The Hindu Business Line : ‘ITeS sector evolving beyond maintenance, processing’

For the top-tier providers, the way to stand apart from the crowd is to deliver more value-added services, and physical and cultural proximity is important for building client relationships. — Mr G.B. Kumar, Senior Vice-President (Customer Advocacy), Cisco India and SAARC

L.N. Revathy

Coimbatore, May 11 The Indian ITeS industry has witnessed significant transformation over the past decade. Starting with basic data entry tasks, the industry has, over the years, graduated to voice-based services and a range of back office processing activities.

In the last three to four years, the industry saw the scope of these services expand to include increasingly complex processes involving rule-based decision making and research services.

And it is continuing to evolve. Reports reveal that many of the services that are now being provided by the Indian ITeS companies will eventually be automated. The process, it appears, has already started, with clients not just wanting these solution and service providers to keep their systems running but also develop new solutions to business problems.

The primary motive to outsource such services could be cost, but “performance is fast becoming the main battleground between the providers. The language is changing. Most companies prefer to refer to their vendors as ‘partners’.

“Labour arbitrage is out and ‘intellectual arbitrage’ is in. For the top-tier providers, the way to stand apart from the crowd is to deliver more value-added services, and physical and cultural proximity is important for building client relationships, especially towards delivering certain types of services,” says Mr G.B. Kumar, Senior Vice-President (Customer Advocacy), Cisco India and SAARC. Excerpts from an interview:

What is Customer Advocacy (CA) and how did this concept evolve?

CA is doing what is best for your customer and representing their interest through a mutual dialogue and partnership. The dramatic increase in customer power has brought about a change in the conventional rules of marketing and customer relationships. Present day customers expect companies to do more than relationship marketing. It is in this environment that CA has attained more importance.

How is Cisco involved in this?

Customer satisfaction has been an essential component of our corporate culture since inception in 1984. The Cisco culture seeks to encourage employees to go beyond in-the-box customer service and mandates CA start with Cisco’s people. In fact, employee bonuses at Cisco are based on the results of customer satisfaction reports. With customers looking beyond device-based value propositions as solutions, the thought leadership is becoming more proactive; knowledge transfer is on the rise as is the demand for tailored offerings. With our network technology and applications, we partner and engage customers through mutual dialogue to accelerate success.

Your services in India?

India is among our key markets worldwide. Our globalisation centre in Bangalore ensures management and collaboration across teams. The India Customer Advocacy team has access to the Cisco Development Organisation and can consult them from an R&D perspective.

What kind of services do you offer?

Our services encompass three broad functional areas — advisory, advanced and technical. Our services basically will support business requirements throughout the network lifecycle.

A lifecycle approach orchestrates the alignment of business and technical requirements at every phase. For instance, in the initial or prepare phase of the network lifecycle, a company establishes business requirements and a corresponding technology vision, develops a technology strategy to support its growth plans.

In the plan phase, it assesses its network to determine if the existing system infrastructure, sites and operational environment would support its proposed system.

During the design phase, the company prepares a detailed design taking care of the current business and technical requirements and incorporating specifications to support availability, reliability, security, scalability, and performance. It then works to integrate devices (without disrupting the existing network) in the implementation phase. This is followed by the operate and optimise phase. The entire approach is mission critical.

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