‘We’ll invest $3-4 m to kick-start cloud operations’

Chennai-based Servion Global Solutions helps clients enhance customer interactions through telephone email, chat and social media. With over 600 customers and 1,000 installations in 60 countries, its products and solutions annually handle over 7 billion interactions through voice, fax, automatic call distributor like the Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) and e-mail.

Recently, Everstone Capital, along with Solmark, invested $66 million to acquire a controlling stake in Servion. In an interview with BusinessLine , K Balakrishnan, Managing Director and CEO of Servion, spoke on the company’s cloud strategy and on the IVRS, the backbone of the customer support service industry. Edited excerpts:

How will the new investors help you?

For Everstone, Servion is the first investment in the IT sector, while Solmark has experience in scaling up IT companies. There is no change in the company’s strategy, but they will help us grow to a $200-million company in 3-4 years, from $80 million now. Our focus is on scaling up, and we will target new geographies such as Australia and Africa to drive growth.

What is your cloud strategy?

We will launch it in the US this month and in other geographies in the first or second quarter. We will invest $3-4 million to kick start cloud operations. Customers like a bank or a telecom company need not buy equipment that sit in their premises, but can have it over cloud. They need to tell us what the call flow will be and give their customers the number to dial for support service. Their calls will be handled through a data centre that will handle multiple users.

There is no big change in technology in the customer contact service industry?

Yes, in the last 20 years, the IT industry has moved ahead, but the customer contact service still relies heavily on IVRS.

If you had called a bank 10 years ago or now for support service, the response is the same in IVRS – press 1, 2, 3 for various options.

The whole idea of IVRS and call centre was to cut cost as it was expensive to pick up calls and give personalised services. In the process, everyone hates the monotone IVRS.

Will any technology replace IVRS?

Not in the near future as there is still a huge demand for IVRS. Earlier, to seek information, do some transaction and make a grievance, you dialled a call centre. However, today, information, transaction and grievance have moved online, but customer support continues to be through call centre, and via IVRS.

An IVRS is still a dumb box. What value addition can you do?

A lot more intelligence can be built into the boxes that has huge amount of data. Using analytics, we can look for patterns as to why customers call and use the data to improve service. We feel 60-70 per cent of the inbound calls can be predicted on the reason for a person calling using analytics. We can then proactively assist you through outbound calls. Unfortunately, we don’t have systems to get real-time information.

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