Rahul Gupta
MUMBAI: With customers expecting more of software services, India is popping
up as a preferred location for software majors to operate service centers from.
Sybase has opted to add India as a major hub in the customer service network for
the Asia-Pacific region.
Sybase senior director, technical services, Gabriel Muthusamy said, "We
have over 2,000 key customers in India. It helps that India has a great pool of
technically qualified software service engineers, so getting staff locally is
not difficult. The idea is to reduce problem isolation time and resolution time
drastically.
With accounts like HDFC, IOB, Tata AIG, BSE, Tata Teleservices, Kotak Mahindra
and ICICI, the company has established its presence over many years.
While telephone support and electronic services offer remote assistance, it is
the excellence in processes that can give a software company the confidence to
take on any level of customer service. Typically, problem resolution is managed
in a number of stages, graded from Level 1 through Level 3. Till quite recently,
at Sybase, the problems of customers in India had been handled at Level 1 and 2
within India, and this was backed up by Level 3 support from outside India
primarily from Sydney, Australia, and from Singapore.
Sybase has taken a different approach. At the enterprise level, there is a
high-availability annual plan, which includes prioritized support services, such
as faster response and escalation handling. The "extended" plan
includes access to 24x7 telephone hotline coverage for critical issues. A
"basic" plan helps customers who want the insurance of unlimited calls
and new software version releases. There are tailor-made services for
developers, personal support options for customers on critical projects, and
extended partnership services, with direct contact to a designated alliance
engineer, backed by a team.
Sybase is the enterprise Infrastructure Company that bridges heterogeneous
technologies. With Enterprise Portal, mobile and wireless solutions, essential
integration products, and high performance database management systems, Sybase
is one of the largest independent software companies in the world.