HDFC Bank was among the first few private sector banks to have introduced technology as the key differentiator to service customers. Starting with Phone Banking solutions for customers, HDFC Bank today services its customers from 13 Contact Centers spread across India.

'Now with 79% of all the customers calls terminating on the IVR, call load of agents at our Call Center has reduced significantly. This has not only reduced cost and increased productivity, it has also made agents available for more critical functions,' said Mr. C. N. Ram, Head - IT, HDFC Bank.

'Servion has been HDFC Bank's vendor of choice for Contact Center products and solutions for the last 6 years, successfully deploying world-class technology solutions for the bank in the Contact Center arena' he added.

"Owing to a decade of global experience in the Customer Interaction domain and with more than 300 customers across the globe, Servion has devised a generic model called the Contact Optimization Model that helps map customer contact and suggests ways and means of optimizing and enhancing the same,' said Mr. K Balakrishnan, MD and CEO, Servion Global Solutions Ltd.

He added, "We believe that every time a customer gets in touch with an organization, (the company has a unique opportunity to bond with the customer and deliver a great experience. Delivering great customer experience through customer interaction management technology and processes in fact lies at the heart of the organization's CRM practice. Over 70% of customers in a recent survey stated that they rated the experience they had when they called the organization the key determinant of brand perception."

The Contact Optimization Model
Customer interaction today has become multi-channel and a customer can reach an organization through various touch points - phone, fax, e-mail, web (Touch Points). And customers, as a rule, contact organizations only for 3 reasons - to seek information, to conduct a transaction or to lodge a complaint (Sessions). Depending on the type of interaction, a set of business rules, workflows and process definitions come into play to satisfy that requirement (Business layer). These rules and processes are integrated to a data layer for information retrieval, updation or notification (Data layer). Each of these layers can (or need not) be enabled by technology that together, results in a customer experience.

Servion helps analyze, define and optimize contact at each stage of this customer interaction and helps enhance customer experience. This is a consultative approach and generates an in-depth analysis that can help organizations assess if they are indeed optimizing contact at each level / stage mentioned above. This entire process is called Contact Optimization.

Contact Optimization works on three principles and delivers three key benefits:

• Cost reduction
• Increase revenue
• Customer satisfaction