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What's Up with Tech?
Building a Purpose-Driven BPO: How Horatio's Human-First Approach Is Transforming Customer Experience
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When ose Herrera and his co-founders first surveyed the customer support landscape, they noticed something troubling: outsourced partners weren't prioritizing employees or truly embodying their clients' brand values. This gap between what brands needed and what traditional BPOs offered sparked the creation of Horatio, a revolutionary approach to customer experience that's now serving hundreds of U.S. clients from operations in the Dominican Republic and Colombia.
Drawing from his background in finance at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, Jose built Horatio with a fundamentally different philosophy: put employees first, and they'll naturally deliver exceptional service to clients. This isn't just a platitude painted on office walls—it's embedded in everything from their bright, open workspaces (nicknamed "the Google of Latin America") to on-site amenities like daycare, gyms with personal trainers, and yoga rooms. Regular employee surveys and informal conversations ensure this people-first culture evolves with their team's needs.
What truly distinguishes Horatio is their dedicated team model, where resources aren't shared between clients. Each team functions as a genuine extension of the client's organization, authentically representing their brand voice while benefiting from Horatio's technological expertise. This approach has proven particularly valuable in healthcare, where "compliance and compassion" must coexist. By providing both HIPAA-compliant processes and extensive emotional intelligence training, Horatio's agents deliver the empathetic support patients need during vulnerable moments.
Perhaps most remarkably, Horatio achieved this growth without raising outside capital, instead reinvesting profits into operations and talent. As they expand deeper into healthcare and financial services while exploring new Latin American markets, Jose remains committed to the vision that technology should augment human capabilities rather than replace them. In his words, "AI serves as a co-pilot for our agents, not a replacement"—a refreshing perspective in an industry often fixated on automation at the expense of the human touch.
Ready to see how a purpose-driven approach to customer experience could transform your business? Discover what's possible when empathy, technology, and operational excellence converge.
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Hey everybody, fascinating chat today with a purpose-driven VX Powerhouse, a company that's really on a mission at Horatio Jose. How are you Doing great, evan, how are you Very good, thanks Great to be here with Irma talking all things customer service, customer experience and beyond and you're a true entrepreneur and innovator in this space. Before we dive in, maybe introduce yourself a little bit about your fascinating journey as an entrepreneur and founder, co-founder, and the vision behind Horatio.
Speaker 2:Definitely so. My name is Jose. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Horatio. We are a near-shore outsourcing provider offering customer support, back-office solutions and trust and safety services across e-commerce, fintech and healthcare. We have operations in the Dominican Republic and in Colombia, and we currently service about 100 clients out of the US and we currently service about 100 clients out of the US.
Speaker 1:Well, fantastic, and you know, bpo is the term of art in the industry. But I think you do so much more than that. Maybe what got you interested in the customer service industry and why did you think this sort of industry needed reinvention or differentiation?
Speaker 2:So I started my career in finance I worked at Goldman Sachs and I worked at Morgan Stanley for the vast majority of my career Decided to take a break and pursue my MBA at Columbia Business School, which is where I met my co-founders, jared and Alex, and we thought that we were going to become VC entrepreneurs investing in e-commerce retail brands, and we quickly realized that one of the biggest pain points that these brands have when scaling is finding reliable, incredible talent on the customer support and back office side of things and in looking at the competitive landscape of BPOs. The majority of the BPOs at the time were catering traditionally to bigger enterprise clients. They were not catering to smaller direct-to-consumer brands, and also one of the biggest concerns of these companies was how can a partner that is outsourced understand my brand voice and my values? That is outsourced understand my brand voice and my values? And we really saw an opportunity there to transform the way BPOs are perceived in the industry and also build a different type of BPO that is centered around human connection while incorporating the latest technologies into our offering. And so we started working with some of our direct-to-consumer brands, building out dedicated teams for every client that actually acts as a true extension of the organization that can replicate their brand voice and that can really foster that environment of collaboration that is expected from an in-house team member. And that is exactly what we decided to do. Member. And that is exactly what we decided to do.
Speaker 2:And the other thing that we've done, as the business has continued to evolve, is incorporate best-in-class technologies. We are fully technognostic. That allows us to provide the best tech stack for all of our clients, depending on their particular use case, and so, as I mentioned earlier, we work with e-commerce brands. We also work with fintech and financial services companies. We also work with different healthcare companies. All of them have nuances, all of them have different requirements. So it's not a one-size-fits-all technology stack that we can recommend to all of our clients, and so we have a very strong customer success and implementations team that is constantly doing a deep dive on the latest technological advancements and what are the best in-class tools that we can recommend and implement on behalf of our clients.
Speaker 3:That's a great overview, jose. Now I'm particularly interested in healthcare. That's what I focus in day in and day out. So you've served high-growth brands across multiple sectors, as you've just told us, and I want to dive deeper into healthcare in particular. How is customer experience evolving in the healthcare industry?
Speaker 2:Yes, it is very interesting because, as you know, it is a very regulated industry and we have to take an individualized approach to each company that we work with.
Speaker 2:So we service different healthcare types of clients, and so we have to obviously be HIPAA compliant which we are and then also understand what are we going to be doing for each healthcare company and how can we best position ourselves in terms of AI, automation and human in the loop components.
Speaker 2:Some of the services that we provide include the traditional support services like appointment scheduling, regular billing questions, onboarding, provider access authorization, insurance verification, and then the traditional back office services like RCM work, and so what we're doing with all of our clients is obviously coming with a combined approach that is digital first, but also human backed, of course, understanding that we have to be empathetic, that it is an industry that still requires a lot of empathy, and that is what matters most to us at the end of the day is providing these personalized experiences. So how can we continue to provide a patient-centric CX experience while also incorporating the latest technological advancements and that's something that we're working very closely with our clients is to understand how we can continue to adapt and evolve and continue to not miss out on that human touch as we continue to see technological advancements in healthcare.
Speaker 3:Fantastic. I'm glad you brought up empathy and you mentioned how important it is in healthcare, because supporting a customer buying a product is one thing, but supporting somebody dealing with a very personal and emotional issue, like a medical condition, is something else. How do you train your agents for that kind of sensitivity?
Speaker 2:Yes, I call it compliance and compassion, and so I think it's understanding the regulatory framework that we have to comply with in healthcare and also conduct very strong emotional intelligence and soft skills seminars so that we can train the team members to maintain that empathy throughout every interaction, no matter how small it is. Re interaction no matter how small it is, we always have to remind ourselves that, as you mentioned, it is a very delicate interaction when it is healthcare related. So providing proactive support, training the team to continue to rely on empathy and use best-in-class tools to dissuade difficult conversations, is something that we pride ourselves in. So, as part of our onboarding process and continuous education process, we work very closely with our team members and our training team to provide those continuous education seminars to all of our agents.
Speaker 1:Wow, amazing Well done. That's not the industry norm, let's say to say the least. Let's talk about your facility, your offices. You built almost sort of tech campuses that look rather different from traditional contact centers. You know daycare and yoga rooms and you know amazing employee experience. I mean, how do you justify those investments when it comes to the environment and what does it mean in terms of mental, physical, wellness for agents or employees? Basically, yeah.
Speaker 2:So when we started the company, we went and checked out what was out there in terms of our competitive landscape and we noticed that the employees were not front and center in terms of priorities for these companies.
Speaker 2:And we aim to do the complete opposite, because my whole thesis is if you take care of your employees, they'll take care of your clients, and obviously it's obvious, but one thing is saying it in a values board and the other thing is executing it, and so, unlike the traditional BPO model, where employees feel confined and disconnected, horatio fosters an open, collaborative and engaging work environment.
Speaker 2:Our offices, as you saw, are designed to reflect a similar startup culture environment that you would see in the US startup culture environment that you would see in the US, and some of our clients call our campus here in the VR the Google of Latin America, because it is a bright, open workspace that encourages teamwork and communication. As you mentioned, we provide on-site daycare for working parents, we have a gym with personal trainers, yoga room, we have an outdoor terrace to support work-life balance, and we've built a company culture that is built on empowerment, career growth and innovation, and it starts with the design of our facilities how bright and open they are to foster that collaboration. And then it also translates into what we do day in and day out for our clients.
Speaker 1:Wonderful.
Speaker 3:That's great to see that kind of approach to industry that historically had seen high burnout rate and, of course, burnout is a word you hear a lot in healthcare. Healthcare support teams overall, including physicians and all the support staff, face high stress and burnout. So obviously, being in this supportive environment surrounded by light, and having this culture that you've described as goes a long way to help that. So tell us more in terms of advice, maybe for other startups how can they learn from Horatio in terms of reimagining this agent experience?
Speaker 2:Yeah, my recommendation would be to build your values and your culture around your employees. I mean, they are the most important asset of your organization. Even with technology, they are still going to remain the most important asset of your organization. So my advice to any entrepreneur thinking of building a people centered organization and business is to really make sure that you are doing what your values are saying and what they're displaying, and making sure that you measure that. So something that we're constantly doing is ENPS and quarterly business surveys with all of our employees to understand, like, what is it that is lacking, what are they lacking? What can we do to improve? And a lot can come out of those conversations. And it's also, you know, walking the halls and having conversations informally with employees and understanding, like, what is it that they care about and how can we support them for that growth?
Speaker 1:Brilliant and I've heard, I've seen many of your customers, big blue chip names, I won't call them out, but well-known brands here in Massachusetts, even in finance and healthcare. How do you deal with their very particular, unique demands around privacy and compliance and trust and security and all these kinds of issues?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so every client has a very unique way of doing things and we pride ourselves on building dedicated teams. That means that we don't share any resources between clients. So whenever you work with Horatio, we build a dedicated team that is just working for you 100%. And so compliance and security is top and center and front and center for us, and we work very closely with our clients to understand during the onboarding process, what is it that we need from a security standpoint to have the best setup. We are SOC 2, type 2 certified. We are PCI compliant, we are HIPAA compliant and it's understanding that each nuance is to your point of what we need to get to make sure that they have the right level of comfort. A lot of our clients travel to the DRM to Columbia to meet our sites and do their direct security checks. We've passed with flying colors. We have a very strong data and security team here at the company that is working very closely with the internal teams at our client sites as well.
Speaker 3:Jose, what I find interesting is that you've been able to scale without raising outside capital, and that is not something you see frequently in technology or in healthcare. So I'm curious how did that influence your ability to build this long-term, value-aligned strategy for your company and that culture you've talked about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we have a very unique background in the sense that the three co-founders come from the finance industry, and so we prioritize building a profitable business that is focused around our customers. We reinvested all of our profits directly into operations, directly into hiring best in class talent, and I guess we were very disciplined in the way that we do things. So operational efficiency for us is critical, understanding how to streamline the right workflows to make our teams more efficient and avoid bloated organizational structures. I think that's something that has benefited us from the fact that we haven't raised outside capital. That is, that we have to get creative with that, figuring out what we can do in terms of building out repeatable processes, making sure that we have built a strong brand.
Speaker 2:So from the beginning, I have been very involved in all of our client relationships. We haven't spent, up until recently, any capital on marketing and sales initiatives. Most of our clients come from referrals, which speaks volumes to the kind of work that we're doing. So we've sort of like created, sort of like a reputation within the industry and even within our tech partnerships as well. We got a lot of referrals from our tech partners because they know that we can deliver for their clients, and so that is something that we have done in terms of like bootstrapping up until this point and still becoming a profitable enterprise. And, as I mentioned earlier, it's about getting creative. So, obviously, having creative partnerships with tech platforms, companies that are complementary to what we do so partnering with companies like SendDesk, for example, or AI platforms and solutions and doing cross-selling with that has also helped us in terms of like building out an infrastructure that has not required outside capital to this point. Well done.
Speaker 1:Not so easy to do. So you have 3,000 agents and growing. I believe this must be a common question. What do you see the role for AI being in the business, both on the agent side customer experience and beyond? What's your thinking at the moment?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so internally, we've been using AI and I think the word AI is new for the past two years, but since we started working at Horatio, we've relied on tools like RPA to handle repetitive, rule-based work. That includes data entry, form processing, order tracking, invoice management. We've done that since we started the company. None of that is new. That has freed up agents to focus on higher-end tasks. We've used chatbots. We've used virtual assistants. We've also used sentiment analysis. All of these that we're seeing now is something that we've always used and we've always incorporated, and the role that we continue to see with AI is to serve as a co-pilot for our agents, not a replacement. I think that the narrative has continued to change. I think when the world discovered AI, the narrative was around replacement of agents, but I think what people are starting to realize that it is about how can we co-live with AI, how can we take advantage of these technological advancements to make our teams more efficient and to have that combination of human in the loop AI augmenting humans which ultimately is a win-win for everyone.
Speaker 3:Most definitely. It sounds like human plus AI is the winning formula. Yes, and there's untold benefits to be gained looking into the future Speaking of that. So what's next for Horatio? More countries, more service service lines, maybe deeper into certain industries? And also, what's keeping you inspired right now?
Speaker 2:we're getting deeper into definitely getting deeper into health care and financial services, so that's super exciting for us. We're we're launching new lines of businesses there, also exploring other lines of businesses there, also exploring other lines of businesses within the trust and safety space, and, as we continue to explore expansion and growth, we are excited about going into other countries within Latin America. I think that we've created a very strong name for ourselves in the nearshore space and we provided that quality that is expected from our clients and so super excited to continue growing, not only in the DR, in Colombia, but also some countries in the region as well.
Speaker 1:Amazing. So you recently had a big open house. We were invited to that. Unfortunately we had a conflict, but I hope that becomes an annual tradition. How did it go? And what other events travel or otherwise are you excited about the rest of the year.
Speaker 2:It went great. Hopefully you guys can come every year. This was our third time doing our client summit. We had 120 attendees. It was a fun week where our clients and even prospects came down and were able to interact with each other, exchange ideas. We wanted to build that informal setting so that they can all share best practices and also have a good time with their team members. A lot of them were super happy to be here with their team.
Speaker 2:As I mentioned, our clients come here all the time. We're super close to the US. It's less than two hours from Miami, around three hours from New York, so a lot of our clients come all the time. But it was a special time of the year obviously February, pretty cold in the US, so a lot of people enjoyed escaping the cold weather for a couple of days. We were in San Descrimate in Vegas a couple of weeks ago that was great as well. In San Francisco with one of our AI partners meeting some very exciting companies that are exploring joint partnerships with us. And for the next couple of weeks we're also hitting the road being New York early May for another summit that we're attending and we're speaking at and then hosting a dinner with clients as well. We have a lot of clients in New York, so it's always good to catch up with everyone before the summer starts.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, congratulations on all the success, onwards and upwards. We're rooting for you, given your philosophy and mission-driven culture. And congratulations, look forward to seeing you when you're next here in Massachusetts.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, and thank you for having me, for having me have a good day.
Speaker 1:Thank you and thanks everyone for listening and watching. Take care.