Domestic Demand Pushes the Contact Center Market in India: Verint India MD

The contact center market in India continues to grow because of escalating domestic demand for customer care, increasing drive towards self-service and emphasizing on improving quality of customer experience, says Anil Chawla, MD Verint in an interaction with Dataquest. Chawla also throws light on how Verint is trying to enhance its customer experience portfolio.

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Organisations do focus on Customer Experience as a business imperative with technology as an optional layer for actionable intelligence. However, what can be done to align these efforts with business awareness to get the desired results?

Initially, many organisations viewed the provision of a customer support service as just a cost and made efforts to keep investment in this area at minimal levels. However, with growing customer choice & demands, this philosophy of perceiving customer support service as a cost centre comes at a price as consumers no longer tolerate poor service levels, long wait times or un-empowered agents. Organisations that invest in customer service and engagement as a strategic imperative see great returns through increased Lifetime Value (LTV), reduced customer churn and higher levels of referral. Additionally, by embracing the engagement philosophy internally, these organisations are also seeing improvements in agent retention and satisfaction, which in turn can lead to even greater levels of customer satisfaction.

What is the announcement about Verint and Forrester to Deliver Unprecedented Actionable Intelligence for Customer Experience (CX) Leaders? In what ways is it going to help customers?

Forrester’s CX Index platform is designed to provide businesses with a deep and actionable understanding of the quality of their customers’ experiences, competitive benchmark data, and the ability to model which CX improvements will have the biggest impact on revenue.

Verint Enterprise Feedback Management helps empower CX teams to listen, analyse, and act on structured and unstructured customer feedback captured through targeted and personalised surveys.

Working together, these solutions can provide organisations with an integrated approach to CX management. They can gain a deeper understanding of the quality of the experience their organisation delivers to its customers as compared to industry peers — and take action to enhance their position by improving processes and service quality. It’s a smart approach that can provide metrics to help better gauge customer experience quality, the competitive landscape, and what to improve in the organisation’s CX program to drive incremental revenue.

Verint is also featured in the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant in both 2016 and 2015 for CRM Customer Engagement Centre, How can customers interpret this?

As well as the featuring in the Gartner Magic Quadrants, Verint is also acknowledged as an industry leader by Frost & Sullivan, Forrester, Ventana and DMG. The recognition of Verint by all these independent analyst firms underlines the achievements and capabilities of our company to help organisations dramatically improve their customer engagement throughout our long history.

What is your roadmap for India? How do you see the contact centre market?

The contact center market in India continues to grow because of escalating domestic demand for customer care, increasing drive towards self-service and emphasizing on improving quality of customer experience.

Indian contact center industry has gone through a notable transformation over the last 3-4 years. We will see the impact of all the combined forces coming to fore - technology advancements, integration of multiple communication channels, the power of analytics and the social media puzzle. Contact centers are becoming more strategic part of an organization rather than just being seen as a 'call center'. The main idea behind is to attract and retain customers by offering them the right type of experience; irrespective of the communication channel being used. The emergence of non-voice channels and automated technologies have taken customer care interactions to another level and the expectations have never been this high.

We expect banks, telecom, travel, Ecommerce and hospitality as well as public sectors as prime verticals that provide impetus to the growth of contact center In India. We are focused on providing them with best in class Customer Engagement Solutions that will help Organisations to serve customers in this evolving market.

Since contact centres are planning a movement from multi-channel to omnichannel, how does Verint plan to capitalize on this movement?

Verint has been a leader in this space for over 20 years and is proud to support thousands of customers across the globe. Our offerings are continually evolving to meet, and in many cases lead, the needs of the industry. Biometric Verification, Employee Desktop, Knowledge Management, Robotic Process Automation and of course our broad analytics suite are all examples of recent innovations designed to further enhance the ability of organisations to serve the customer in the evolving engagement environment.

While most contact centre solution providers boast of omnichannel, in truth they only talk about multi-channel. Would you agree? 

I would prefer to talk about ‘best channel’ – what is the most appropriate channel for a customer to use at any given time? Whilst organizations can try and influence the way that customers engage with them, experience shows that different circumstances can result in different channels being utilised. In fact, Verint recently conducted a significant global research program, including 2,000 submissions from India, and it showed that whilst customers are happy to utilise digital channels for simple queries, there is a strong preference to engage via the telephone or face-to-face as the query becomes more complex. It is therefore vital that consistent information, in the form of Knowledge Management, and business processes are available across all the channels. Too often, individual channels are served by separate technology deployments and this can lead to duplication, out-of-date information, a lack of contact history and a very poor customer experience.