Page 40 - AIMA : Foundation Day Souvenir

services activities outside of their organisation. Simultaneously, the outsourced companies also started moving up the value chain and gained expertise in the domains, through which they were able to expand the service lines and take on more complex calls. This outsourcing was restricted to onsite, though, because of issues with diction, accent, culture, security, etc. So, while this strategy helped reduce the costs for the organisations to some extent, the full benefit was not being realised because of the continued high cost of onsite call centers. With the advancement of IT and ITES as well as technologies such as VOIP, this was also addressed gradually through ‘near shoring’ whereby call centers in nearby countries that had somewhat similar cultures could provide the same quality of service at a much-reduced
cost. With continued cost pressure, there was a need to further optimize the customer service costs. Hence, apart from call centers (which is a completely synchronous channel), non-voice contact channels started getting precedence as an alternate lower-cost alternative. Initially, non-voice was serviced through channels that were completely asynchronous like through posts and emails, but gradually we saw a proliferation of semi-synchronous channels emerging in this space, which included chats, SMS texting, social media like Facebook, Twitter, etc., and more recently Business WhatsApp. Along with this, a very important channel of service was emerging which has now become the mainstay of customer service which is self- service. By exposing many of the processes to end customers that were typically available to agents only for which these customers had to call or mail these contact centers, power to view and in many cases add/modify/delete capability to these databases was placed in the hands of the customers. Of course, proper checks and balances were imposed to maintain the sanctity and security of the data. So, earlier, for a duplicate bill, customers perhaps would have to write or call, today the customer has to just go into his MyAccount portal or mobile app and be able to download the bill in a fraction of a second. To get a refund, a customer would have to call to find out the status; today the entire workflow is made visible to the customer on his My Account page with perhaps, periodic updates on SMS or WhatsApp.
A parallel theme that was also playing out was automation in its various manifestations. So while contact centers were moving from normal IVR to dynamic IVR, voice IVR, visual IVR, etc. along with technologies such as biometric voice authentication, the call center agents were being aided with technologies such as RPA which allowed capital-light non- invasive integration of disparate applications which were required to service customers more efficiently. Mash up composite screens to display data from various applications, copying data into various applications automatically instead of individually copy-pasting them, automating repetitive tasks by co-bots while agents attended the next call, suggesting
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