IVR To The Rescue At Tata Chemicals

Established in 1939, Tata Chemicals Limited (TCL) has manufacturing facilities in India, UK, Kenya and USA. Defying the standard norm for IVR use i.e. for responding to customer queries, TCL embarked on its own innovative journey of using IVR.

Not as easy as it sounds

TCL had to constantly interact with its sales force, distributors and vendors for business purposes. TCL’s distributors often depended on the sales people or regional office representatives for basic information about dispatches and pending invoices. These sales people or company employees acted as intermediaries, who would look into the system and extract the required information.

Beyond office hours, it would be really difficult for employees to get this information, and many a times trucks would land up in storage godowns late at night, which created hassles and delays due to lack of information. As the hazard kept growing, it became necessary to address it. Vikas Gadre, CIO, TCL, came up with a very innovative fix for this problem. He decided to connect IVR to the company’s SAP ERP, which gave them the perfect solution to cater to their needs.

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Gadre says, “The IVR was initially rolled out for the sales force and customers. The roll out for vendors is currently on. For distributors, for some basic queries they do not have to depend on intermediaries like regional offices. On the vendor side, we actually calculated what could be the savings and how much time our people spent per call while answering queries related to payments and thus, calculated the time value of such telephonic conversations. Even if 60 percent of these calls are converted to IVR calls, it could be result in huge cost savings.”

TCL uses a system developed by MobileOne, a company based in Hyderabad. The calling number ‘1800’ is from Tata Indicom and the IVR engine has been developed collaboratively by MobileOne’s offices in India and Germany. This engine sits on top of middleware and then connects with the Tata Indicom number.

Not everything is a happy story

The implementation, which was executed in phases, came with its own share of challenges. It took three months to connect the IVR solution to the ERP system. The roll out got extended due to the training and handholding involved.

Due to financial constraints, TCL had to cut down on a lot of initial ideas during the implementation. Gadre says, “One of the challenges is that people resist listening to a robotic voice to get information. In spite of the information being very relevant, there is a human touch that is missing. The development of the IVR engine itself was a challenge. It required a lot of programming in SAP so that relevant information was extracted and made available. There were also challenges in terms of response time because if the IVR query queue is large, then it puts pressure on the production system, so we had to make a decision about this as to how to prioritise queries on a busy day or during peak hours.”

IVR can be used very effectively for secondary phase data capture. The engine developed by TCL also has a facility to call back the distributor. The engine is not merely equipped to receive calls; it can also call back the distributor and ask for information.

Future roadmap

TCL is planning to extend the IVR implementation for employee self-service. “One of the extensions that we are trying is to modularise the IVR engine and then Tata Indicom could offer it to other Tata Group companies on a SaaS model. The journey is still on in that direction,” says Gadre, mapping out the future plan.

During times when most organisations are going in for cost consolidation and containment, IVR can be really useful. In companies that have many regional branches and widespread buyers, a lot of long, volume-added work can be completely eliminated with the use of IVR. On a concluding note, Gadre says, “It is one more step towards cost containment for organisations as it eliminates unproductive use of manforce.”