Customer Interaction Management Not Just A Technology, But A Strategy

Today, customer satisfaction is becoming of increasing importance to service providers worldwide. Servion Global Solutions is a company that deals specifically with customer satisfaction and automation in the contact centre. Although most of its business so far has been outside India, the company is now looking to penetrate the Indian market. Shankaran Nair, president - corporate strategy, Servion Global Solutions speaks to Biztech2.0 about how Customer Interaction Management is not just an analyst buzzword, but an aggregation of concrete technologies and processes, which changes the way today’s faceless enterprises deal with large volumes of customer interactions.

Could you tell us a little about Customer Interaction Management (CIM)?

Customer Interaction Management is not just a technology, but a highly integrated process. Servion as a provider of these solutions provides customers a spectrum of end to end solutions, which are process and technology driven.

Specifically with reference to CIM, the CIM layer sits on top of the CRM layer. Companies deploy millions of dollars worth of software that do what a CRM does. What happens in the process is that the customer really experiences that CRM only through the CIM.

When a customer calls or emails a service provider, he/she accesses information from a number of applications. One way of looking at it is that CIM is a layer that rides between the consumer and the service provider. So basically it forms a gateway to effective interaction.

Another way of looking at it is that CIM enables interaction of every kind. As businesses get flatter and delivery channels get shorter, interaction between the consumer and the service provider will go on increasing. For instance, most of the products bought in the U.S. have an associated 1-800 number. This trend will be seen in India as well, but in due time. Hence, as the delivery channels become shorter, service providers will need to figure out an effective and automated way to interact with their customers, in order to keep them satisfied. This is where CIM (and Servion) steps in.

What verticals are looking to adopt CIM solutions?

We believe that every enterprise needs to have a CIM strategy. They may or may not use the technologyat first, but acquire it in due time. We make it a point to help customersformulate a CIM strategy, which is achieved by means of our consulting division.

Servion has worked with a number of verticals and from what we’ve seen, the BFSI and Telecom sector have been the ’early adopters’ so to speak. We see large volumes of transactions that are part of these two verticals. Within the telecom industry itself, some of our customers handle a large volume of calls on a per day basis. The only way to handle these kind of volumes is to automate. It is difficult to handle all these calls using only the human resources that one has at hand. This is where the CIM solution comes in. It allows the customer to make a transaction without needing to talk to a human agent.

Apart from BFSI and Telecom, we expect a number of other verticals to adopt this technology as well. As I had mentioned before, this is the kind of solution that would be useful to anyone who offers services, and deals with customers on a day to day basis. We expect the travel and hospitality industry to take to CIM well. Of course, we can’t leave out retail, considering this is a sector that’s becoming a heavy technology adopter. Will believe that utility providers (electricity, internet, etc.) will take to CIM in due time as well.
What are some of the challenges faced by contact centres, which would lead to a need for a CIM strategy/ solution?

The core challenge for a contact centre is scheduling. It’s all about call queuing really. The challenge is to map agent availability. The contact centre tends to become inefficient if it has too many agents and few callers, or vice versa. We have solutions such as our workforce optimisation solution, which tries to get into the contact centre, and figure out how to be in a state of either having calls waiting for agents or vice versa. The key is in the reduction of this gap.
What are some of the challenges you face as a provider of CIM solutions?

For us, the challenge is to evangelise CIM to verticals that are currently not using it, or do not have a strategy in place. This is why we established our consulting division. With CIM the solution per say is specific to each industry. We approach customers in an advisory capacity, and map the solution to their specific business needs.

If we approach a vertical we haven’t worked with before, we appraoach it, with our team of consultants and educate the company about the solution. There are times when we don’t necessarily follow through with technology or service sales, but that first visit is what enables companies to understand and relate to advancements in technology and the kind of ROI these technologies can bring. Usually, we try to have a solution for a particular vertical readily available before we evangelise our solutions.
What is your road map to further educate Indian companies about your services/offerings?

Well, at this point, we’re involved in conducting demonstrations and organising workshops, where we educate companies as to how we can help them.

We recently partnered with CISCO to jointly deliver IP based Unified Communication. Using our CIM expertise, we can jointly deliver solutions to contact centres, and eliminate the need of a contact centre in the conventional sense. Today, using UC, a contact centre can have agents working from home. One can use IP to transfer calls wherever the agent is based. We have also partnered with Avaya, Nortel and Siemens to deliver a range of solutions. We are definitely looking at more partnerships of this kind.

Could you speak to us briefly regarding your current offerings in the CIM space?

We have a number of products available in order to enable effective CIM. These products can be used as independent modules. We have the RAP CTI, which is an enterprise-level CTI engine that functions as the single point of contact between customer access channels (PBX, IVR, Dialer) and corporate business applications; enTRAC, which is a multi-channel messaging platform; CallBack Manager, which gives an option of a ‘call back’ to a customer in a queue, and automates the ‘call back’ either on availability of the agent or at a time opted for by the customer; and Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) which enables customer Self Service and Call Centers.