May I Help You?

With rapid growth in the number of service providers and
increasing competition in the telecom industry, customer experience has emerged
as one of the most important differentiating factors for service providers in
increasing their subscriber base and brand loyalty.

The telecom industry no longer talks only about customer
care services. Rather, it is addressing the broader aspect of customer
experience. Service providers in India are investing heavily in improving their
customer experience as it largely impacts their brand identity. The conventional
customer care services are getting the much-needed makeover, enabling agents to
provide knowledge on a broader range of products and actively up-sell their
services.

As the term 'customer experience' gains popularity,
customer care services are taking a backseat. Recently, BSNL decided to
outsource its customer care requirements to private call centers. The telecom
giant has invited bids for setting up and managing its BPO operations that will
cover over 17 mn customers across four states in South India.

Service providers are focused on how to differentiate
themselves from others, target their market segment, and find better ways to
understand their customers-thus, ensuring customer satisfaction and enhancing
customer experience. The goal is to become the sole provider of all services to
an individual customer as a way to drive up brand loyalty and combat high churn
rate.

Pushpendra Mankad, senior VP, Comverse says, "Today,
consumers have access to many more services than before. The plethora of
services requires efficient management so as to cater to the unique needs of
customers."

The Indian telecommunications market is growing, so is the
competition. The hope for telcos is that this increasing competition brings with
it opportunities for revenue generation. Better customer experience is
accelerating a company not only in its smooth functioning but also in revenue
generation.

Sudha Jagadish, chief operating officer, Dax Networks
agrees, "Customer care plays an important role in an organization's ability to
generate income and revenue. Customer services are, undoubtedly, an integral
part of a company's customer value proposition."

Driving Factors

The other factors that are further driving service providers towards
enhancing their customer experience include:

Retention Tool: Some regulatory changes are likely to
happen soon that will affect the retention of customers, hence, forcing service
providers towards optimizing their customer services. For example, Trai has
warranted that mobile number portability will soon come into existence. With MNP,
one of the major exit barriers for subscribers to switch between operators would
be removed. Hence, better customer services would be of paramount importance.

Rural Customers: The challenges are immense in this
segment as customers have different languages, are differently enabled in terms
of education, culture and background, etc. If these challenges are met through
customer services, it will earn brownie points for telcos in tapping the rural
market.

Social Networking: Social networks have brought customers
closer to each other and made them more vocal about their choices. With easy
dissemination of information and opinions through social networking, an issue
gets escalated very quickly and can impact the brand image. Thus, operators have
to be more cautious in servicing their customers now.

Commoditization of Services: Multi-purpose devices that
combine voice, video, Internet access, content and applications that alter our
lifestyles are gaining popularity. This combination of services will require a
platform to disseminate information which can be done effectively through
customer care services.

Time for Innovation

Telcos have realized that having a knowledgeable, helpful representative is even
more important than speedy delivery of services.

Companies have been fast in innovating and developing new
modules for customer satisfaction. Some of the recent innovations in this area
include-web based customer services, online complaint redressal, interactive
voice response and speech recognition, outbound calling, proactive customer
services, and other customer contact innovations.The latest innovation has been
the introduction of automated speech recognition engines, which allow self-care
for discovery, provisioning, activation and de-activation of services. There is
also an increase in the use of multilingual automated (voice) portal.

Taking a closer look at some of these innovative steps,
One97 has deployed services like IVRs and customer care portals. These self-care
portals cut the customer's time waiting to interact with customer care
executives. Besides allowing access to self-care menus, and they also enable
automated subscription and deactivation services in real-time. Further newer
services such as recommendation engine, and automatic speech recognition (ASR)
based search engines are also being deployed.

Technologies such as automatic call distribution (ACD)
platform, super call routing, uniform call distribution, etc, ensure that
customers get connected to the right person with the right information as
quickly as possible.

NetXcel has deployed in bound dialers (IVRS) systems,
wherein customers can login and register their queries. It also runs exclusive
outbound dialers, wherein the operator communicates with its subscribers about
all its services on offer. Says Dr Debasis Chatterji, CEO, Netxcell, "Customer
care services are becoming more responsive and interactive with the help of
large-scale software deployment, as well as hardware integration."

Infosys has deployed proprietary technology, 'active desk'
that integrates information across multiple systems on to a single interface for
the customer care agent.

While Talisma has recently partnered with Ushacomm for
providing a unique solution that helps the service provider improve its top-line
by creating new offers for existing customers and also to reduce the cost of
acquisition of new subscribers. This solution is built on the capabilities
around business support system (BSS), customer relationship management (CRM),
and business intelligence (BI) and is named as TIB-X.

These apart, Comverse has pioneered the use of a single
data model for ordering, billing, and customer management data, as well as the
use of automated usage-driven notifications delivered directly to handsets to
make consumers better aware of promotions and account status.

Nuance Communications has started a speech recognition
service, wherein the caller doesn't have to wait for long, he gets the answer to
his query by just dialing the customer service number.

New offerings also include order to cash (O2C) being
offered as managed services by service providers. This service starts with the
acquisition to billing to service management being jointly offered as managed
services.

Customer-centric strategies will only lead to long-term
benefits and in establishing the brand name. The extraordinary usage of
different services demonstrates how customer's usage of mobile as a tool has
changed. Streamlining the various needs of the users, analyzing their behavior
will hold the key to customer satisfaction. And, with fierce competition among
the service providers, the customer care services are expected to get more
polished in the future.

Archana Singh

archanasi@cybermedia.co.in