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.

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 vendors to remain competitive.

Sandeep Sharma, managing director, South Asia, NICE, explains, "The industry has been witnessing changes both in the interactions journey taken by consumers and technology landscape of contact centers. 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 right business and operating models, governance, and capabilities. Driven by real-time cross-channel analytics, the company provides solutions for increasing revenues, enhancing customer experience, improving regulatory compliance, and optimizing contact centers and back-office operations."

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.

Wilson Chin, VP-marketing-APAC, Verint, comments, "The use of social media as an important new channel to monitor within the voice of customer 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."

Levis Wilson, COO, astTECS, agrees, "The contact center context, social media becomes a customer collaboration platform for monitoring conversations and interacting publicly with consumers. Social media monitoring platforms allow an organization to track and respond to conversations/views that are exchanged about the brand and not just customer-service questions."

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.

The 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, Telsima, Altitude Software, 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 efforts to understand mobile social media as channel and their impact on costs and profitability while managing customer experience.

Development

The 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.

Johnson Varkey, director-contact center sales, Avaya India & SAARC, asserts, "The focus on contact centers has moved to various other parameters like first call resolution (FCR), integrated computer telephony (CTI), and dynamic or personalized IVR services leading to better customer experience. Organizations are trying to turn call centers into profit centers through better cross-sell and up-sell opportunities for an inbound customer call. Companies are looking to run contact centers in a distributed fashion allowing multiple points of presence across diverse geographies, thus enabling a local flavor for a more intimate customer interaction."

DJ Dutta, country head-India & South Africa, Altitude Software, adds, "The ability to execute business strategies in real time and deliver maximum value in a wider range of operational situations can be dramatically increased in the contact center business with the right investment in strategic operational areas.  Informed decisions with real-time insights, unified social media interactions, multimedia workflow, and intelligent campaigns are the four key areas in the contact center business that can deliver higher returns from future technology investments."

"Mobile and Web including email, chat, and social media are driving technology innovation around contact centers. Customers expect to receive similar experiences irrespective of the medium. It is very important that businesses capture all such information from across different platforms and provide this to agents, helping them serve customers faster and better," maintains Vinay Nair, product manager, BT Contact, Asia Pacific.

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 the organization and 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.

Rajeev Soni, country manager, Aspect-India and Middle East, elaborates, "As the number of channels and online forums 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."

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 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 centers 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 current trends. The availability of information on the web and the ease of use of self-service are customer service aspects that have gained significant improvement in India. Most organizations are not yet aligning 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 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.

Subir Bhatnagar, VP and global head-solutions, AGC Networks Ltd., agrees, "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."

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 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. Solution 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.

This article is based on the research conducted by Communications Today in May, 2012.