Why Hosted CC in India is a NO – GO

Let me confess that, I am a thorough born & bred Indian and hold Indians & our “Indianess” in high regard. Having said that, I am also cognizant of the fact that Indians by nature are a race that believes in customizations, personalization and “juggad”. Trying to box such a race’s Contact Centre requirements within the confines of a readymade Cloud offering is difficult, to say the least.

Contact Centres are largely the face of any organization; the customers tend to be extra cautious as to what they subscribe to as a service on the cloud. At times of economic fluctuation, good customer relations become vital. As a corner stone of customer satisfaction, the contact centre is essential to any company’s business strategy. The largest users of the Contact Centre market in general are the BFSI & Telco industries. The biggest challenges these industries face from a Hosted CC stand point pertain to data security & scale.

Over 40 per cent of exports by the IT Services industry are support services for the global financial sector, ranging from investment bank back-office functions for research, risk-management and processing of insurance claims. India is unfortunately also emerging as a notoriously popular destination for cyber data theft. The availability of low cost resources for cyber activities in the country is also another factor contributing to theft of financial data.

A second part of the data security issue is data ownership and data management. To understand where the whole data resides, who owns‖ the data, and what options are available for backup and redundancy. The intent would be to own our own data and back it up onto our own data centres routinely. And finally, what happens to business data after the termination of contract is still an unanswered question.

Due to this the BFSI industry is extremely hesitant and wary of allowing their critical data to be hosted and thus preventing their critical function of Contact Centre to be outsourced in general.

Scale is another typical deterrent in the wide spread acceptance of CCaaS. Especially for the Telcos who are one of the largest consumers of CC in the country today.
Cost is not necessarily a constraint for them and usually secondary to the privacy and flexibility that setting up their own infrastructure gives them.
The Indian Smart Phone market is growing at approximately 38% YoY with Gen Y being the primary consumers. As a result, new technologies are bringing about new habits. Gen Y is demanding, connected and interactive. Customers wish to connect at any time of day, in any given place and expect a quick or even an immediate answer.

Trying to achieve this sort of dynamism on the cloud (in a B2B environment) would really be an epitome of customer responsiveness. And the sad but true fact is we are not yet there.
If we remove these two large segments from the Target Market List, what we are left with is the SME market across industries such as Travel & Hospitality, Logistics and Manufacturing to name a few.

SME’s face a large and significant challenge of being “different”. Generally, these companies are more willing to improve their services in order to boost growth and differentiate themselves from the competition; the ambition for them is to be unique and be the first.
Doing this in an environment, which is essentially trying to curtail all requirements within the conforms of the lowest common denominator, is basically an antithesis to the very essence of their contact centre philosophy that most companies are trying to achieve.

Achieving the customizations necessary to serve the unique requirements of every customer on a common cloud is challenging and often complex. The cloud provider must be 100% dedicated and willing to meet this challenge.
Again skilled manpower availability at the Cloud CC provider level is an issue, along with the cost involved. Cloud providers find it difficult to accurately anticipate cost and change requests necessary for customization.

Even customers who opt for cloud must have the maturity to realise that since the basic infrastructure is coming to them as a common infrastructure shared across several tenants, they get an amortized cost. However customizations are exactly that – custom and specific to them. Hence the cost of services for the same can’t be expected to be in the same proportion as the rest of the infrastructure.

Contact centres are bound by a number of imperatives. Controlling variable costs is the most critical if businesses want to stay competitive. Inability to accurately predict these variable customization costs leads to dissatisfaction among many early adopters of CCaaS.

Finally, I strongly believe that it’s not because of technology alone that uptake of Hosted CC (CCaaS) in India is slow. In fact technology is capable of doing all of the above and more. Concerns persist around voice quality, data traffic and security, confidentiality and retrieval, etc. However, technically, these fears have no basis in reality. Service providers globally have gone to great efforts to provide full security, quality and confidentiality guarantees. Transparency about SLAs and the systems used to make data secure and reliable give companies all the facts they need to make their decision. The CCaaS providers who are able to articulate this clearly and confidently to the end consumers will successfully be able to sell their services.

So until the confidence of the consumer increases to a level greater than what we generally have in our Meteorological department, CCaaS will hardly see the downpour they have been hoping for. But like the Mumbai rains, sooner or later the downpour will happen!!! When? Only time will tell….