'Customer responsiveness wins the game'

BANGALORE, INDIA: Customer service has become a critical component for any enterprise to be a winner. Avaya GlobalConnect, a provider of intelligent communications solutions, systems and services, recently awarded companies with Customer Responsive Awards 2007.

Ritesh Jayswal, director, Industry Solutions, Avaya India Pvt Ltd, in an interaction with Dheeksha Rabindra of CyberMedia News spoke about the significance of providing better customer experience by an enterprise to win the game.

Avaya recently recognized companies for customer responsiveness. Has customer care come of age in India?

I think if there is one thing that unites the entire enterprise community, it is the customer. If you don’t serve your customer well you are out of the business.

What has happened over the last 10 years - due to globalization - is that the sense of customer responsiveness - into how India serves the globe - as well as domestic customers has improved significantly.

Americas or Western countries are leading the way in customer service for multiple reasons because of demand and supply. In India it was started late.

Economic liberalization has been one of the most important reasons for the way customer responsiveness has picked up in India.

Many have experienced how customer responsiveness is in other parts of the world and they expect similar things back here and technology helps in achieving it.

How are enterprises attempting to provide better customer responsiveness?

Enterprises are utilizing multiple ways of tackling it and to improve the customer experience. For instance, sales guys have to decide on how can they keep in touch with the customer 24/7 even while balancing personal and work life.

There are multiple tools for that. For instance on mobile it is possible to give desk phone features and it is also possible to transfer all my desk phone calls to mobile.

With these methods, what you are doing is becoming more responsive. People these days have taken these things for granted that you are available when I need to.

This paradigm shift over the last 10 years has happened, and Avaya provides technologies that remove the barrier making companies utilize some of our tools in satisfying customers better.

For instance end users will use multiple means like email, fax, call, SMS, etc to do banking. But enterprises should look at customer as single entity, whatever means of communication end user is using.

Avaya helps customers/enterprises to have unified way of addressing end customers and enhance customer experience.

What kind of technology solutions are enterprises looking for when they go for contact center solutions?

Multiple solutions, like Automatic Call Distribution recognize the customers (end users) and then deliver the call to the right agent.

It helps enterprises to ensure that they are distributing right customer call to the right agent. Every enterprise follows customer segmentations like, gold or silver (member) segment, or insurance or mutual fund segment.

The challenge for enterprises is merging segmentation with SLA or enterprise business strategy. For instance, if an end user is a gold member with an enterprise, the enterprise has to provide an efficient customer service unlike to its regular members.

Avaya will help in implementing business strategy into system so the customer responsiveness is appropriate according to the segment end-user belongs to.

Second, significantly emerging in Indian context is self-service, that is typically known as IVRs. In self-service, in Indian context people like to talk more person-to-person.

However, we have seen that service providers in banking segment have started providing multitude services. Because of speech recognition system one can talk to the system instead of punching the keys.

Now Avaya’s self service platform is available in Indian English and Hindi, which can be used for speech recognition. Avaya is already investing in technology such as how can we bring video on to the mobile phone. We are waiting for 3G spectrum to open up.

Can you elaborate on how video contact centers (VCC) solution works?

For instance, if I am calling airline to check whether my colleague has reached the destination, with 3G handset by just talking to the contact center, the contact center can continuously stream images on where the flight exactly is and details of the flight confirmation can be sent to mobiles.

I already have the context, flight details, by GPS I know the destination located, I have the maps of these places, and I just have to get all together.

How has been the response for VCC and other Avaya solutions?

In India we can’t implement VCC as there is no 3G spectrum. When it opens up we will have solution, which we can do video transaction on mobile. It has been implemented outside India.

But response for voice has been significant. We extended from automatic call distribution, went on to self-service and computer telephony integration (CTI).

Another technology picking up in Indian context is outbound solutions which enable now to make list of calls and find out on the other end whether it an answer machine or a busy tone.

The Avaya solution integrates all the above technologies- the outbound and inbound system. We also provide cradle to grave reporting for the companies.

There’s been this complaint against contact centers that they are not properly aligned with business applications and hence don’t provide connect with other components of enterprise applications. What is Avaya doing to address this?

Entire theme of Avaya is Intelligent Communication (IC) by which we mean that communication solutions, which are embedded in the business process.

We think that business objectives are critical and communication systems have to enable this business objective. From that stand point it becomes only imperative that we integrate our solution with business objectives.

For instance in a manufacturing company, they had a challenge of reaching out to lots of dealers. It is a difficult thing to find the stock position or a query about an item.

We provided them a solution of self-service platform. However, this did not help completely. The company had SAP implementation done.

We had to integrate our self-service platform into SAP. So when someone calls and lodges a complaint, it automatically launches to SAP, and will direct to the right person or to a supervisor and after the closure, it automatically gets the feedback.

We call this communication-enabled business process. It is all about embedding communication into the framework of the business.

How is Avaya’s engineering center in Pune contributing to the company’s solution portfolio?

We have R&D center in Pune and we provide services as well. We have centers across the globe and we work together. We are able to offer implementation of solutions partially or fully and also service our customers from same locations.

We are now able to provide better responsiveness to our customers around the same time zone from Pune center.

Have you developed solutions specific to industry verticals?

The focus on vertical from our perspective is IT and ITeS, we have BFSI and third vertical, which is significant and under penetrated in India is retail and manufacturing and we think tremendous opportunity is opening up for hospitality industry also.

We do business by understanding customer pain points. In IT and ITeS now the pain point is rupee appreciation and its impact in short time and wage inflation.

We understand these pain points and build solution around these problems to increase productivity. We integrate Avaya solutions along with partners and we follow open standard technology, which enhance our offerings for our customers.

We have 5000 partners registered. We take Avaya’s and partner’s solutions into the market place to solve the business pain points.

We also create staggered investment plan for them. We act as consultants for enterprises and tell them how we could help them in implementing the solutions.

How will Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) take off in India?

It is an interesting area, literally looking at unified communication space how workers can become more productive. How can 100 employees work to provide a productivity of 200 employees?

This can be done through multiple solutions like FMC and other solutions. In IT-ITeS 65 per cent utilization was ok, but with rupee appreciation it has been increased to 75 –80 per cent.

The increasing productivity can be met with giving the right tools, can I give desktop features on phone, can I provide IP phone applications on IP phone itself, so I can do transactions on IP phone itself, so on. This is where we are leading.

What is the current trend in India in adopting communication technologies?

I think the thrust in coming years would be the post-unified communications. It can be about how can I seamlessly communicate across various medias.

Right now lot of people is using point solutions. They are using videoconference systems, audio conference systems, voice systems. They are all disparate.

We are unifying all these. Today all companies are talking about – we have lot of point solutions and how seamlessly do we integrate together and that is going to be the trend.