Dataquest, May 31, 2007

What are the products you are launching in the retail segment?
Servion’s offerings are not restricted to software products alone, but encompass a gamut of solutions and services as well. We take a consulting led approach to optimizing customer interactions for our client organizations. And with customer interaction management (CIM) challenges varying across verticals and organizations, we engage multiple solutions available in the contact space to provide optimal results including interactive voice response and speech, computer telephony integration, outbound interaction management (telemarketing), multimedia notification, quality monitoring, and work force optimization solutions. This suite of solutions will enable organizations to provide a differentiated interaction experience to the end consumer.

What are the trends being witnessed in CIM?
The major trends can broadly be divided into two categories – strategic trends and technology trends. The strategic trends include using personalized customer service as a differentiator. Another significant strategic trend has been the shift towards enabling multiple communication channels in the contact center. The technology trends include adoption of enterprise chat on the company website through which customers can chat with the sales and service teams, and growing importance of knowledge management tools. Other technology breakthoroughs are session initiation protocol (SIP) and presence.

What are the challenges in this space
Today with more choices than ever, customers are demanding experiences that are meaningful to them. When a customer’s service is interrupted, they expect the service provider to not only know that they have been affected and to identify the cause of the impact, but also to resolve the problem as quickly as possible, while keeping them appraised of the situation. Service providers also recognize the need to move towards customer centricity.
However, providing a unified service across different customer segments definitely has a retarding impact on overall profitability of the company. Most companies have approximately 20% highly profitable and another 20% unprofitable customers. While it is easy to work out strategies for the top and bottom customer segments, it is the middle 60% that organizations struggle with – customers who cannot be ignored, but who are hard to serve in a profitable manner.