enterprise and building a talent pool that can unlock holistic experiences for digital transformation. Besides, new key result areas (KRAs)—more distinctive and deeper—are introduced to ensure performance metrics are met for guaranteed customer success.

Further, we are strengthening our centers of excellence (CoEs) by allowing more inter-geo movements, collaborative leadership, and improved mobilization of resources for innovation. By eradicating barriers and letting our teams address business needs anywhere, we are opening routes to more onsite opportunities. Since our employees can work closely with our clients irrespective of the location, client engagements have radically boosted, and business goodwill points to an upturn.

With OneKellton, we are enabling a centralized function with a mission to streamline access to capabilities for everyone at the scale of the business. By letting teams draw on capabilities across geographies, we are ensuring high-value outcomes and rapid execution. Activities now are being tackled in short sprints, each focused on the immediate fulfillment of requirements.

Customer value underpins OneKellton

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the conventional wisdom on customer experience. The rule book no longer includes optimizing the traditional sales and marketing touchpoints. In fact, the rule book doesn’t exist any longer. We see many consumer behavior changes that will likely persist for a long time, perhaps forever. Others have been developed over time, and some are now being accelerated.

Put simply, customer experience is amid disruption, changing faster than ever. With so many fundamentals turned over, we need to secure our value proposition and build more differentiation over it. OneKellton is an aim explicitly directed at achieving this.

With OneKellton, all of our capabilities—digital practice, enterprise intelligence, design strategy, global delivery, integrated support, and more—will be accessible to companies of all sizes irrespective of their location. New and existing customers will be able to leverage our digital and enterprise practice hubs to scale and strengthen core technical competencies critical to their success. We envision a scheme of things where our clients will have access to our unique offerings, our innovation hubs, and our bench of talent across the globe and be able to galvanize their businesses to push the frontiers of digital transformation.

We are excited at the prospect of fostering OneKellton as an engine that powers CX and market growth.