Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Prem Uppaluru, Co-Founder, CEO and President of Transera (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Are the Hadoop clusters customer-specific?

Prem Uppaluru: The database can be shared across multiple tenants.

SM: So it is a multi-tenant Hadoop cluster?

PU: Absolutely.

SM: Where do you see interesting open problems in the industry? If you created another company today, where would you go?

PU: I would go outside of the contact center market because I have been there for a while. The real opportunity in terms of contact centers is making them data driven. There is a lot happening in the world of the web, which has become the place where companies engage with their customers.

Those lessons can flow into the contact center, and the contact center should become more of an integral component of the way businesses deal with customers as opposed to the current setup, where they are very much silos that operate independently of the online world. When I bought a 50-inch plasma TV last Christmas, I did research on multiple sites. Ultimately, I bought a TV from Best Buy. I spent a fair amount of time on the Best Buy website. Then I went to a Best Buy retail store to see the picture and to compare LCD versus LED versus plasma, and then made the purchase. Then I made a call to the call center – I had questions about shipping. My engagement during the purchase required a number of interactions with Best Buy. That engagement looked like a series of disconnected interactions to Best Buy.

I think that is where we really see the value, which is in creating an end-to-end view for businesses that is customer-centric as opposed to process-centric. Today most of the businesses operate in a process-centric mode. They set up a process by which a customer can engage with them, that process generates some data, and they get some reports on the interactions which are efficiency oriented, cost oriented, and operation oriented – they are not customer oriented. To really measure my experience and my satisfaction with the entire engagement, Best Buy would need to know how my experience was on their website, how productive my store visit was, and ultimately if the service was there for me after the order. Did I get 24 hours’ notice before shipment to ensure somebody would be at home? Did somebody show up and deliver the TV to me within the four-hour window they had promised? That is the entire engagement. No one is cracking that engagement right now. I think that is the real opportunity for new entrepreneurs, which is to start very data-driven views that start giving the customer engagements. If I go back to Best Buy to buy a DVD, that is also part of my journey with Best Buy. That is a series of engagement.

SM: What you are saying is that today, the way data is captured and organized, is in functional areas. It is in sales, customer service, and marketing, but the organization is not really set up to look at the data in a holistic fashion, such as “the customer is the center of the universe”?

PU: Exactly.

SM: Do you have any other thoughts?

PU: We have the vision I described. Clearly we are not going to be able to apply it to every sector, but we do want to do it for all contact center systems and a few of the upstream and downstream silos – at least to start integrating and providing an engagement view with our customer engagement analytics suite.

SM: It is not clear to me that the problem you are trying to solve and the place you are trying to solve it from will give you the full reach.

PU: I don’t think there is anybody in that position right now. But we are in a position of significant in-depth knowledge about the way contact center systems operate. That is what we are focusing on.

SM: Thank you, Prem.

PU: Thank you, Sramana.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Prem Uppaluru, Co-Founder, CEO and President of Transera
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