Technology Gets Efficient at ICICI OneSource : Raju Venkatraman

Interview Questions

Full Interview with Raju Venkatraman

Raju Venkatraman:

It has worked wonders. On the floor, it gives us the ability to provide total redundancy to a call. Signal drops in the middle of calls are not a problem and we are able to recover immediately without losing the customer midway.

As we add new centers, bandwidth redundancy is being built in and a significant amount of planning has been done to tackle traffic. We believe that we have the best-in-class technologies that will give us an edge over the competition. During customer audits, it is a good endorsement for me, as head of operations, to hear clients say, "Wow, we don't have these kinds of facilities in the US."

How much customer traction have you gained from this?

In addition to VoIP, we have excellent data management technologies in place. We also have a strong workflow management software, reporting structures for managing individual work units, a productivity and quality tracker - our proprietary product - which sits on top of our customer platforms, and even customer middleware. These technologies allow us to perform parallel tasks in certain cases, sequentially manage workflow and move work units around whenever we engage in provisioning work for customers. Provisioning work often arises when we get orders from US clients or clients in healthcare, where it is very important not to miss even a single call order. Here, real-time inventory tracking and control for each unit of work helps us.

On the voice side, we are achieving accent neutralization for our call center trainees through voice recognition applications.

 

Raju Venkatraman:

It is. But at least we can now concentrate on the keywords in a conversation. Vendors will have even greater play in fine-tuning and coming up with better versions of accent neutralization software. Character recognition on the data side and voice recognition capabilities on the voice side, for example, are still inadequate.

Voice recognition is a powerful tool with strong implications in training and accent neutralization where we can differentiate ourselves further.

 

Raju Venkatraman:

The most important one is a statistical tool we have built, in which we take an agent's call - maybe two or four calls per week depending on the agent and his tenure - and rate them against different parameters as good, bad or ugly. Statistical models can be generated based on a call lasting a couple of minutes, and the need for higher training, voice modulation deficiencies, gaps in systems knowledge, etcetera, can be pointed out. Often, a banking or telecom client's CRM or transaction systems are used for voice services, and we are able to use this to analyse an agent's performance using the Pareto chart and Six Sigma.

Constant monitoring is possible through our Business Process Management System (BPMS) created last year. BPMS has a dashboard, quality and productivity metrics and other analytical tools which help us work on our weak areas. Actual acquistion of data and ensuring that reports are running and readily accessible are a CIO's responsibility.

 

Raju Venkatraman:

We are continuously empowering internal IT staff to help our customers. Network uptime is not an issue with us, but, at an operational level, we need to have high uptime for applications on the client's side. We now have reverse SLAs placed on our customers in which we tell them to guarantee 99.95 percent uptime on their applications, while we guarantee network uptime.

Other challenges are when upgrades happen or new versions are introduced. Since clients don't do maintenance over the weekend, we have to get our testing right and control how their different software versions and security layers are integrated into our infrastructure.

 

Raju Venkatraman:

We have a long way to go on speech recognition. IVR depends on the kind of work we are asked to do. Our IVR is often managed by our customers in the US or UK. But as we move towards managing particular clients 100 percent, we will have to come up with ideas on increasing the number of IVR calls, and even manage the client's IVR systems. Our Six Sigma staff's involvement will be crucial as IVR usage increases, especially when many customers want problems resolved on the first call.

We are seeing a first-call resolution rate of 62 percent, which is much higher than the industry average. We use a lot of tools to understand what our agents do while fielding 7 lakh calls a month.

 

Raju Venkatraman:

Business has always driven technology by pushing the envelope with new challenges. I feel technology will always find a way to solve a business problem, no matter how long it takes. I have been in this industry for 22 years. And, when we started using many imaging technologies, for example, we did not even know how to send a 500KB or a 2MB image, because compression or TCP/IP did not exist. We often came up with proprietary ideas and such problems were solved with time.

With SOX, the pressure on CIOs will be very high; but they will no doubt deliver on these demands.

 

Raju Venkatraman:

Fortunately, we are already five years old, so our core technology spends aren't huge. But, in the kind of high-capacity expansion mode we are in, our IT spend is higher than most others. Looking ahead, we will be seeing more and more investments in voice recognition technologies on a per server/seat level.

On the technology side alone, we should see IT spends increasing by 10 percent to 12 percent on a per seat basis. An increase of 25 percent wouldn't be viable.

 

Raju Venkatraman:

The real challenges will lie more in the area of data processing for voice and non-voice, where our capabilities will increase with demand. For example, we will need more specialized voice processing applications to help us measure agent turnover against the onshore-offshore blend of services we provide.

As for non-voice revenues, over 50 percent of our business is now non-voice based. New challenges on this front relate to image processing, forms recognition, symbol recognition and pattern technology among others, which are all very CPU-intensive. Right now, we are carrying out these functions higher up in our architecture, but will do it at the client level soon. I see processing capabilities going up and the prices of core CPUs falling. Yet, there is room for us to justify a 10 percent to 12 percent increase in per seat IT spend if it will achieve better quality and productivity.

 

Raju Venkatraman:

The board and CEO realized that we couldn't adopt a fishing net strategy by just building capacity. The team was good and the market was right, as was our timing in taking on that market with key differentiators.

The acquisition of RevIT, a Chennai-based transaction processing company, brought in new domain capabilities like workflow imaging and processing capabilities. We tried to increase the transaction-based pricing component of our voice work over the last one-and-a-half years or so. We acquired a collections company which gave us domain capabilities in areas across the BFSI vertical. This kind of work, though voice-based, is not billed on a per-hour-per-seat basis, but on transaction quality. The idea was to be able to guarantee the output and charge the customer on quality of output, not on effort involved.

Our recent partnership with Metavante for payments and mortgage processing represents a strong technology play for us. While the BFSI segment continues to see client-specific growth - with each client bringing in his own platform - Metavante will provide us intermediary platforms to bring in our process excellence differentiators. The client should see a net reduction in their overall costs; it's not just pure labor arbitrage.

 

Raju Venkatraman:

When RevIT was acquired, it was a question of getting both systems to run the same way. With Metavante, the challenge lies in integrating the core components of our IT infrastructure with their platforms, and our IT staff has been doing a great job here.

Questions abound, like how do we provide content-centric security for one class of users as opposed to another? How do we align data compression rates and tools used in both companies? Or, how do we get platforms and standards to integrate and process data under a similar framework? There is a difference in the level of integration of data and voice security, which has been addressed by a mature IT team. They have also dealt with platform, tools, data, security, voice layers and switch/router integration challenges.

We have a technology workshop created whenever an acquisition is done or a new client is signed up where we sort out various integration challenges and design tailor made strategies. Apps migration is a very tough handshake. Once the integration plan is laid out, both sides can create a win-win situation while consolidating our IT resources.

On the call center side, the idea is to make agents listen to their own calls from Day one. We actually play back calls from our extensive call libraries which categorize and differentiate between good and bad calls. Besides accent neutralization training, there is also the question of how an agent can comprehend a query asked in 20 different ways and zero-in on what the customer really wants. In this way, the systems help agents and help develop rigor and discipline.