Pressured by the need to retain customers and also get increased spend from them, mid-cap IT companies are using innovative ways to make their employees more attuned to the customer's work culture.

At Aditi Technologies, for instance, project managers are being trained in ‘precision reporting.' “We are bringing more Western attributes, such as summarising, closure and precision in reporting to customers, as they appreciate these skills in our engineers,” says Mr Pradeep Rathinam, CEO, Aditi Technologies, adding that the biggest impediment to the Indian software business is lack of communication skills.

According to Mr Rathinam, this initiative is one of the reasons for Aditi's zero customer attrition in the last one year.

IT consulting companies such as Sapient are tapping into creative initiatives for increased customer spends. Sapient Nitro is a vertical that fuses creativity and technology for ‘superior customer experience.'

Its team of ‘Idea Engineers' generates ideas, backs them with technology, brings those ideas to reality and engineers highly relevant customer experiences for clients. “This is done to ensure our clients can create a better customer experience for their consumers,” says Mr Prashant Bhatnagar, Director-Hiring, at Sapient India.

Telecom solutions provider Huawei has been using the agile method of software development at its India R&D centre and now covers nearly 70 per cent of all the projects with this initiative. Customers are able to view the day-to-day development in their projects and make immediate changes.

“The agile method helps in delivering higher value to customer faster by incorporating new requirements and changes during all phases with required agility, and hence reduces waste,” says Mr Pius Maria Prasad L, Associate Vice-President, HR, Huawei Technologies India Pvt Ltd.

Apart from using collaborative tools such as agile method of software development or training people to empathise with the Western work culture, companies are also broad basing their services to increase their share in the customer's IT spend, says Mr Karthik Ananth, Director, Zinnov Management Consulting.

“Companies are looking at increasing customer touch points and communicating with them with greater frequency about the range of services offered. They are also willing to restructure their management teams to deepen the relationship with their clients so that they are more embedded with their needs,” he points out.

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