We hired our first Chief Digital Officer and we’re announcing the formation of the new software division at PartnerHero. Read on to find out why we’re making these two big moves.
You might know PartnerHero as an outsourcing company. One that connects talented and capable people from all over the world with innovative brands who care about delivering a high quality customer experience, while doing right for people and the planet. But our vision goes beyond the professional services that have been at the core of what we do since our founding in 2014.
We’re intent on remaking a BPO industry that hasn’t seen much innovation over the past 30 years by combining services with technology (software) and insights (data) to drive better outcomes for our partners. What’s more, we think we can do that in a way that casts aside the tenets of traditional extractive capitalism, which underpin our industry, and instead centers people, place, and culture.
That’s why today we’re announcing the launch of our new software division and hiring Piras Thiyagarajan as our first Chief Digital Officer.
Piras has over 20 years of software development and product leadership experience. He comes to PartnerHero after stops at Okta, Amazon, and Google, where he built a new customer experience platform for the Advanced Technology & Projects group, Google’s in-house technology incubator. Most recently he was the Chief Technology Officer at FrontDoor. Piras lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, kids, and dog, and is an avid rower.
He will lead a new team within PartnerHero tasked with building our forthcoming CX operations platform. The platform will be made available first for our partners and later for external customer experience teams, as well. We believe there’s a huge opportunity not just to chart a new course for the BPO industry, but for how business and operations software in general is built and sold.
“One of the guiding principles we follow at PartnerHero is the idea that culture leads, and success follows. It’s easy to define success in traditional business terms: deals won, revenue, profit. But that stuff is worthless if it comes at the price of burning through people and destroying the planet,” says PartnerHero CEO Shervin Talieh. “We follow a different path. PartnerHero starts with culture and we find that business success comes as a result. I’m excited that Piras will bring that same mentality to our new software division.”
For too long, B2B SaaS software has been built and sold using the old extractive model, locking companies into contracts for products they don’t really need, that don’t provide value, and that are hard to use. We think that has to change.
Software should be generative. It should be both useful and empowering, valuable and affirming, for the companies that purchase it and the people that use it.
We’ve begun to see some changes in the way SaaS products are sold (like month-to-month contracts and Slack’s fair usage billing), but rarely have we seen products put the user at the center of the experience. We’re starting by asking how this software will be used by people on the frontlines and working backward from there. This is a radical change in approach from the way most software is built, starting with the business case and fitting it to the user experience later.
The ops platform we’re building won’t just help brands run more efficient and effective CX operations (though it will do that!), but will also enable frontline CX professionals to learn, grow, and master their craft.
"Partnerhero is a unique company that cares equally about its customers and the people who serve those customers,” says Piras. “We’re building tools to help us deliver our services at scale while enabling our associates to grow and thrive. We don’t want to stop at changing business as usual at PartnerHero, so the tools and insights we develop internally will be made available to every customer experience leader to grow their businesses while empowering their teams."
Piras will bring his decades of experience to bear when building out this new function within PartnerHero and bring this vision to life. Stay tuned to learn more about what we build and how we build it.
