CIOIN

Let’s admit it: customer service in our country sucks. How many times have you torn you’re hair out speaking to an agent on the phone after having painstakingly repeated all your information to three agents before him? Well, help is at hand.

Imagine a world where you could get all your queries and issues sorted out by an imaginary friend. Non-intrusive, doesn’t ask silly questions and knows exactly what you want. Technology advancements in the field of business intelligence is helping some of those come true.

From the innovation labs of 24/7, comes the latest BI suite of solutions called PX solutions that attempts to use predictive analytics; it helps you predict a customers’ requirement and buying behavior through his/her past behavior on the web.

 We see predictive analytics all around today. When you type something on Google, it starts throwing up options of what one might be likely to search for. Social networking sites too use predictive analytics to suggest people whom they might want to connect with.

“Most of the customer interactions today continue to happen on the voice channel, but that’s not how customers are seeking information. Today, internet has become the preferred data point for customers," explains Ravi Garikipati, chief technology officer, 24/7 Customer. Garikipati, who also heads to innovation labs, had noticed that most of existing the web based interaction would tend be intrusive and ineffective.

The web offers answers to browsers through non-interactive text heavy FAQs. But there are inefficiency that exist on the web that require a self service platform.

You’re best bet of finding a self service platform on the web today would be to find an automated chat service (usually in the garb of an attractive Caucasian female) who’d direct you to a voice agent after a few failed attempts at understanding what you need.

“Most of the offerings from our competitors don’t have any information on the customer, apart from perhaps the time he has spent on their website. This is not sufficient to offer a high-class web-based interaction. We saw a huge opportunity there and decided to do something different," he says.

 The PX Solution

 The PX stack offers solutions for customer service and sales. The solution can throw up predictive analytics about a web browser based on his pre-domain data, web journey and web behavior.

 “The basic objective was to build a strong analytics platform that interfaces with our clients customers in a proactive yet non-intrusive fashion for two objectives: to resolve customer issues faster and for cross selling and up selling products," says Garikipati.

The predictive analytics are based on the rich set of data of customer’s online behavior. For an authenticated (registered) users, these include his purchases in the past, his card related information, his buying and surfing pattern. But what happens to first time visitors?

“We can get a lot of valuable insight even from a non authenticated user. We have access to his geographic location, his pre-domain details (before he landed on your site), what key words he used to land your site, time spent on various sections etc…” explains Garikipati.

But not all customers are alike and Garikipati respects that. “We understand that not all customers would like to interact through chat. That’s why we have developed the capability of channel prediction. Based on the users previous interactions, and compared to other interactions facing similar issues, we predict whether the customer would like to be serviced through an automated chat, through a human chat agent or through a voice agent," says Garikipati.

Whatever be the channel, all agents have prior customer data right at hand before the customer interacts with him.

The solution also offers the option of smart routing. “If a high value customer is facing some issue, we don’t take chances and immediately put him to our best agent,” he explains.

The same analytic can now be used business to boost sales. “The analytic will also predict which customer might be interested in buying what and use this intelligence to cross sell or up-sell their products, “says Garikipati.

 The solution also offers an automatic reporting platform that reports in hindsight on the performance of the customer service agents with suggestions for performance improvement. The same reporting tool can be used to indicate important sales insight, combining demographics, web behavior and buying patterns of customers.

Challenges of Integration

Challenges of Integration

 Integration with third part software has also been a huge challenge for CIOs. “We’ve worked extensively to reduce the time and effort required to integrate PX with the parent website. PX can be integrated by a simple java script snippet that can be tagged in the customer’s website," explains Garikipati.  For pre-authenticated space all solution is done on 24/7's platform delivered by SAAS hosted in the cloud.  However, for authenticated users, the company will have to build some adapter to be able to link with their existing legacy CRM web data.

Having a self-service portal is fast becoming a requirement for enterprises. Garikipati states the experience of an airline company that faced huge increase in call volume post the volcanic ash spew. “When an unforeseen disaster strikes, businesses witness an insurmountable rise in call volumes. At that time it is not possible to augment your backend folks to service all those customers. Self service portals will be able to resolve most, if not all, of these issues at the portal level. And since it is hosted out of our cloud, on a SaaS model scalability is not an issue, “assures Garikipati.

Send feedback to varsha_chidambaram@cio.in.