Two companies—that improved their customer experience and brought in more operational efficiencies with a contact center solution—talk about how they did it
By Harshal Kallyanpur
Among the customers were Asian Paints and the online retail store Naaptol.com, which spoke to Express Computer about their respective deployment experiences.
Asian Paints initially did not have a contact center in place. The company supplies its products to its dealers, who in turn sell it to the end customer. These dealers call Asian paints to place an order. In the traditional scenario, they were calling around 150-odd sales offices in different parts of the country wherein each of the sales office had a telephony system to handle these calls.
However, the experience was not too great because the dealers could call only during office hours. “The people taking these calls were personnel stationed at godowns or depots and therefore did not have the right service mindset and so the dealer’s interaction experience was not very good,” explains Deepak Bhosale, Chief Manager – IT, Asian Paints.
To overcome this problem, the company decided to set up a contact center operation, provide a toll-free number for the dealer to call and have a service oriented workforce that could handle the calls from these dealers.
In the case of Naaptol.com, the company already had an inbound contact center in place to take orders. However, the company noticed that 10 to 12 percent of these calls would drop as a lot of its customers would call from the mobile phones to place an order.
Also, a very important part in the company’s address taking system is the PIN code number. “Around 30 to 45 percent of the time, the customer is not aware of his own PIN code number. We would ask them to check the PIN code on the electricity bill or telephone bill. Since the call was on a paid line, the customer would tell us that he is hanging up and ask to call him back in a short while. This call-back would never happen because there was no facility for the same agent to call back the customer,” explains Bishnoi.
It was these challenges that prompted Naaptol to look at a solution wherein it could enable the agent to handle both inbound and outbound calls.
Choosing the right solution
It was around 2009 when Asian Paints started searching for a contact center solution. As a part of its evaluation process, the company looked at solutions from Avaya, Aspect and Genesys. It carried out several pilots and felt that Aspect was pretty flexible in terms of setting up a pilot and working with Asian Paints to determine the right solution for its environment and therefore, chose to go with Aspect’s solutions.
Naaptol, too, evaluated a few vendors and on comparing the offerings from all of them, felt that Aspect gave all the features in a unified, single box kind of approach while with Genesys, it would need to integrate various components.
Both Naaptol and Asian Paints have adopted Aspect’s Unified IP 7.1 contact center solution.
For Asian Paints, phase one was just about having a centralized order taking system, wherein dealers could call in at almost any time of the day, and the call experience was standardized and personalized to ensure a better interaction experience for the dealer.
The contact center was integrated with the back-end system; therefore, each time a dealer called, all his information would be available to the service executive. The executive could then address the dealer by his name and update him on any past pending orders or handle a new request.
However, the company also provides end-to-end painting services to end customers wherein it starts from taking measurements in the house to recommending paint options. Once it signs on the customer, it has the contractor and color consultant coming in. The dealer then supplies the material and the house is painted followed with a warranty and feedback service. Asian Paints also gets in touch with the customer for his next painting cycle.
“All these interactions need a contact center solution that is completely aware of how the customer interaction happens. We therefore extended the contact center service to the rest of the ecosystem including all our partners such as contractors, interior designers and end customers who buy directly from us,” informs Bhosale.
Naaptol, on the other hand, sells through its website, newspapers and TV. For all three mediums, the company takes orders over the phone or on the website. To do so, it would need three teams for each of these media, working in silos. The best practices could never be exchanged among them. For the TV medium, the calls would come in a spurt. There would be a lot of time in the day when there would be no calls and then there would be a spurt of calls after the telecast.
Explains Bishnoi, “We were using 40 percent more agents when we had not deployed a unified contact center solution. We wanted to have a captive contact center wherein we could manage the KPIs and SLAs by ourselves.”
Naaptol has a center each in Noida and Hyderabad. Aspect’s solution is hosted in a Reliance data center and connected to the two locations through MPLS connectivity. According to Bishnoi, they were able to implement the solution in about six weeks and today the company is in the testing phase.
Improving experience, efficiency
According to Bishnoi, while Reliance hosts the solution, it is being run and managed by Naaptol. With the previous solution, the company tried working with the solution vendor to develop a workaround for call-backs, but it was not very efficient.
However, Aspect’s contact center solution, according to him, allows the agent to schedule a call-back at a specific millisecond. The dialer will not route any other call to that agent for that time. If the agent is logged out, or on a break, the call will go to the next best skilled agent available.
Also, prior to the implementation the customer would call on one number, only to find himself on the wrong extension. The company would then ask him to call on the correct number, which would often lead to him finding himself in a call queue, before he gets attended to by an agent.
“Earlier, we had two different teams, two different offices and even two different numbers for sales and complaints. By unifying the sales and complaint calls into a single number, we have been able to improve the customer experience a lot. We are able to take 20 percent more calls with 30 percent fewer agents. Our conversion rates have improved a lot,” informs Bishnoi.
Explaining the success that Asian Paints has found with the deployment, Bhosale says, “The implementation brought us a lot of benefits and gave us a three-year headway over competition, as the competition has only now started to realize the benefits of such a system and has started adopting similar approaches to manage a customer.”
Also, as the company has centralized all its communication, now if it wants to launch a product or a service, the contact center gets in touch with the dealers and informs them. Previously, someone had to manually go to their office, show them the updated information and then ask the branch head to call.
According to Bhosale, when the company started off with the implementation, it was an in-house effort. However, over time it realized that it had gained all the learnings that it could on running a contact center, and therefore decided to outsource it. While they have kept the Aspect solution deployment in-house, Asian Paints has outsourced the entire management to Genesis BPO for its three centers in Mumbai, Bangalore and Mohali.
Talking about the direct benefits of the solution for the company, he says, “We did a dealer satisfaction survey post-implementation and close to 85 percent of the dealers gave the service a very good rating.”
In terms of average call handling times, we have come down from 180 seconds to 120 seconds. However, we have not added more agents to the contact center. The same agent is able to scale and improve upon his abilities because the processes and technologies and interfaces have been kept simple. The agents can get in touch with the dealer or customer over phone or via SMS or e-mail,” adds Bhosale.
With social media becoming a favourite among customers to reach out to organizations or expressing their opinion about a brand, both the companies are now looking at strengthening their social media channels and integrating them with the overall contact center ecosystem.