Companies are Relying more on Contact Centers - An Interview with Shalabh Jain

Companies are Relying more on Contact Centers

An Interview with Shalabh Jain - EVP and Head, Asia Business Unit

Q.	Customer engagement and management is becoming vital to the success of an organization. What according to you should be the focus for organizations to ensure this as a differentiator?
A.	There is a lot of hue and cry about deploying social media to engage subscribers in India. What we need to understand is that the large mass of Indian subscribers fall under the pre-paid umbrella and hence the most important tool in engaging them would still be the agent at the contact center. This implies that customer engagement or management initiatives in India are restricted to services through the contact centers. If we look at the market today, introduction of third generation mobile telecommunications (3G) and mobile number portability (MNP) has thrown up unprecedented challenges in the field of customer management strategy. In addition, service providers have to grapple with the unique business requirements in each circle, diverse customer profiles and varied cultural traits make customer relationship management complex. Fierce competition between operators and falling average revenue per user (ARPU) further add to the challenges. There is no doubt that the operator who effectively addresses all these challenges will emerge a winner. Operators are realizing this and are increasingly empowering their contact center agents. The days ahead will witness proactive initiatives aimed at ensuring customer loyalty and innovative engagement strategies.

Q.	Considering the complexity that the Indian market poses, what are the key customer engagement trends that you see?
A.	At Firstsource, we engage in over one million customer interactions per day with subscribers. The market in India is driven by price factors, which is reflected in the voice of customers that we get to hear. However, there is only a point to which the war on price can be continued. We see a concerted effort on the part of our clients to better engage with the subscribers and derive insights from the engagement and relationship . This is largely to understand price-sensitivity and subscriber loyalty (stickiness). Subscriber stickiness, in fact, is one of the top most agenda amongst clients with several compelling retention schemes being rolled out to ensure the same.

Q.	You are in a vantage point – hearing the real voice of the customers. What value do you provide to clients basis this?
A.	As mentioned earlier, agents are better equipped and empowered today, thanks to the ‘integration’ within the telecom sector and intense competition. For example, agents today suggest the effectiveness of a client’s retention scheme and more importantly fine-tunes the same to ensure stickiness when the subscriber fits some of the stipulated criteria. There are also instances of suggesting potential avenues for up-selling like value added services. For one of our clients, we generate close to Rs.70 lakhs in revenues a month. In order to pass on value to our clients from the voice of customers that we capture through our interactions, we undertake regular focused-group discussion with a cross section of our agents. This provides us with necessary insights on products and services as well as efficacy of tariff plans vis-à-vis competition. While those are external factors, there is a lot of strategy work that we do internally to ensure operational savings. Since this is a cost center for the clients, it is our endeavor to come up with solutions to save costs and eventually turn this into a profit center. Under the annual operating plan, we continuously attempt to reduce repeat calls, calls per subscriber etc. To give an example, Firstsource provided comprehensive customer support services to one of the telecom companies here, using standardized processes, to minimize capital expenditure, save operational costs and drive efficiencies. The team took over processing of more than 10 million complex transactions across revenue and service functions. Firstsource’s expertise in customer related operations management support system (OSS) and billing support system (BSS) brought in significant advantage to the client. The team helped the client in reducing their fraud detection time significantly by 75%. The streamlined revenue assurance processes helped prevent revenue leakage of USD 5 million per annum.

Q.	Social networking has given a new twist to customer engagement. What is your view on this?
A.	We haven’t seen too much of traction in social media as a customer engagement or management tool. This is primarily because most of the social platforms require proficiency in English, which is a challenge for most of the telecommunication subscribers. Having said that, Firstsource has seen significant adoption of social networking across clients in other markets like the UK and US.