Clearing Public Queries

A telecommunications company like Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) churns out
a lot of information monthly, which needs to be disseminated at the right time
to the public. This is why it decided to set up a call center. Sai Infosystems
had once implemented Ahmedabad Telecom District's DoTSoFT project, which
helped it bag the BSNL project with relative ease. It learnt to combine its
expertise in hardware and software to deploy the right solution for this
project.

The Ahmedabad Telecom District (ATD) was receiving many complaints from
customers in various areas for a decade. The complaints were regarding payment
of bills, making the system more transparent and getting the right information
at the right time.

Thus, there was an urgent need to deploy tailor-made software that would not
only answer the queries of customers, but also be a solution that took care of
the billing. It was also required to answer questions pertaining to faulty and
commercial services.

Thus, an integrated software known as DoTSoFT was implemented to address the
above mentioned issues. The software also attempted to stabilize ATD and make
the system more transparent in its transactions. It succeeded in solving the
latter issue, but giving customers the information they wanted online was a
concern that remained unaddressed. ATD was well equipped with online information
across the district that customers could access, courtesy Sai Infosystems.

It was around this time that the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) was
coming up with many value-added services over the existing ones. Now came the
question of which solution provider would get this order. Since Sai Infosystems
was involved with ATD for the implementation of DoTSoFT, it was in good stead
over its peers and bagged the BSNL project as well.

The project was one of the first that BSNL was implementing in the country.
"The broad concept of a call center was known-a place that is an
information center and clarifies doubts of the public on a particular topic. But
the finer details and defining the project in terms of practicality was not
clear to the authorities also," said

Sunil Kakkad, Director of Sai Infosystems.

Step-By-Step Approach

Several brain storming sessions took place between the Sai Infosystems
personnel and ATD staff. This led to finalizing a service strategy for the
project. Unlike several other projects, this project was implemented in a single
phase.

In this project, building the framework or boundaries of the call center was
crucial to decide. This was the main task. The second task was to identify the
service area and identifying the queries by customers. This helped us make a
solution that attended queries at macro and micro level.

The practical problems a customer faces while accessing a call center number
included going beyond a mere pleasant voice on the phone, especially when the
query remained unanswered or matters were not being escalated when needed. These
aspects were looked into when the solution was being deployed.

Sai Infosystems also overcame the problem wherein the customer interface
executive did not mention the status quo of the problem. It deployed a second
level of agents. Their duty was to chase the field agents and see to it that the
pending work of customers was completed efficiently.

Once the second level of agents was deployed, a new idea came up, which was
also the unique feature of this project. The problems that were left unattended
by the agents were then escalated to higher authorities. The reason attributed
to have this was that since a call center does not offer a solution to any
problem, the idea of answering pending problems at a higher level was
incorporated.

Required Skillsets

These were the three levels that the project was divided into. For
implementing this, Sai Infosystems required personnel with specific technical
qualifications. They needed to know technical tasks such as development of
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), Interactive Voice Recognition System (IVRS),
developing the Agent Application, integration with the Customer Relation Module
(CRM), managing Database (Oracle and My SQL) were the technical tasks.

To deploy just this solution, three individuals were employed who understood
BSNL's requirement with respect to the solution, and were adept in integrating
CRM at a call center. They also had sufficient knowledge of call centers and CTI.
The entire team strength that helped implement the project was not less than 10
employees of Sai Infosystems.

With every project come some unique features. "For the first time we
integrated CRM to the entire call center. The entire project was implemented at
Rs 60 lakh," stated Sunil. With these features came some valuable lessons
also.

Till the BSNL implementation, Sai had individual expertise only in hardware
or software. The company learnt to combine the two in the ATD call center
project. The solution provider's personnel also learnt to implement the
project with limited technological expertise and human expectations.

Once the solution for ATD's call center was deployed, Sai Infosystems
bagged several other projects on the merits of this. They were similar projects
in various cities. Solutions were implemented in call centers of Jaipur, Meerut,
Noida, Bareilly, Raipur, Solan, Thiruvananthapuram, Ernakulam, Trichur, Calicut
and Gujarat GSM's call center.

AMISHI SHAH