Outsourcing: PV Kannan, CEO Of 24/7 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Yes, very good. I am going to start drilling down on a variety of points. In the course of the 11 years that you have been in business – and I think I got it right – you work only with B2C companies right? This is a B2C company.

PV Kannan: That is correct.

SM: A lot of things have happened. One of the big trends we are dealing with is at the top of my mind right now. I write a lot about trends in social CRM and customer support. [It] is a trend that is coming to dominate. We have a number of companies that are working on various aspects of this trend. One of them is working on the customer support, exactly the function you perform, and with companies that have very high volumes of people contacting contact centers. This could be for  level one customer support, level two customer support, or level three customer support. But what they are introducing is a level zero customer support by pulling in the export customers to field some of the customer support requirements.

PVK: What you are talking about is very popular in any technical product one buys. It is more relevant, and people are more comfortable. If I have a problem with my HP printer or my iPad or whatever, there is a culture of sharing the problem and finding answers. Companies like Jive and bunch of other companies are helping to solve that problem, where the community comes together and stays ahead of the companies that  provide the technology. These communities are where we see that trend being relevant, but if you look at most of the questions that are asked of large B2C companies that are not necessarily selling a technical product, it tends to something like, Hey I bought this product, and I want something added on. So, I want to upgrade my subscription plan. I want to change my house address. I am a cable customer moving. I need to change. These are problems where the community really cannot do anything.

SM: That is right.

PVK: The company can’t do it, yes? So, we have two by two but what are the types of issues? If you are a client, can you use social media to answer such questions?  If you are a bank figuring out a mortgage product, [social media] can play a big role and can help you find to someone like you who has gone through the same mortgage problems and share some experience with you? Or help you to optimize it.

SM: We are constantly dealing with such questions. My favorite example is wireless route configuration routers, I have to say, they are not meant for consumers today.

PVK: That is exactly right.

SM: I can’t imagine how consumers deal with wireless.

PVK: I totally agree. I think it is a good example, and I have friends who work in Cisco, and they tell us about the horror stories of how many people call just to figure that right out.

SM: I guess the question is really, How is the increasing use of social media impacting your business?

PVK: Yes, social trend. As I said, we help our clients to understand what is being said about them in the social media. We have a free website where we mine a lot of streams and then in an update, we will be adding blogs and forums and stuff like that. Essentially, it gives you a snapshot of service issues. We are not monitoring Tweets for everything that is going on about our clients. What we monitor is related only to customer service issues or specific issues with the product and so on. We feed it back to our clients and say, Hey, here are the trending issues that are emerging, so that they are better prepared to respond to it. That is what we do. There are a bunch of things that are exploding in the social space all at once. But social [media] is not replacing customer service in any way.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Outsourcing: PV Kannan, CEO Of 24/7
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