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“Organizations struggle with customers who cannot be ignored but are hard to serve in a profitable manner.”
 With over 1,000 installations worldwide, the decade-old Servion Global Solutions is a leading provider of customer interaction management (CIM) solutions in India and many other markets abroad. Among the company’s clients are Bharti Group, Citibank, Emirates, ICICI Bank, LG, Toyota and other organizations across verticals. Shankaran Nair, the company’s President of Corporate Strategy, discusses the science and business of CIM in an exclusive interview with Sanjay Gupta, Senior Associate Editor, Network Computing. Excerpts:
A lot of companies have put in place IVR solutions to handle customer care, but there are wide differences in their deployment and customer success. Why do you think is that so?
Research shows that customers prefer speaking to an agent than an automated interaction. But an agent interaction is far more expensive to the organization than an automated one. So, if the organization wants to offer only personalized service, it may still choose to direct all the interactions to a live agent. For example, the American Express Bank does not believe in automated interactions; all the calls are answered by a live agent. On the other hand, if the organization chooses to lay emphasis on quick responses and resolution, they would automate routine queries using an IVR.
If you examine the reasons why customers call, all the interactions fall under any one or a combination of the following three categories: information, transaction, or complaint. A large percentage of those customer interactions seeking information or logging complaints can be completed on the IVR using self-service – touch tone or speech enabled. Examples of these could be account balance inquiry, bill amount, date of payment, or a complaint on a defective service or product. Transactions that require human intervention such as banking fund transfers could be automated to a point and then cascaded to an agent. The decision of what to automate and what not to rests with the organization. Which is why there are wide differences in the deployment and use of IVR systems.
What are the key issues enterprises face in deploying CIM solutions?
When service is interrupted, customers expect the service provider to identify the cause of impact, and also resolve the problem as quickly as possible, while keeping them aware of the problem.
Service providers also recognize the need to move toward customer centricity, which allows them to differentiate themselves from their competitors, reduce churn, and improve profitability. However, providing uniform service across different customer segments definitely has a retarding impact on overall profitability of the company. Most companies have approximately 20 percent highly profitable, high-value customers and another 20 percent unprofitable, low-value customers. It is easy to work out strategies for the top and bottom customer segments. It is the middle 60 percent that organizations struggle with - customers who cannot be ignored but who are hard to serve in a profitable manner.
Organizations face three significant challenges in handling the bulk of these customers: How to allow these customers to contact the organization in the way they want (phone, e-mail, chat, SMS); How to manage this interaction profitably; and How to optimally balance automation and personalization.
Even with the best of tools at their disposal, companies end up cheesing off their customers either through inaccurate profiling or pitching the products to the wrong set of customers. How do you think technology can help them address these problems?
At present, customer information exists in silos. Organizations are slowly realizing the importance of a 360-degree view of the customer and the interaction which will provide them the ability to get the right information to the right people at the right time. Consider the following scenario for a telecommunications company: One customer may have several products or services, such as ISP, wireless, and local/long distance services, from the same telecommunications carrier. If customers have a question about several products or services, contact center agents may be forced to fumble through 10 to 20 applications to find relevant information to answer the call. Or worse yet, tell the customer to call another customer service number.
A 360-degree view enables the contact center agent to increase customer satisfaction by bringing in relevant knowledge to make the interaction meaningful. A 360-degree view also enables agents to offer relevant products/services to customers, which significantly increases up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
While deploying technology could be an answer, it is important to realize that mindless deployment of technology alone will not help. Tweaking and streamlining the deployed technology and associated processes, keeping in mind the customer landscape, is critical for its success.
Do you think brand loyalties are getting adversely impacted by poor application of technology to respond to and serve customers, especially in the services industry?
Customers use the contact center for a variety of reasons – for information on products, multitude of transactions, and resolving issues. Each of these contact instances has a substantial influence on the perception of the brand. A popular research on consumer behavior states that 92% of customers form their opinion about a brand in just one interaction. Poor application of technology, poor service and poor resolution times are just some reasons why interactions with organizations do not go the way they should. When any of these interactions become meaningless to the customer owing to a fault in technology, process, or the human element (agent), the brand perception is negatively impacted. And, in such a highly commoditized market as ours, it does not take much time for the customer to make a brand switch.
Most companies put huge resources on acquiring customers rather than retaining them through quick, efficient service. Your comments?
It is a proven fact that repeat business drives profitability. It costs less to retain your current customers than it does to acquire new ones. Good customer service coupled with a good customer retention program will work to convert those occasional customers into ’loyal customers’ who spend more money on a more frequent basis. Yet, as you mention, organizations fail to work on retention programs because, in their mind, the sale is over and the opportunity to further engage is slim. In cases like these, the focus unfortunately is very short-term.
The other reason that drives organizations to invest resources on acquiring customers is the obsession with numbers. A new customer is seen as an additional number in the excel sheet, as opposed to an existing number. And it is this syndrome that inhibits organizations from enhancing service to existing customers and retaining them.
What do you think are the inhibitors in migrating to a full IP-based solution?
There are three major constraints that enterprises need to overcome before migrating to a completely IP based solution (for CIM). One, legacy solutions have tight integration with business applications and in the short run pose a maintenance challenge. Two, security issues relating to enterprise applications in a single converged network act as an inhibitor to full-scale addition. And three, given the distributed nature of solution components, ROI is achieved only on large-scale deployment (in a single-site or distributed multi-site telephony environment) in a reasonable time frame. For smaller single-site deployments, out-of-the-box IP contact center solution is still evolving.
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