Shivakumar Ganesan CEO and Founder, Exotel
The information technology-enabled services/business process management (ITeS/BPM) industry has been leveraging information and communication technology (ICT) solutions such as video-conferencing and cloud to enhance business efficiency. Being early adopters of technology, enterprises in the ITeS/BPM industry are now experimenting with big data, artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), etc. to streamline business processes and automate operations. They are looking forward to interesting times with many of these technologies set for mainstream adoption. Leading enterprises in the ITeS/BPM industry discuss their IT roadmap, the technology trends and key challenges in implementing new technologies….
How have telecom and IT solutions helped in increasing business efficiency in the ITeS/ BPM industry?
I would like to point out four different examples of how ICT solutions are helping improve business efficiency. Companies in the logistics industry are integrating cloud communications into the apps of last-mile delivery executives, who make calls through the cloud platform before going for a delivery. Using this process, companies have managed to create a standard operating procedure and their first-time delivery rates have improved significantly. Similarly, in the direct-to-home industry, executives go to customers’ homes for installations. There has been a growing instance of customer complaints about delays in installation, which have been arrested through the deployment of cloud solutions. Meanwhile, real estate and credit card industries can address the issue of leakage of leads by deploying cloud communication solutions. I would also briefly touch upon the government sector, particularly gas agencies, where interactive voice response (IVR) systems have helped in improving the customer experience and business efficiency.
What is the current level of adoption of technologies like IoT, automation, AI, big data analytics and cloud in your industry? What are your plans in this regard?
There is 100 per cent adoption in terms of cloud technology and everything we do is on the cloud. As for IoT, one of the key innovations that Exotel has undertaken in the recent past is to allow our customers to be able to get a sense of reliability of the telecom network through an application programming interface (API). As for automation, we find ways to automate most of our processes so that systems can handle the basic work while individuals can focus on quality work. We are only 80 people in the company and are able to sustain large-scale operations because we introduced efficiency through automation. As for AI, I believe there is a lot of scope in terms of adoption. Today, the newer networks are a lot more intelligent than their old counterparts such as intelligent network (IN) and information management system (IMS). However, if we can get a computer to make decisions on behalf of humans, say, for routing a call, I think we would have really introduced AI in telecom. As for big data, we process close to 4 million calls a day. That is a huge amount of data being generated at the backend. We use a lot of this data to learn more about the quality of the call, inter-operator connectivity issues, inter-circle connectivity issues, mobile-to-landline issues, landline-to-mobile issues, etc. A lot of analysis is put into how calls have matured in the past and, using this data, we try to assess whether or not a call that a customer is going to place will mature in the future.
What are the some of the challenges faced by the industry when implementing new ICT technologies?
The first challenge is the complexity in regulations across various industries. For instance, the BFSI sector has regulations around how stockbrokers must store their call recordings, how the ICT systems must store the data of their customers, etc. Then, there are broad-based telecom regulations; for example, it is not possible to mix a PSTN call with an IP call. There are many such regulations, which ultimately increase the complexity of ICT installations as well as overheads, and make the job of IT personnel and software companies difficult.
The second challenge is the inertia or risk-averseness to move from old technologies to new. I believe it is a mindset issue, which can be addressed by educating companies about new technologies. Another key challenge is that of disintegrated systems. There has been a rapid proliferation in the number of software solutions that an enterprise uses. Earlier, there used to be only one enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Now there are CRM solutions for marketing, sales, support, ticketing, etc. There are too many systems and different kinds of software that enterprises are adopting, due to which there is no single place where all the information is available. Any technology that is able to seamlessly integrate all these disparate software solutions will see higher adoption.
What are the key technology trends that will shape the industry in the next few years?
Over the next five to 10 years, convergence of devices and of communication media will emerge as a key technology trend. It will be possible for an individual to shift from one device to another seamlessly, in terms of not only connectivity but also in moving conversations seamlessly to the new device. Convergence of the medium is another interesting trend. Right now, we think of messaging, voice and video as media of communication. Within messaging, one can think of things like Facebook and WhatsApp. But all of media are walled gardens; they operate in silos that do not intra-operate with each other. We believe that over time, these silos will get removed and it must be possible for people to get into a conference bridge, talk through a PSTN call, convert that call over to a video call when necessary, share a screen and potentially send an SMS to all the participants in the conference call.
The second trend that we are likely to see is that the concept of a call centre as a centre will disappear. It could be possible for a person to be a part of the call centre from home, while travelling, in office, from a laptop, from a mobile, etc. We also believe that voice is the most natural form of human communication and right now the two key communication devices between an individual and a system are the keyboard and the mouse. Very soon, we believe almost all computers are going to understand human language.
Lastly, we believe that the cost of communication will continue to decline over time. There is a misconception that because the cost of communication is coming down, the relevance of telecom and telecom-based companies is going down. I believe it is the opposite. As the cost of communication comes down, people will connect with each other more often and for a longer duration.
“We believe that almost all computers will soon understand human language.” Shivakumar Ganesan
