Computers Today, May 1-15, 1999, Telecom; The Query Router

Corporate business houses are cottoning on to the fact that the sure way of luring and retaining customers is by providing personalised, real-time and cost-effective service via call centres.

Picture this. You want to buy a product or get details regarding some service. You call up the company concerned but the lines are busy. After much time and effort, the call finally gets through and is answered by a receptionist, who listens to your query and forwards the call to a specific person. The process can get tedious if you are unable to contact the person at first go.

Every year, many organisations lose business worth crores of rupees owing to poor call handling and unsatisfactory customer services. Not many realise that as the business grows, so do the incoming calls. The receptionist using the conventional PBX systems finds it difficult to cope with the rising tide of calls and customer enquiries. Quite natural that the courtesy level slips. On the flip side, organisations also need to make many outbound calls to keep in touch with their customers and provide customised service accordingly. How does one manage all that? Which is why call centres come into play.

In lay lexicon, a call centre is a facility which handles large volume of inbound and outbound telephone calls. They are manned by 'agents'-individuals who act as ambassadors of an organisation. The nature of calls could be varying: customer service, sales, marketing or technical support. Call centres liaise between companies and customers. Besides providing basic information and answering different queries, they are effective tools for real-time marketing and market intelligence gathering. Which means, you can call anytime-most call centres work round the clock-and be rest assured of getting across the right person without the endless wait.

Indian Call Rollers

Tata Telecom Ltd, a joint venture between Tata Group and Lucent Technologies, is a leading call centre solutions provider in India. According to Nalin Malhotra, general manager, marketing, "India holds great potential for call centres-both in the internal and global market. Indian organisations are becoming aware of the benefits offered by call centres. Typically, a call centre costs comprises 5-10 percent equipment, 20-25 percent networking, 10 percent over head expenses and about 50-55 percent personnel expenses. Thanks to its cheap labour, India has an edge over other nations." Tata Telecom's customers include GE Capital, Bank of America and Citibank.

Delhi-based Nirvana India Pvt Ltd also offers comprehensive call centre solutions. Typically, they focus on organisations that outsource their call centers. Their range of services include both inbound call management for product/ services support as well as outbound calls for lead management, tele-sales and customer care services. Nirvana's clients include Motorola, DHL, Mobilink, Indian Railways and the Indian Space Research Organisation, among others. Chennai-based Serviont Global Solutions Pvt Ltd specialises in a wide range of CTI/IVR/call centre solutions. The company has tie-ups with global leaders such as Lucent Technologies, Dialogic Corp, Microsoft and Novell. According to Sanjeev Nimbudiri, "The future holds great promise for call centres solutions, both for the proprietary systems as provided by Lucent and open systems as provided by their company." Serviont's clients include Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Kotak Mahindra Financial Servicesn and Southern Railways.

Mumbai-based Avhan Enterprises provides a comprehensive range of services including call flow analysis, voice and data call transfer, integration to interactive voice response, PBX, inbound and outbound agent consolidation.

Call centres aim at increasing customer revenues and satisfaction, closing more sales and losing fewer calls to "hang-ups". They distribute inbound calls directly among agents, and also give preferential treatment to specific customers. Depending on the company size and nature of business, call centres may be manned by as few as ten agents to as many as 5,000.

Businesses such as banks, insurance, travel and entertainment that receive a lot of calls or depend heavily on telemarketing benefit the most from call centres. According to a recent report by Frost & Sullivan (F&S), automatic call distribution (ACD) systems, a key part of call centres (see box), are taking off into big time. The call centre industry worldwide is already dialling a turnover of $800 billion.

Globally, organisations, irrespective of their nature of business, are focussing on call centres to provide consistent service to their customers, across international boundaries. Take a look at Thomas Cook Group. The London-based travel and financial services company that supplies over 30 percent of the world's travellers cheques outside of the US, has consolidated its different call centres into a single "Global Refund Centre" in England. To facilitate different customer needs, the centre operates in 24 languages. In case a caller speaks an unsupported language, the company uses an AT&T's three-way call, for simultaneous interpretation service. At the other end of the spectrum are organisations such as Hewlett-Packard Co. that are setting up new call centres and linking them all. Currently, the firm has over 34 call centres in 31 countries. It uses an intranet-based system called K-Mine that facilitates real time communication between response centre engineers, third-party engineers and customers. With thousands of "solution" documents and user notes, HP customers are not likely go away disappointed.

Similarly US-based asset-tracking software firm TSW International Inc. has 904 worldwide customers/call centres in Singapore, Australia, Paris, London and Atlanta. The Web-based call system called "Care Net", handles customer support, sales and marketing and a help desk feature. Customers can log on to TSW's home page and they key in their particular queries. The call centre staffers can reply electronically or call the customer directly. Call centres also play a critical role in customer service at Xerox Corp. Customers can call a toll-free number to report their problems and or request any particular service. The company banks on Aspect Telecommunications' automatic call distributor (ACD) systems and Prospect Call Insight CTI server software to provide a hassle-free service to its customers.

The auto industry is also exploiting call centres to further its corporate goals and retain customers. Mercedes-Benz has combined call centre and Internet technology to provide value added service to its customers-both potential and existing. Thanks to the "teleweb" technology based on AT&T Corp.'s Instant Answer software, people can talk directly to representatives in the 45-agent call centre while navigating the luxury car manufacturer's Web site.

In India too, firms are deploying call centres to improve customer service. American Express, Bank of America, Citibank, ABN AMRO, Global Trust and Deutsche Bank 'connect' to their customers to keep their edge on the competition. According to Sujit Mittra, head, public affairs & communications, American Express, "Thanks to bottlenecks posed by the telecom authority and no toll free 1-800 numbers, companies in India have to set up different call centres in different cities. This in itself negates the concept of call centres and doesn't make any business economic sense." But call centres, he says, are effective tools to measure and quantify the efficiency of customer service.

The telecom sector is not far behind. Airtel has a swank round-the-clock call centre in Delhi. The centre, set up three and half years ago, has about 35 at a given time and takes care of all the 1,30,000 Airtel subscribers. On an average, the call centre receives 8,000 calls which can go up to even 15,000 on certain days. Most queries are related to billing or the different packages. According to the company spokesperson, "For better functioning, Airtel has categorised its call centre into three core groups-inbound (the general hotline number for all subscribers); caretouch (premium hotline number for major clients) and outbound (for those queries that are not settled online). Airtel uses it call centre to retain its customers by keeping a check their general usage method. For example, if a subscriber hasn't used the service for long, agents call to check if "everything is OK".

The increasing competition in the Internet market is rubbing off on the call centre industry. R.P. Bhel, general manager, call centres, Bharti BT, comments, "The technology is the same-anyone can buy it. Similarly anyone can lower the price. There are very few differentiators, and as I see it, call centres providing efficient round the clock customer services are one of them." Bharti BT Internet Ltd plans to have around 24 live agents in their call centre. Bhel comments proudly that theirs is the first authorised national call centre. This means calls from Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi would all divert automatically to one hotline number in their Delhi-based call centre. The call centre would have complete details about the different dealers and distributors. If, for instance, you are calling from Dadar in Mumbai, the call agent can, in a couple of seconds, identify the closest dealer/distributor whom you can contact regarding your problem. If the problem is not rectified immediately-the company targets to satisfy 90 percent of the queries online.

Bharti BT Internet is using Lucent Technologies call centre solutions. Even small details like recorded message and music played while call on hold are given importance. The firm has selected graduates from premier computer institutes for their call centre and are given extensive training, both technical and behavioural. It has invested about Rs 50 lakh-barring the office space, interiors, manpower training or employee incentives!

The hospitality sector is plumping for the concept. The Taj Group of Hotels has a sophisticated interactive guest service and messaging systems in its hotels in Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi and Bangalore. So does the Oberoi Group in its hotels in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore.

The public sector too is realising the potential. The Southern Railways has implemented a multi-lingual (English, Hindi, Tamil/Kannada/Malayam) accommodation and reservation service that can be accessed over the phone. Likewise, Air India has a flight arrival/departure system available for their customers at Mumbai Sahar Airport. Maruti Udyog has also installed an auto attendant/voice messaging system at its Gurgaon office for better call handling, productivity and efficiency.

To think of a call centre's traditional role as a group of people who answer calls in a dingy basement room is old fashioned. Today's call centres operate in a sophisticated and plush environment. In the near future, firms are likely to manage complete transaction-right from a person's first call to the firm to the delivery of product and service-under one platform. Another emerging trend is multimedia call handling, similar to videoconferencing and virtual call centres-wherein agents operate from their homes and are dispersed geographically.

Call centres of tomorrow will synergise technology, business and people. Reducing call waiting or unnecessary routing will be one part of the story. The real part will make sure that the business does not make losses and the customer is always satisfied.

Call Components

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD): Basically, the ACD processes all inbound telephone calls on a first come, first served basis. The system answers each call immediately and, if need be, holds it in a queue till the time an agent is available. When an agent becomes free, he/she services the first caller in the queue. A system can configured to offer different kinds of treatment to different callers. For example, people calling long distance can be given priority handling. Or calls from customers placing orders can be taken before than those seeking technical support. By providing sequencing and uniform distribution of incoming calls among multiple agents in a call centre, ACDs offer offer time/labour savings and enhance productivity.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR): IVR applications support the automated retrieval of stored data. For example, when you call up any multinational bank or private firm, you hear a pre-stored message saying " Press 1 for this or Press 2 for that". IVR applications range from the basic inquiry to the most sophisticated speech recognition applications as used in telebanking.

Computer Telephony (CTI): CTI is one of the most common feature of call centre environments. They can either be a simple screen pop, a sophisticated call control algorithm that can search for the last agent that spoke to the caller, or a predictive dialling solution that doubles the efficiency of outbound calling. With a simple click of a mouse, a call center agent can quickly move between a customer profile, product information, customer history, order entry, fulfillment request, template cover letters and quote entry, among other fields.

Web Integration: The integration of Web technology in call centres offers personalised, time and cost effective customer service. Organisations can either have a call back button on their Web page whereby a call is automatically made to the customer or have a seamless addition of voice over IP to the web application.

SQL Reporting Systems: Different reporting applications are used to optimise the use of different communications platforms. Depending upon your firm's specifications, you can go in for simple proprietary tools or advanced tools that blend information from multiple communications and information systems platforms.

Workflow Management Tools: Coordinating telephony applications with information systems applications, workflow management tools assist call centre supervisors to script and manage employee activity. For example, which is the best agent for handling a particular type of calls.