Organizations are expected to move forward in the next phase in 2012 to seriously integrate social media channels as part of their multichannel strategy to leverage this as a powerful self-service mechanism and a platform for proactive real-time engagement with customers.

The industry continues to evolve as it responds to changes in global business environment, economic pressures, new technologies, increased competition, and customer behavior. Contact center technology, as well as the dynamics of delivering quality service, is changing at a rapid pace. The accelerated adoption of cloud-based solutions, the incorporation of new media types into the multichannel mix, the impact of smartphones and mobile tablets, the need to accurately capture the voice of the customer, and new methods of measuring agent effectiveness are being leveraged by the vendors to remain competitive.

The social customer has sent customer-facing organizations worldwide into a frenzy of new initiatives to try to restore balance to transactions. Society is changing not only with changing customer service, but also with expectations for service delivery. The advent of a social customer concocted by mixing a vociferous customer with social channels has made matters far worse. Social customers are no longer ready to put up with bad service or lack of insight of any organization, thanks to the aggregate power of online communities.

The next phase in end-to-end customer experience management is based on an evolution that is well underway in contact center infrastructure from voice-centric contact centers to the addition of multimedia contacts and now to fully integrated, context-based customer experience management. This transformation requires enterprises to fully adapt to changes in customer demographics, interaction types and evolve to offer consistent, satisfying interactions across multiple channels - voice, e-mail, IM, video, and social networks. Moving to a customer experience management approach requires an infrastructure that is open, scalable, and capable of bringing together state-of-the-art multimedia contact handling and integration with enterprise applications, fully preserving customer context.

Combined with sophisticated reporting and analytics, this infrastructure has enabled enterprises to deliver differentiated customer experience across all forms of contact and social media.

Market Dynamics

India continues to be a high-growth region for the contact center industry. Year 2011 was the year for consolidation of growth momentum around technology investment aligning with customer acquisition theme.

Contact center applications market may be segmented into inbound systems, such as automatic call distributor (ACD) and call monitoring, outbound systems, computer telephony integration (CTI), speech technology, interactive voice response (IVR), workforce management, and multimedia systems.

The Indian contact center solutions market is projected to reach `1218.72 crore by 2017. The major players in the market are Avaya, Cisco, Verint Systems, Aspect Software, Genesys, NICE, Siemens, and Alcatel-Lucent. Players such as NEC, Nuance, AGC Networks, Ericsson, AstTECS Communications, Telsima, Altitude, Intel, Parsec, ININ, Egain, and Holly also have a presence in the contact center solutions market.

The agenda of vendors has been to grow faster, acquire more customers, and gain sustainable competitive advantage. Enterprises upped investment in the areas of capacity expansion to self-services; leveraged performance optimization suites and analytics; explored cloud-based platform and services; and initiated effort to understand mobile social media as channel and their impact on costs and profitability while managing customer experience.

Session initiation protocol (SIP), in conjunction with open, standards-compliant services-oriented architecture (SOA) and web services, is a critical enabler of architecture, providing complementary and more capable methods of integrating communications, information, and processes. Leveraging SIP architecture enables a simpler, cost-effective, flexible, and scalable model for application, context, and multimedia communication integration across the enterprise. A SIP-enabled endpoint provides a range of information about presence, availability, and the types of media available that the contact center can use to select appropriate treatment.

Web services interfaces can seamlessly access data within other enterprise systems, or deposit information into systems. As web services interfaces are fairly ubiquitous on enterprise applications and knowledge-base tools, this paradigm can be used to integrate all these systems into multimedia dialogs and agent interfaces that are used to interact with customers.

In addition, the standards-based approach to contact center integration encourages the development of an ecosystem of third-party application developers who can provide unique value by building web services interfaces to leverage their applications in the contact center.

Development

Dramatically changing communication landscape, driven primarily by the evolving behavior of younger generation, has propelled enterprises to rethink their customer strategy and evolve. Customers still value speed, accuracy, and ease of use, but they include a few elements like the convenience of performing ever-more-complex transactions on the go, personalized service at every instance, and seamless movement among various channels with a consistent experience at each as pre-requisites of a quality customer experience.

Traditional contact centers are evolving to become customer management centers, and transforming them has become a strategic part of the organization rather than treating them as cost centers.

Trends to Watch

With soaring customer expectations, entire organization's commitment in engaging with customers and enhancing their experience will be the norm. Unified communication tools have been helping organizations leverage larger enterprise workforce as part of the customer service process. Adoption of optimization tools such as workforce management and performance tools in the back office coupled with workflow management applications bodes well for efficient contact centers.

The power of analytics is fast transforming contact centers as a strategic part of the organization. In the connected era of competitive business environment, it is critical to understand customer behavior to drive revenue growth, build experience, and improve operations and margins. The key focus in 2012 is likely to be in stitching different forms of analytics across the organization to leverage newfound actionable insights possibly in real time to make smarter decisions throughout organization and enhance customer experience.

Considering very high percentage of young users who have preference for self-service, organizations are anticipated to enhance their options for such channels. Further investment is probably to be on web with mobile self-service going beyond traditional interactive voice response. Application of real-time analytics across channels will improve resolution rates, which in turn enhance customer experience.

Increasingly connected customer base expects switches across customer service channels both physical and digital based on their convenience and expects communications thread to maintain the context and offer the same level of personalization across. India saw good investment toward establishing multichannels in 2011.

With smartphone and mobile broadband penetration going through the roof, mobile services may have a great potential to be the primary customer service channel. Organizations will have to invest on such devices to make their virtual presence optimized for access. In 2012, many larger organizations are expected to go one step further in launching mobile applications empowering customers with choices including escalation to web chat and voice to interact with customer service agents.

Surging Internet-connected mobile devices with video capability are also anticipated to make organizations think how they can leverage video for customer service. Video content complementing other resources or direct agent-to-customer video interactions are suitable to receive wider acceptance in 2012 before becoming mainstream.

UC applications such as presence, instant messaging (IM), and conferencing are to be deployed increasingly in the contact center in order to extend into back office and make a larger knowledgebase available for customer service. Realizing obvious benefits, such integration efforts are expected to gain further steam in 2012, especially in the advanced markets in the region.

Contact centers have started to explore how cloud can help them operate more efficiently and complement their premise-based offerings. Flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits augur well for cloud contact center and set up good base for adoption in 2012. More solution vendors will offer applications in the cloud and offer customers with choices suiting their business needs and scale at that time.

Challenges

With the seismic shift observed in the market, the challenge lies in how organizations respond proactively to the current trends. The availability of information on the web and the ease of use of self-service are the aspects of customer service that have gained significant improvement in India. Most organizations are not yet aligning the different types of interactions they have with customers to get a single view of the voice of the customer and the customer's interaction journey across multiple contact channels.

The ability to capture, analyze, and act holistically upon all forms of interactions from the web to the contact center is poised to become a key differentiating factor.

Customer centricity has been gaining tremendous momentum in the market. The ability to have a single view of client interactions is driving customer data management, bringing together the disciplines of business intelligence, customer analytics, customer relationship management and customer data integration to drive demand for targeted business solutions and real-time impact and analytics applications.

New models of IT delivery such as cloud computing, utility processing, and off shoring necessitate new strategies to address data privacy and data integrity issues. It has become imperative for enterprises to keep costs under tight control to maintain competitiveness. Retailers are expected to move toward lowering operating costs, optimizing existing infrastructure, and achieving strategic application development. Adoption of multi-channel retail management systems while focusing on the voice of the customer has been deemed necessary to maximize cost efficiency.

Future Outlook

A huge shift in customer service is underway, brought about by changing demographics, new technologies, new forms of communication and interaction, and social media networks. To meet customer expectations and mitigate customer satisfaction risks, organizations need to focus on how to evolve their customer service infrastructure and manage customer satisfaction expectations. Achieving the goal of delivering true context-based experience management across any media requires an open, scalable infrastructure that brings together disparate and disconnected databases, business processes, and communication channels. Companies that can effectively shift their focus to address the new realities of customer service experience management will win the game and lead their market.

Organizations are expected to move ahead in the next phase in 2012 to seriously integrate social media channels as part of their multichannel strategy to leverage this as a powerful self-service mechanism and a platform for proactive real-time engagement with customers. Solutions vendors are expected to play the advisor role in such initiatives of organizations when best practices become more pronounced.

In a nut-shell, contact centers are likely to enhance self-service not limiting to just integrated voice response but also on web and mobile self-service. They also invest in social media applications, implement multichannel service for customer engagement, and leverage analytics to truly live up to be a strategic part of the organization.

Minhaj Zia
Director-Collaboration,
Cisco India & SAARC

The contact center space has undergone a transformational change during the past couple of years. According to a February 2012 Frost and Sullivan report, 2011 has been a year of experimentation in this space and APAC organizations are likely to move ahead to the next phase in 2012 to seriously integrate social media channels as part of their multi-channel strategy. The change has largely been driven by changing customer demographics, increased technological development, and broadband penetration. Organizations are integrating multiple platforms to engage customers and enhance their experience.  According to Frost & Sullivan, multi-channel communication including mail, chat, and SMS has gained preference over voice.

In India, pure vanilla voice interactions are on a gradual decline; however, this has been offset by the fact that the non-voice/mode model is gaining traction. Almost all new requests for proposals (RFP) include a request for non-voice components and this in turn is propelling growth in this space. At this stage, most companies are looking to invest in a scalable framework to increase productivity.

From a vendor's standpoint, Cisco has enhanced its unified contact center (UCC) platform, which initially comprised voice, e-mail, web chat, and video to include products such as social miner. Social miner helps a company track social networking sites, and enables them to filter by topics of interest and apply business logic to monitor and send relevant conversations to agents in the form of social networking messages or e-mails. Cisco also offers a virtualized call center solution that combines VDI with UCC.

Rajeev Soni
Country General Manager,
Aspect India, South Asia and Middle East

The nature of customer service and support is changing as consumer 2.0 demands more from the companies they do business with. They not only expect higher levels of service, but also expect companies to accommodate their channels of choice, control conversations and interactions with service providers, provide seamless interaction across multiple channels, and resolve issues in real-time. A bad experience on any of these fronts is likely to result in the customer moving to a different company. Companies are inundated with a myriad of these unstructured interactions as they work to engage this audience in today's digital world.

As the number of channels and online forums (Facebook, Twitter, and others) continue to mushroom at lightning speed, these are beyond the contact center's control and organizations have recognized that multi-channel customer contact is not an option anymore; it has become a necessity. Phone calls might still rule, but the alternatives to real-time voice are too significant and high to ignore. The challenge is to ensure a consistent level of service and provide information and meet expectations across all of them.

The contact center must have systems and processes in place for each channel to respond in a consistent and acceptable timeframe. Without a coordinated and consistent approach, organizations run the risk of waiting too long to respond - in effect, putting the customer on hold for days. These kinds of interactions have the potential to do lasting damage to customer relationships.

For companies that have invested in a unified platform, it is important to strategize with social media as these platforms are designed to handle all types of interactions. Aspect has developed products that allow companies to integrate channels effortlessly into the contact center.

Businesses that continually put the customer first are those that manage to successfully command consumer attention in the crowded marketplace, and are rewarded with long-term customer loyalty.

On key challenges

The slow economic recovery with lack of capital and tight credit is making many businesses especially outsourcers reluctant to spend heavily who are unwilling to take risks on expensive capital spending. Price has become the only differentiating factor.

Wilson Chin
VP, Marketing APAC,
Verint Systems

Contact centers play a central role listening to the voice of the customer (VOC), as consumers continue to have voice conversations and send e-mails to customer service centers. The use of social media is an important new channel to monitor within the VOC framework, but it should be prioritized and weighted against the established channels of voice and text/email.

Social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter are valuable channels to listen to the sentiments of the consumer, as they change from day-to-day or even hour-to-hour. But the voice conversations and emails currently handled by contact center operations are even more insightful and valuable if these data sources are analyzed using speech and text analytics into actionable intelligence.

They are more valuable as consumers have to make an extra effort to make a telephone call or write an email versus using a smartphone or tablet to post a social media comment. People post all the time on social media channels, but they only contact customer service when they have a more important positive or negative feedback. Thus, their feedback and analyzing customer feedback over a larger data set through analytical tools, such as Verint's VOC solutions, allows contact centers to provide valuable insight to companies to take intelligent actions.

On key challenges

The contact center solution providers are facing challenges to offer advanced services and solutions to differentiate themselves on the market, and to upsell from the commoditized call recording business.

Offering analytical services that provide insight into what consumers are saying, i.e., VOC analytics (speech and text), provides value to enterprises in adjusting their sales, marketing, and customer service programs. As the contact center industry matures, it is critical for contact center solution providers to make available superior analytics services that give their enterprise customers valuable insight to perform intelligent actions.

On opportunities

India has been and will continue to be a key market for Verint. The company continues to invest in India to maintain its market leadership position. Verint sees tremendous opportunity in VOC solutions as companies leverage technology to better understand what their customers are saying, in order to drive intelligent actions into their operating strategies. VOC analytics will help customers grow revenues as they understand better the customer needs and concerns as well as improve the customer service experience.

Sandeep Sharma
Managing Director,
South Asia, NICE

The interactions dynamics between organizations and individual consumers have changed drastically over the last few years. The B2C communications landscape is not only voice but also email, chat, web, social media channels for communications between consumers and business. This brings new demands where businesses have to aggregate the interactions through multiple channels to understand the true customer intent. The intent-based solution is positioned for growth as organizations around the globe are awakening to a need to invest in cross-channel platforms that will enable them to draw greater and real-time consumer insights. Contact centers are also a cornerstone for customer satisfaction and loyalty. This channel affords an organization with the opportunity to strengthen its relationship with a consumer, identify and mitigate churn-risk, and improve up-sell results. To effectively seize these opportunities, contact centers must be equipped with a holistic customer profile that comprises information regarding the customer's interaction journey - spanning all assisted and self-service channels.

On investment plans for 2012-13

The company continues to be an active player in the areas of transportation, critical facilities, utilities, airports, ports, and city surveillance for security solutions. In the enterprise space, banks, insurance, trading floors, telcos, BPOs, airlines, utilities, logistics, and hospitality also continue to show strong demand for NICE solutions. Indian economy is expected to experience continuous healthy and steady growth at an average 8.7 percent a year through 2012-15. Naturally, NICE India is well positioned to capitalize on this wave of infrastructure upgrade growth. The company has transited from targeting the contact center to provide enterprise-wide solutions covering the contact center, branch, and back offices.

On future outlook

The industry has been witnessing changes both in the interactions journey taken by consumers and technology landscape of contact centers. Enterprises in India are committed to better customer experiences based on results showing significant improvement in all aspects of customer service. Consumers cite the availability of information on the web and the ease of use of self-service as the most improved aspects of customer service in the country.

With the seismic shift observed in the market, the challenge lies in how businesses respond proactively to these trends. For a strong growth position, businesses need a strong and strategic partner who is able to leverage on the trends observed with the right business and operating models, governance, and capabilities. Driven by real-time cross-channel analytics, the company provides solutions for increasing revenue, enhancing customer experience, improving regulatory compliance, and optimizing contact centers and back-office operations.

Subir Bhatnagar
VP and Global Head-Solutions,
AGC Networks Ltd.

With competition ever increasing for businesses and price wars being waged, companies have realized that customer experience is the direct indication of customer loyalty. Hence, customer experience has become the focus of many companies' contact centers. This may be achieved through a multitude of ways from servicing multiple channels such as web, email, and chat, or empowering the agents through computer telephony integration with customer relationship management systems.

Customers are a lot more technology savvy and comfortable using alternate methods of communication. They also expect a similar and uniform brand experience across various channels of communication. This is forcing contact centers to have a relook at their voice strategy, and extend it to encompass multimedia channels as well.

The ever-growing pressure on IT managers to reduce the cost of operations has been forcing a lot of companies to explore new and alternate ways to reduce costs. This would include consolidation of various infrastructures, employing emerging technologies such as SIP, and starting offshore operations in relatively less expensive geographies.

Contact centers have been in constant evolution. It started as people taking calls but changes in unified communications have forced the industry to upgrade and align itself with the changing environment a customer operates in. Social media has been revolutionizing the way interaction in a peer and C2B environment used to happen. Organizations are trying to ensure that they adopt the commonly used platforms before their customers do. They hire specialized manpower who understands the dynamism of these platforms; social media has today become a part of their customer care and customer engagement strategy.