In last few years we have seen drastic adoption of innovative technology by Indian companies to perform well in so competitive world. By adopting right solutions at right time always helps companies in growing well without any major technology barrier. Organisations across all verticals are investing heavily to enhance customer experience by deploying best solutions. ClearTouch, one of the leading player in tech market, has brough many innovative solutions to enhance call centre process for the companies. To know more about the company, Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, DT interacted with Mr. Uthaman Bakthikrishnan, Executive Vice President, ClearTouch. Read below the excerpt from the recent discussion.
DT: What are ClearTouch’s product offerings?
Uthaman: Our product offerings are very diverse. For the past 5 years, we’ve been the only company in India to provide a pure and managed cloud contact center platform with free customization. We provide an omni-channel experience to the enterprises, helping the organisations get one view of their customers irrespective of the cannels they use to reach them. Our call center softwares like Inbound and Outbound solutions helps in routing the customer queries based on their skills, time, and location. Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) ensures that the calls are routed to the right agents with the right skills and helps manage queues effectively. We also provide data and digital services such as List Management- which essentially acts as a central data repository and helps the enterprises to handle all the customer touchpoints and interact with the data gathered in real-time ensuring greater visibility into the call center. Team Management tools like Workforce Management and Optimization which ensures that when the demand spikes, the call center has right support in place while simultaneously training, coaching, mentoring and rewarding the agents to enhance their productivity, and for adhering to Service level Agreements (SLA) with the end customers. Business Intelligence tools like Voice Analytics which helps in revealing deep business insights that are hidden inside every customer interaction by converting the mass call recordings into structured data and real-time insights, thereby facilitating informed customer service decisions which then helps in gathering real-time insights. Our close-knit (tight) integration with CRM platforms like Salesforce, Lead Squared, and Zoho helps in boosting agent productivity; and the seamless integrations with other best-of-breed IT solutions like Servicenow and Zendesk makes the agent performance efficient.
DT: What are the key trends dominating the Indian cloud contact center ecosystem?
Uthaman: In the past two years, agents have migrated to remote work in significant numbers, making cloud platforms more critical than ever. This led to the emergence of various trends in this space: like the rise of omni-channel, virtual assistants to handle the increasing customer requests during the pandemic-led lockdown. And as these new realities collide, it’s fascinating to speculate on what’s next in the evolution of contact center technologies. There is a surge in hyper-personalization, which essentially combines real-time customer data with AI to generate insights that can be usefully enhanced by enterprises. Another key trend is the adoption of tools like Conversational AI- which helps in automating a large portion of query resolution, especially for common issues and FAQs refers to the use of AI-powered chatbots and voicebots. The mainstreamization of Contact Center as a Service (CCaas) is a trend we’re already witnessing this year post Gartner recognized CCAAS as an essential technology segment for enterprises with its addition of the technology into its Magic Quadrant program. There’s also an imminent trend of evolving our good old software like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and getting so much more out of them by just embedding these to other contact centre solutions to enhance their efficiency. For example IVR turning into intelligent bots and evolving from traditional menu systems/algorithms into smart ‘voicebots’ which are capable of handling complex customer queries. These trends are expected to accelerate in the coming years.
DT: How does ClearTouch support Indian businesses to thrive in the digital era?
Uthaman: ClearTouch is a subsidiary of TCN, Inc., a global contact center technology provider. We established our presence in India 5 years ago, and since then we have grown at a CAGR of 100% year-on-year. We support more than 1500+ enterprise customers around the globe and helped migrate more than 25000 agents in India across vertices to our cloud platform. We've been expanding to meet the ever-increasing demand of the diverse industries we serve for them to thrive in this digital era. For example, one of our banking service customers used our voice analytics to sift through thousands of recorded calls to identify frequently asked questions. This aided them in establishing a self-service platform, and they used our solution to raise red flags by identifying words and phrases based on user-defined lists. We also help businesses set up the entire retail omnichannel customer experience platform within 48 hours, post which the agents could access the data from anywhere and at any time, using any device.
DT: Please tell about the role of voice analytics in contact centers and customer experience?
Uthaman: The way in which voice analytics impacts contact center performance and enhances customer experiences are:
Enhancing quality analysis: Only 2 % of the recorded calls get analysed in call centers- that too, only when there is a burning issue like compliance or disputes. However, the ignorance of 97% of conversations leads to a poor understanding of the customers. The use of AI Voice analytics enables the review of each and every conversation which then leads to a deeper understanding of the customer’s and agent’s behaviours and sentiments, leading to greater transparency and efficiency.
Uncovering insights: ClearTouch’s Voice analytics tools help reveal deep business insights that are hidden inside every customer interaction. This deeper analysis of each and every conversation leaders to generation of highly valuable insights about customers such as preferences, demographics, sentiments, and brand perception.
Real-time analysis leads to better revenue generation on live calls: On live calls, if the customer seems to be satisfied with the support and warms up to the idea of purchasing additional products or services, real-time AI analytics systems can make recommendations to the agents to cross-sell or up-sell products, pitch for a plan upgrade or add-on products and services.
Voice Analytics also aids in reducing the cost of callbacks as a result of improved first-call resolution (FCR) rates, alongside helping in avoiding penalty fines and damages by maintaining compliance with data records and reducing the call volumes by identifying typical call issues and customizing self-service options to provide a solution.
Voice analytics systems have proved to be very useful in analysing conversations and finding out the causes of lower sales conversions or poorer CX scores. It may be a newer technology, but there is no denying its importance.
DT: What sales model do you have currently? Please share your current sales or channel strength in Indian market.
Uthaman: We reach out to our customers directly. We have our offices in Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, and New Delhi. Our business development team interacts with our customers directly to understand the challenges and propose a solution to improve customer experience. We have started onboarding Channel partners to reach out to our prospective customers as an additional avenue. We have strong channel presence in Southern Part, and we are now expanding to other parts of India. We are looking to on board channel partners in all major cities by mid of next year and to the Tier 2 cites by the end of 2023.
