While most of us will be pleased to see 2020 in our rearview mirrors, we at KM2 Solutions want to take time to reflect on this past year. Although it has been a year of challenges, it has also been one of opportunity, and through it all, we are now better positioned as a result.
COVID-19 RESPONSE AND WORK-FROM-HOME
We began 2020 on an incredible growth trajectory. However, within a few months, everything changed. Under a cloud of COVID-19, we were forced to close many of our offices. The success of our business during this time depended on leveraging the fullest capabilities of our business continuity plan.
Born of necessity, we launched our Work-From-Home model. We deployed thousands of at-home work stations to employees across all of our sites. At the height of the pandemic, KM² Solutions had over 50% of its workforce deployed remotely.
In a way, this made our business model more dynamic than ever. We can now leverage the benefits of remote deployment and the success of remote management and training across multiple geographies simultaneously. This proved to be so successful that it will remain not just as a continuity measure but as part of a hybrid model moving forward, benefitting clients with greater flexibility and productivity and increased retention advantages.
OUR OFFICES AND PEOPLE
Throughout everything, our number one concern was for the protection of our employees. We invested in significant sanitization and safety protocols, including daily temperature checks on arrival to the office, distancing and plastic screens between workstations, masks and face shield to all employees, and daily cleaning of all public spaces. Our office environments have become the standard by which other local businesses model theirs.
Despite temporary closures and social distancing, our teams were able to celebrate some incredible milestones. We expanded our office in St. Lucia to support an additional 300 agents, and we took new office space in Colombia, Honduras, and the DR, nearly doubling our capacity in each country. Our Grenada office turned 10 this year, and to celebrate, we donated 50 computers to local community centers within the parish of St. Andrew. We also celebrated our first employee to reach 20 years with the company. Both ceremonies were broadcast across the organization via web conference.
Finally, we hired a VP of Training and Development, who is tasked with continually improving the skills of our people day in and day out. We have reimagined our Leadership Development Program, KM² University, and it will be rolled out to all employees in the first quarter of 2021.
GROWTH IN SCALE AND SCOPE
This year, the partnerships with our clients became stronger than ever before. During the height of the crisis, several clients saw substantial impacts to their business. Auto finance clients, for example, saw their loan origination functions nearly evaporate overnight as the economy went into a standstill. KM² prides itself on being adaptable to any client’s need. We scaled back this operation based on demand. However, months later, the demand for receivables management began to increase, and accordingly, we scaled up this part of our client’s business to match. Today, in aggregate, our clients have grown beyond where they started the year. Our flexibility as a partner makes us the vendor of choice.
KM² has always been a major player in the auto finance industry, but this year we saw a shift. Even as our existing client portfolio grew, the percentage of auto finance declined as we won business in new markets such as healthcare and insurance. These vertices grew due to the changing market dynamics, and as we became more efficient at delivering services for these industries, we won new client logos.
Given that we have grown our office capacity and have augmented many of our clients with at-home agents, we will be able to accommodate double the workforce when the COVID crisis ends. We have ample room to support any size project in the future.
OUR COMPANY IN THE MEDIA
In addition to our operational accomplishments, we continued to develop our brand with a series of new initiatives. For starters, KM² Solutions partnered with Ryan Strategic Advisory to produce 3 webinars on Nearshore Outsourcing, the Healthcare Industry, and CX Technology. Each segment contains a 30-minute conversation and 10-minute Q&A with different key people within our organization.
We have also created a series of videos that help detail our operation in each of our locations. Since travel has been restricted this year, we can now virtually visit our offices in Barbados, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Honduras, and St. Lucia. These 3:30 minute videos contain an introduction from our site directors, an overview of our facilities, and testimonials from our operations team.
We have also published a series of thought leadership articles to help clients and prospects understand certain details of our business. Among these articles were Cost-Benefit Analysis, Offshore vs. Nearshore, and Effective Info Security and Compliance for WFH.
FINANCING THE FUTURE
Last but not least, in December, KM² Solutions closed on a financial transaction with the private equity firm, H.I.G. Capital (“H.I.G.”). H.I.G. is a leading global alternative investment firm with $42 billion of equity capital under management with a focus on the small-cap and mid-cap segments of the market. The recapitalization aims to provide KM² with a long-term, well-capitalized financial partner who will support KM²’s growth strategy. The capital raise will support KM²’s business process outsourcing solutions and continued expansion. Future growth opportunities include expanding into new markets and investments in next-generation customer experience technologies to support clients seeking high quality, competitive cost solutions.
The KM² Solutions management team will continue to retain total control of the business. Everything that has helped our company grow consistently over the past 16+ years will remain intact.
With a multi-site, multi-geo model, KM2 is already an agile outsourcing proposition with a proven track record of providing secure and scalable solutions for major U.S. clients across almost all verticals. Now, with continuity measures tried and tested, the ability to leverage these successes into a hybrid model can only enhance adaptability, performance, and productivity as we enter the new year, bigger, stronger, yet more flexible than ever before.
We attribute our continued success to the hard work and dedication of our operations teams. 2020 is our 16th consecutive year of growth, and we remain optimistic for continued growth in 2021!
About KM² Solutions
KM² Solutions ( KM2 Solutions ) operates contact centers throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, providing outsourced inbound and outbound customer service contact services for voice, chat, email, and mobile. KM² Solutions provides these services to clients in financial services, multi-unit healthcare, insurance services, travel & hospitality, eCommerce, technology & telecommunications, home services, and other sectors. The company provides clients with a host of solutions, including customer support and care, telesales & retention, claims management & processing, appointment setting & schedule management, loan origination & verifications, back-office processing, and technical support. KM² Solutions maintains PCI DSS compliance, completes a SOC 2 audit annually, and has a Compliance Management System that meets the FDIC standards.
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