Alorica announced that it had recently completed its acquisition of Expert Global Solutions, Inc. (EGS). As a result, the transaction makes Alorica one of the world’s largest providers of customer experience outsourcing solutions.
Irvine, California-based Alorica provides customer relationship management, back office support, and receivables management solutions for numerous industries like government, finance, automotive, energy, media, retail, technology, and transportation. According to the company’s website, half of Fortune 50 healthcare companies are among its clients.
Plano, Texas-based EGS provides some of the same services as Aloricq, but its emphasis seems to be geared towards customer service as it has several specialties in that area. Omnichannel, retention, experience transformation, acquisition, self-service, and tech support are among its solutions.
The acquisition began with a stock purchase agreement in the first week of June 2016 and is driven by a desire on Alorica’s part to create a comprehensive customer service solutions portfolio. Alorica will also benefit from EGS’ strength in the healthcare industry and becomes the third largest BPO company in the world and largest in North America.
Alorica has made some acquisitions in the past, but is not particularly aggressive in doing so, especially when compared to a company like Birch Communications, a company well known for its frequent acquisitions. In January 2015, Alorica acquired several of West Corporation’s agent services in a $275 million deal. Five years before that, Alorica acquired Ryla, an Atlanta-area call center outsourcer in a $70 million deal.
Both of the past acquisitions seemed to be sound ones on Alorica’s part. Acquiring the West companies was expected to increase Alorica’s revenue by $1.2 billion, more than four times the purchase price. Ryla’s revenue had increased fourfold between 2008 and 2009, so Alorica had bought a proven winner.
The EGS transaction seems on one hand to be a good business decision for Alorica as well. EGS provides extensive expertise in customer service and adds to Alorica’s overall services rather than being a major overlap of services the two have in common. Given the size of this acquisition however, there will be considerable challenges integrating two separate corporate cultures. All industry observers can do at this point is wait to see how the deal plays out.
Edited by Maurice Nagle