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30 minute interview
“IPCC will enable Indian call centres to remain competitive”
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Mary Dunlop
Vice-President
Business Development & Strategy
Enterprise Applications
Avaya
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How is an IP contact centre better than a traditional call
centre?
VoIP has been widely deployed all over the world. An IP contact centre (IPCC)
offers software that unifies all critical applications so that return on investment
from every call centre can be achieved quickly. Our message to contact centres
in India is that developing IP infrastructure is going to be critical in achieving
their goals, enhancing services, reducing costs and managing their network.
One of the important elements of an IP contact centre is management reporting.
This is the process of analysing data that helps an organisation in knowing
the type of service a call centre agent provides on issues such as the duration
of the call and the time it takes to answer it. These are important and critical
measurements.
Since traditional call centres are not based on an IT-centric architecture,
the call centre is fragmented and integration with other systems is not easy.
But with IP infrastructure, a number of applications can be integrated enabling
seamless communication. Other advantages of IPCC are continuity, efficiency
and cost reduction. Above all, there are no security issues. IP infrastructure
helps integrate back offices with processes, and allows the segmentation of
customers based on identity and requirement. Based on data, connect the customer
to the best-skilled agent wherever he or she is around the world.
What is IPCC’s potential in India?
India has a number of success stories in outsourcing. We are keen on understanding
how the Indian market will progress over time. We see call centres in India
focussing on improving customer service and increasing agent productivity. In
the future, we will see customers looking at driving their businesses more proactively
and using a contact centre in a multi-channel way to increase revenue and reduce
cost.
The number of call centres in India is increasing rapidly. It will be easier
for call centres to have common software applications running across the IP
infrastructure. IPCC will enable Indian call centres to remain competitive.
The biggest advantage of IPCC to Indian call centres is that it offers cost-reduction.
The challenge before us is whether we can sustain this cost benefit in the long-term
in such a competitive environment. Cost cutting is definitely a critical aspect
when devising strategy.
The SMBs are a key segment. It is one of the fastest-growing markets for IPCC.
Recently, Avaya launched the Contact Centre Express for this segment. The software
has all the functions that one is looking for in a sophisticated contact centre.
And, most importantly, it is priced keeping in mind their budget constraints.
The BFSI segment has been aggressive in adopting the contact centre concept.
The financial segment is the leader in contact centre and best practices implementation.
What are the emerging trends in call centres?
Globally, a key element in a call centre is self-service, which means automating
the transaction without taking help of a human agent. The fastest-growing segment
in this area is speech recognition. For example, when you ship a packet and
ask for its status you should get a response automatically; automation can lead
to significant cost savings.
One of the key benefits of speech recognition is that it allows a high proportion
of customer requests to be handled without the intervention of an operator,
freeing up agents to focus more on complex queries and thus reducing the cost
of call-handling significantly. Asia-Pacific is an important market and, in
India, IP infrastructure will be the next important trend. They can address
all areas that are important to customers, be it management reporting, customer
service or agent performance.
What kind of services are customers demanding from contact
centres?
Customer expectation is the topmost concern. The type of services that enterprises
or businesses expect from contact centres are consistency and how customers
are treated. Part of our strategy is to focus on improving customer service
because this is the top priority among call centres in India.
When we spoke to customers and asked them about factors that
they are looking for in a satisfactory call, 66.7 percent cited ‘service
inadequacy’ of the agent as the number one problem. Human resource remains
another area of concern. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, 63.8 percent said
that meeting customer expectations and improving customer service are their
priority areas. We therefore take customer satisfaction as a challenge. Another
big challenge is to increase agent productivity and operational effectiveness.
| Avaya recently released the results of an Asia-Pacific
contact centre industry survey. It involved key decision-makers from approximately
1,050 contact centres across six countries including Australia and New Zealand
(ANZ), China, India, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. The analysis conducted
by Frost & Sullivan showed that Asia-Pacific customers assigned high
importance to an agent’s service and etiquette.
The study revealed that contact centres in the Asia-Pacific
have begun to recognise the advantages and benefits of deploying sophisticated
technologies. These include IP-based contact centre solutions, speech
recognition technology and multimedia applications. Centres are ready
to adopt them to help meet the demands for higher customer service levels.
The study was conducted to better understand technology adoption trends
and the challenges and issues faced by the contact centre industry.
Survey highlights
- About 65 percent of the decision-makers polled identified agent service
and etiquette as the key reason behind customer satisfaction, particularly
in Singapore (81.5 percent).
- Nearly 60 percent of respondents stated that improving customer service
within contact centres was their top priority. This pressure to improve
quality of service was particularly high in Japan (75.4 percent), India
(72.4 percent) and ANZ (73.1 percent).
- Increasing agent productivity was ranked as the second priority for
decision-makers in China, India and Korea, while increasing revenue
was ranked as the second priority for Japan, Singapore and ANZ.
- The study also identified a strong demand for multi-channel contact
centres in the Asia-Pacific. Over 80 percent of decision-makers see
an increase in demand for multi-channel contact centres as they are
equipped to handle voice, fax, e-mail, Voice-over-IP, instant messaging,
video and SMS transactions.
- Among the new contact media, e-mail ranked as the most popular across
all six markets surveyed, but more predominantly in India (68.6 percent),
Singapore (62 percent) and ANZ (60.4 percent).
- Nearly 40 percent of the decision-makers polled are exploring the
adoption of advanced IP contact centre solutions as their next technology
investment. Cost reduction (38.8 percent) and easier network management
(33.6 percent) were identified as the top two perceived benefits for
implementing an IP-based contact centre.
- Over 10 percent of Asia-Pacific decision-makers identified speech
recognition as the next technology investment, with ANZ (18.6 percent)
and India (16.8 percent) showing higher interest.
(Source: avaya.com)
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— Megha Banduni
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