The Financial Express, May 5, 2007

Servion Global Solutions, a global end-to-end consulting services provider, plans to provide customer interaction management (CIM) services to the retail, hospitality and stock broking verticals in India.

At present, 95% of the company’s CIM business in India comes from banking and financial and telecom verticals.

According to a Frost and Sullivan survey, the Indian CIM market is growing at 34% every year and is the fastest growing in the world, said G Shankaran Nair, senior vice-president, head – Middle East, Servion. The company is among the early entrants to offer CIM services to these growing verticals, which constitute about 35% to 45% of the global CIM market, he added.

Servion already services global companies in the three verticals and the Indian attempt will be an extension of the services, Nair said.

Apart from BFSI and telecom, hospitality, retail and stock brokerage are the three industries where there is maximum customer closeness to vendors.

There are no channels between the consumer and the vendor and hence the need for customer interaction devices is high. Hence, number of consumer queries on a daily basis is much higher compared to other industries, he said.

“Deploying humans to handle customer queries is the most expensive means. Our research shows that while about Rs. 8 is spent on an employee per transaction, an interactive voice response (IVR) system does the same job at about 15 paise per interaction at minimum response time. About 60% of consumer queries handled by humans at present can be routed to automated systems for maximum productivity,” he said.

The company has developed CIM solutions in two major hotels and is in the final stages of closing deal with a stock brokerage firm, he said.