Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Prem Uppaluru, Co-Founder, CEO and President of Transera (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So the key value proposition is call routing.

Prem Uppaluru: Call routing and matching the callers with the right agents to deliver highest value transactions.

SM: What kind of heuristics are involved in the case of Office Depot? What is the notion of “right caller for the right agent”? Can you give us an example?

PU: Typically contact centers at a high level to enable the consumer to call for sales, service, or support. At some level, as the calls come in, you have to distinguish the route calls based on call type. Then there is customer type. There may be a customer that is high value and you have that knowledge based on the lifetime value of that customer, so you can route calls from high-value customers to high-performing agent to ensure better customer service and experience. There are also multiple channels. Customers may have a preference to call or to visit a website and be directed from the website to a contact center. This provides seamless connectivity from online to offline.

SM: Let’s do another use case.

PU: While Office Depot represents a very large enterprise at a global workforce, the real value we are providing to them is that before they were routing calls when they came in – I call it the hot potato game – they had to make an instantaneous decision about who to assign the call to because customers loathe waiting, particularly to place orders. Their customer call has to be connected to an agent in the most efficient fashion while lowering the cost of service by getting that call to an agent that is working out of India or the Philippines to get the right cost structure.

That is a challenge – keeping the customer experience high and the cost structure low. Before they were sending calls to a fixed location across different call centers, but they had no idea about the staffing levels of those call centers. Often calls would go and fit in the queues to call centers that were poorly staffed. The call centers experienced a high level of abandonment – that means lost orders. By centralizing the queue, we were able to hold on to the calls until an agent who was capable of providing the service became available. No matter where the agent was, we were able to pick the agent and connect the call to that agent efficiently. This dramatically lowered the percentage of calls that were getting abandoned. That justified the purchase of our software.

SM: Is there a vast difference in where calls are being handled and the level of the customer experience.

PU: The way it gets done today is in an ad hoc way. All agents, regardless of whether they are in the Philippines or in India, are delivering the same level of satisfactory service. That is hard to measure, which leads to the whole idea of analytics – start measuring at a granular level the way a contact center is performing from a customer perspective, not simply from a company cost perspective.

SM: Are you routing at the individual agent level? Let’s assume there is a contact center in Manila that has 10 really hotshot agents, and the rest are average. Are you able to route high-value customers to those 10 agents who can do cost optimized but high-quality interaction, or are you talking about just Manila at the national level?

PU: We do both, based on the customer’s choice and the level at which they want to measure the performance of the agents. If they are measuring performance of vendors, we route them to vendors. If they are measuring the performance of teams, we route at team level. If they are measuring the performance of agents, we route at the agent level.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Prem Uppaluru, Co-Founder, CEO and President of Transera
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