Industry news

No one can say they weren’t warned about the likelihood of a global pandemic or a war in Ukraine. And, in the light of President Xi Jinping’s recent comments at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, where he reaffirmed his government’s commitment to take control of Taiwan one day, no one can say that companies should not think about what comes next.

Indeed, most of the risks that a company will face do not fall into the category of what the mathematician and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb termed “black swan” events: random, highly improbable events that have enormous impact. A trade dispute, a viral epidemic, a product failure, a cybersecurity breach, a tsunami — these are not “black swans” but, as the business writer Michele Wucker memorably puts it, “gray rhinos”: highly probable, highly predictable, high impact, but neglected threats that are charging toward the company like a crash of rhinos (who show visible signs of aggression and whose attacks can thus be predicted nearly 100% of the time).

Read more at Harvard Business Review here.

Five years ago, in 2017, a Harvard Business School Professor opined in the Harvard Business Review that neurodiversity is a competitive advantage which employers should embrace within their workforces1. The Review’s article identified that the sometimes extraordinary skills of many neurodiverse individuals were not being tapped into by employers because of the traditional way in which companies found and recruited talent and decided who to hire and promote.

Fast-forward to 2022 and this thinking is gradually becoming mainstream. Employers are increasingly recognising that the benefits of a neurodiverse workforce are considerable, including access to more of their employees’ talents and diverse perspectives that can help their business to increase competitiveness.

Read more on Lexology here.

London, 25^th October, 2022;  Multilingual messaging provider ChatLingual is thrilled to announce its partnership with HGS UK, a leader in providing world-class customer care and digital innovation for contact centre operations.

The partnership marks an exciting time for international brands looking to make advancements in their customer experience. With HGS’ decades of expertise and their shared vision with ChatLingual, this partnership will be sure to help companies to support their multilingual customers. HGS UK will be able to support customer support transactions in over 100 languages across all non-voice channels combined with native or bilingual agent voice support. This empowers HGS to provide better support to meet their client's needs now and in the future.

“This partnership is a fantastic opportunity for HGS to better support its international clients by providing a more effective level of multilingual support for customers. Recruiting and retaining multilingual staff has become more challenging and expensive as a result of global pressures including Covid labour shortages, and the cost-of-living crisis. Partnering with ChatLingual helps us address multilingual support for all digital channels which today represents the largest share of overall demand. Through using their award-winning  platform, the need to attract native speakers is dramatically reduced, and with digital contact now representing conservatively 70% of demand, the remaining 30% of voice contact requiring native support becomes much easier to manage.” Graham Brown, Chief Revenue Officer, HGS.

“Partnering with HGS is an incredible opportunity for us to help bring our leading-edge multilingual technology to the BPO space and we are looking forward to the innovative ways in which HGS and ChatLingual can pioneer a modern CX frontier. We are elated to be partnering with HGS to bring innovative solutions to companies looking to modernise their CX,” commented ChatLingual CEO, Justin Custer.

About HGS

HGS provides world-class customer care and digital innovation for contact centre operations locally and globally.  Their solutions ensure high-quality conversations, in the customer channel of choice resolving contacts first time all underpinned by great people, cloud technology, digital innovation (automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence) and a collaborative partnership to optimise and future-proof.

HGS UK has over 3,000 employees making a difference to some of the world’s leading brands, central and local government partnerships.  Although locally managed, they are part of the HGS group, a multi-million-dollar business, bringing global best practice, backing and investment.

Connect with HGS:

Website:https://hgs.cx/locations/uk/

LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/showcase/hgs-uk

About ChatLingual

ChatLingual provides the world’s most comprehensible multilingual messaging platform; supporting customer interactions in over 100 languages in real-time across chat, email, SMS, and social channels.

Trusted by enterprises around the globe, ChatLingual enables companies to quickly provide multilingual customer support, allowing agents to converse with customers in their native language—no bilingual hires or translators required.

ChatLingual brings multilingual support to companies across verticals through its messaging solutions:

●      ChatLingual Agent Desktop

●      ChatLingual App for Salesforce

●      ChatLingual App for LivePerson

●      ChatLingual App for Zendesk

●      ChatLingual App for Genesys

●      ChatLingual Translation API

Connect with ChatLingual:

Website: https://chatlingual.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chatlingual/

Notes to editors

For media enquiries please contact Tina Stanley TSA PR tina@tinastanleyassoc.com or +447909967657

It is hard to overestimate the importance of supply chains in the modern world. The global economy pretty much depends on its smoothness and uninterrupted flow. Rapid expansion is the name of the game right now, and the faster you can move materials, resources, tools, and products around, the higher your chances of success are. 

As with any system with a lot of interconnected components, supply chains can be extremely vulnerable to a large number of factors. They can vary from simple schedule problems and untimely deliveries to global disasters that change the very economic landscape these chains are built upon.

Read more on Business Review here.

I heard someone say recently that companies that have not yet started to create environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reports are data-rich but information-poor. So true.

These organizations have utility bills, data on workforce demographics, training metrics, customer privacy and data security policies, commitments to human rights, sourcing and supplier diversity statistics, and countless other sources flying around their data ecosystem, but no ESG insights or reports.

Read more on Accesswire here.

Murielle Lorilloux, EU Cluster and Enterprise Americas & Asia Pacific Director, Vodafone Business, and Eva Kaili, Vice President of the European Parliament share their priorities to secure an inclusive, sustainable, and economically successful society.

Read the full interview on The Parliment here.

Global law firm Ashurst LLP is launching a virtual experience programme for students, as part of an initiative to promote access to careers in the NewLaw division of the firm.  

The free-to-access programme offers students the chance to increase their commercial awareness through experiencing an alternative legal career path to encourage innovation in an ever-evolving legal market. 

Students will complete tasks that replicate the work of the Ashurst Advance team, allowing them to gain an understanding of how to shape and manage a NewLaw service delivery model for a client's lending project. 

Read more on LawCareers.net here.

Apple’s manufacturing partners will be made to participate in yearly audits to keep tabs on how their efforts to decarbonise their production lines are progressing, as part of the consumer electronics giant’s push to become carbon-neutral across its entire global supply chain.

The process will see the firm’s manufacturing partners put under greater pressure to curb the Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions generated by their Apple-related workloads, with the firm stating that it wants to work with organisations that are “working with urgency and making measurable progress towards decarbonisation”.

Read more on ComputerWeekly here.

Public sector-focused sovereign cloud provider UKCloud has been placed into liquidation more than a year after its accounts revealed that the firm was in need of a £30m funding injection to continue trading.

Winding-up orders for UKCloud and its parent company, Virtual Infrastructure Group, were issued on Tuesday 25 October 2022, and Gareth Jonathan Allen has been appointed official receiver by the court to oversee the liquidation of both parties.

According to sources who spoke to Computer Weekly on condition of anonymity, the Cabinet Office is understood to have started briefing the firm’s customers at the start of this month to begin transitioning to new suppliers in anticipation of the company collapsing within three weeks.

Read more on ComputerWeekly here.

Robotic process automation (RPA) software is used to coordinate the use of one or multiple robots along a specific process or set of processes. This now includes highly skilled functions such as product assembly, welding, and finishing. Additionally, RPA software is the glue that brings together business processes with organizational workflows and the actions of intelligent automation. RPA software also encompasses bots used for such things as chat and many office productivity functions. 

Read more on eweek here.