Tech support outsourcing dawned on India Inc long back. But solution providers are waking up to taking up this opportunity only recently, as they set up call centers to cater to their internal as well as external clients. Though few such centers are operational at the moment, partners are showing a growing inclination to set up more such alternate business avenues.

If you are under the impression that folks burning the midnight oil in the name of tech support are working only for MNCs, you could well be mistaken. Welcome to the world of offshore support centers as adopted by solution providers. Very soon, a partner can boast of having a self-owned call center on this visiting card as well.

Buoyed by the surging demand of customers, and competition among solution providers to offer quality yet unique support, players are virtually jostling with one another to make that extra buck. This is also beneficial for customers, as they need not go through numerous loops to get the requisite support.

"Services on demand are what is driving the need for call centers. Traditional help desks direct customers to some URL or make them undergo a series of steps with no plausible solution. Eventually customers end up requesting for physical support. Also, help desks are not 24/7," informed Omnitech Infosolutions' Director, Atul Hemani. This Mumbai-based company started call centric operations on a pilot basis since last April with six persons on the job. It is on an extensive ramp up of this division.

The concept of call centers is catching on, especially in IT retail. Solution providers experimenting on it, on a pilot basis, are enthused by the results. And mind you, some of these are not just India-centric. They even target international customers.

Offshore Support Centers
In what are termed as offshore support centers, customers are serviced verbally (call centers) or by gaining access to customers systems (remote management). A call center is nothing but a centralized office of a company that answers incoming telephone calls from customers or/and makes outgoing telephone calls to customers.

On the other hand, remote management service offerings cut across networks, servers and applications. While large solution providers like Wipro Infotech, Cisco and others offer remote management services; small sized outfits attend to infrastructure-related queries. This is what is catching on rapidly with small and mid-size solution partners.

What Customers Want
Explains Syntech Informatics' Marketing Director, Dilip K Banerjee, "Customers are looking out for a lot of related information than just support related calls. This could include information about products, billing, promotions, conferences and seminars, personal demonstrations and appointments with key persons." An ideal call center, according to him, should answer such queries and also extend support to specialized technical services like manufacturing, import, export, R&D, survey and logistics.

For setting up an ideal call center, solution providers space need to focus on specific technologies to meet customers' on-the-spot queries. This niche focus can also help them in personnel management.

This business is all about people, be it customers or staff. One reason why clients outsource technical support to other companies is to enjoy better personnel savings. Especially for overseas clients, as appointing local manpower in their country will mean almost double the investment they make in a outsourced company. Therefore, solution providers need to build on this asset to gain more customers and market it effectively.

As Dilip puts it, "Marketing is crucial, as you need to present your capabilities, productive benefits and skills to customers outsourcing their work to you. For domestic customers, you need to tell them that outsourcing this business aspect to you will free them to focus on their core competencies."

Rather than direct marketing Atul suggests a three-pronged approach. He feels that the primary step to tap the domestic market is by approaching local agencies and letting them know about your new service offerings. The next step is showcasing your capabilities and making your presence in all major events and exhibitions. Finally, one should also closely work with principals. "Now that they share the roadmap with solution providers, joint work could be taken up as a value proposition. It not only fetches loyal customer base, but equally adds credibility," added he.

Tiered-staff
One step of managing personnel is to have them organized in tiers. The first tier could be trained to resolve issues using referrals and hitherto resolved problems. When this tier fails to resolve the issue, it should then be escalated to a more highly skilled second tier. Alternately, the center could even boast of even higher levels or third tier of support.

Corroborating this, Jalan Infotech CEO, Arun Jalan said, "Customers might have various levels of queries. If it's not answered at Level 1, then it should be transferred to level 2 or level 3 and so on."

No matter what the size of the call center is, getting technical expertise and retaining them is not easy. Continuous training and motivation to the staff is essential. Noted Atul, "When opting for offshore support center, employing an engineer to handle multiple locations through remote management service would drastically reduce my costs rather than confirming a resident engineer for each of my client."

Here again, one has to continuously train the staff about upgrades on various tools and versions. "Training is an ongoing activity, and we have to closely work with principals to keep abreast of latest entrants," added Arun. "One also has to be quick enough in training staff to keep in sync with the to-be-launched tools. So we have to gear up with what the vendor is likely to launch and in a short period prepare the staff, to reply to customer queries accordingly," said Syntech Informatics' Director, Milon Chakraborthy.

Infrastructure Investment
Infrastructure forms the biggest chunk of the investment pie while setting up a tech support center. Starting with a physical facility, partners also have to factor in sophisticated technology as expenses, particularly while targeting international clients.

Besides investments on hardware such as PCs, servers, database recovery applications etc, an IP-based EPABX system is essential. Most call centers, irrespective of its size, opt for IP-based communication to take up more than one or two calls at a time.

"When a customer call the support center only to hear that his/her call is put on hold because of busy lines, he gets frustrated. So the call hold time should be kept at the minimum. I agree that calls will not only flood the support team continuously, but as the customer size increases, one has to take this into consideration," explains SP Software's Executive Director, Jeyram.

This Hyderabad-based company has been offering offshore support since last year. It has employed the model of Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) for its US-based customer N-League where SP Software had build the support team, operated it for the agreed time and then transferred the division to N-League.

There are other infrastructure costs also that cannot be neglected, apart from telephones. "With infrastructure costs come incidental overheads that include electricity costs, Internet charges, telephone, fax and document printing and record maintenance through customized software and IVRS for preliminary communication," noted Dilip.

Business Bottlenecks
Though IP-based communication comes to the rescue of call centers, costs are still higher for international customers. Besides costs, quality of communication has to be taken care of. Informed Jeyram, "Sometimes the code gets blocked, and there could be disturbances in the line too. These things have to be sorted out."

Another major hurdle is manpower retention. Explained Dilip, "Executives tend to shift their jobs for better opportunities and this proves to be problematic in recruiting new executives, especially when the amount of investment on training and the time involved goes in vain."

Accent neutralization is another key aspect. However hard one tries, getting along with that western accent is an arduous task. Also, for employees, continuously working in night shifts invariably puts their health at risk. There should be an alternate shift mechanism in place that can call for a slightly bigger support team than usual.

All said and done, this is a lucrative business avenue for solution providers who can invest in it and sustain it till the returns become stronger. At the same time, they have to bear in mind to focus on specific customers, so that they develop skillsets in this area. Developing a specialized customer base will provide improved opportunities and would be known for quality of service.

Sunitha Natti
CyberMedia News

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