BPO Rankings: 15 | vCustomer: If Customer is King

Even as the voice/non-voice debate made many of the large
customer service companies look at other services for "growth" and
"margins", vCustomer continued with its commitment to customer care.
It believes that the "services" component in what is today the top
favorite of BPO companiestransaction processingwill continue to get
diluted and get fully automated. Customer care, on the other hand, means caring
for your customer, and that can never be done without some service elements.

That does not mean that it is afraid of automation; in fact,
automation is the core differentiation strategy of vCustomer. While traditional
call centers have played on the IVR to make them more and more intelligent,
vCustomer has now significantly invested in what it calls the next wavevoice
portals based on voice recognition. At the same time, more customer service is
happening on the Web, and self-service is emerging as a fast growing
opportunity. vCustomer has now created solutions that integrate these two.

More disruptive, however, is its bundled solutions (developed
in-house) and services approach. A customer signing up for that would not have
to pay for licenses for packaged software, and can get that at one-tenth of what
he paid for licenses. By doing so the company has thrown an open challenge to
solutions vendors. It is just few steps ahead of what other BPOs call the
platform approach.

It has also taken the consulting path to understand and create
customer care solutions for clients specific needs. That is possible because
it is focused on two industriestechnology/telecom and retailthat it
believes will provide significant services opportunity for a long time. Most of
its clients like MCI, HP, Cisco, Netgear, Linksys, FingerHut, and Target are
from these two verticals. It is trying to develop hospitality expertise too.

In India, vCustomer maintains a low profile. But, despite that,
it has scored high on employee satisfaction surveys such as DQ-IDC Best
Employers survey.

vCustomer, like most customer services firms, is excited about
Indias domestic opportunity and has already got a few clients in the consumer
and insurance industries. DQ