Natarajan Radhakrishnan, Chief Innovation Officer, HGS

One constant in the enterprise world: changing customer expectations. Post covid andwith the proliferation of advanced tech in mainstream, customers expect help in aninstant. And brands are tightening their purse strings. It falls on IT companies to innovateto bridge the gap. Here’s how Hinduja Global Solutions’ tryst with automation led to animproved and cost effective customer experience strategy.

Natarajan Radhakrishnan , commonly known as Nat in the industry, joined Hinduja GroupSolutions around four and a half years ago as President and Chief Innovation Officer. Natis responsible for internal automation, covering IT infrastructure, cloud, and relateddomains. He oversees global delivery of every project for BPM and digital businesses, aswell as the M&A integration. , recently, acquired TekLink, an analytics company, andNat was responsible for finding prospects and integrating them.

Saving Cost, Time and Energy with Automation

Customer experience is the top most priority for almost all customers but they’re not in aposition to spend on it. Also, measuring ROI from customer experience is difficult. “It’sdifficult to get additional IT spend from our clients to improve customer experience. Theymay agree to pay for marketing, sales, new sales office, and geographical expansion, butif you ask for say US$ 5 million for improving customer experience, they won’t agree topay,” Nat says.

This means that you need to use the existing money to make the experience better.

Adding a distinction between clients and customers, Nat says, “When referred to asclients it is HGS’ customers we’re talking about, such as American Express, Venmo, etc.and by customers we mean the end customers of our clients.”

Contact Center

Nat describes the call center situation as such: There may be 100 agents answeringqueries from customers such as ‘my health insurance card is missing, can you send areplacement or I sent a claim on a certain date, what’s the current status, etc.’ or slightlymore complicated questions.

Customers are not happy if they’re made to wait for 5-10 minutes to be responded to or ifthe agent responds saying, “I’ve noted your complaint and we’ll address it in next 48hours and so on.”

So, two things need to be done:

• The routine calls should not go to the agents, they should be able to do itthemselves. Something to the effect of changing passwords, changing personaldetails, finding out the status for all such queries there be a self-service portal,chatbots, conversational bots, etc.
• For more complicated interactions, the agent has to come on the phone and solve itright there. He should not have to go to his manager, calling some other country /office to get details, so on and so forth.

HGS has worked on this strategy in recent times. “About 30% of all mundane calls havebeen automated which means that the agent has that much more time to sort it out.Based on a customer’s number, we’ll get to know about his past call history, pendingproblems, whether he's a happy or unhappy camper – all of it displays in the terminal.

Similarly, when the conversation is happening, sentiment also gets reflected. This iswhere artificial intelligence comes into the picture. The sentiment is known based on theintonation, type of words and so on. This is an example of customer experience transformation in the contact center context,” Nat says.

Further extolling the benefits reaped out of automation in the contact center space, Natsays they can save up to 50% to 55% of the cost.

With HGS AgentX, we can save up to 50-55% cost, you only need about 40%agents. Typically, we start with 20% call deflection, and it goes all the way up to 60-65% call deflection. Natarajan Radhakrishnan, CIO, HGS

Also, with new questions coming up the responses go into a knowledge repository. Ifthose questions come again you don’t have to go to the agent.

Retail Customer

Nat makes another case for automation with a Middle East retail customer. They canreceive orders in stores and on the phone. Suppose you want to buy an iphone. You cancall them up or you can either go to their store or go online. You can also go to the storeand then tell them to deliver the iphone to your house. Or you can go online, place theorder and pick it up from the store.

With multiple channels for placing the purchase order and receiving them- anycombination is possible. “People may say I’ll place the order now and pick it up in the next45 minutes or day after tomorrow. So, you need to first receive the orders, make sure thatthe stocks are available in the respective locations, generate the invoice, and monitorstocks,” he describes.

HGS automated the entire process using robotic process automation (RPA). “There issavings of about 32-33%, but more importantly, immense improvement in customer experience.

Otherwise, the store guy has to receive the order, call the central dispatch system andsend the phone to the customer’s location, etc., all of this is now completely automated.The order now gets dispatched immediately to the correct location and stocks areawaiting when the buyer comes,” Nat says.

Application Reduction and Cloud Migration

HGS had 140 internal applications and now have reduced it to 60. Nat says, “We've ateam size of 140 people supporting them, today it is 88 and in the next 6 months it will be75 people. So, we’re talking about 80% reduction achieved through three different things:

• All our internal apps have been moved to the cloud. No maintaining physicalinfrastructure, server, hardware, etc.
• We’ve done application rationalization. We’ve combined many of the applications. Ifthere are multiple apps doing the same thing, we’ve gotten rid of a few.”

At the contact centers, the calls received were all based on physical switches. If thevolume of calls goes up, you have to buy equipment and hire people. To buy theequipment, if you place the order it takes six-eight weeks and another to configure andimplement.

Today, our entire call center in the US, UK, Philippines, Jamaica, and othercountries we operate have been moved to cloud. We have cloud telephony asopposed to physical telephony today. This means I don’t have to worry aboutwhether I’ve capacity, bandwidth, etc. Natarajan Radhakrishnan, CIO , HGS

Nat describes every one of HGS’ internal applications have been moved to the cloud.“We’re 100% in the cloud which means that there is no question of server breakdown,new investment, obsolescence, etc.,” he says.

Telephony is on the hybrid cloud model and internal applications in a public cloud, exceptin the UK because the country has strict GDPR laws. “You have to have local instancesand hybrid models, and this is particularly after Brexit. Earlier they used to say you canhave it in Europe but now the data must only be in the UK,” Nat clarifies.

The internal cloud migration was done in 30 days. “We had a physical instance, we took acloud server. Internal cloud was in AWS and then we gradually migrated, tested (thephysical instance was still available) and one fine morning we cut it off,” he says.

Navigating the Challenges

The biggest challenges for HGS were in AI and analytics, and not so much in the cloud.“In traditional organizations, there is a mindset of ‘keep it inside’. Their point is if I buy theapplication or infrastructure, I can use it for seven-eight years but for cloud every year Ihave to pay. They’re worried about the data leaks, security breaches, etc. though it canhappen even in the physical world,” he says.

The two biggest challenges Nat describes were:

Change management in traditional organizations: Changing the mindset aboutthe cloud being more reliable. Volumes can go up and down, and it is not so muchmore expensive.

“In my opinion, there is little difference between physical infrastructure and cloud. Theonly thing in cloud is that it is completely predictable, it is almost - pay as you go. Inphysical infrastructure, you never know. One box will be superseded by another box inthree-six months, that’s the biggest problem,” he says.

Business case: When you migrate, there is a physical set of applications andthere’s one in the cloud. There’s a double cost, there’s a migration cost.

“If you can get an external vendor and come up with an innovative model, it will not hityou in the first year. Otherwise, in the first year itself you'll have to incur an additionalcost. Everybody is bothered about current year costs, we've got to get past that. Now Ithink people have become smarter. Vendors are offering models whereby you can kind ofsmoothen the spend pattern,” he says.

IT Budget

Discussing the percentage of revenue that constitutes the IT budget, Nat was not onlyhappy to go on record but downright proud. “There are P360 benchmarks. P360 wasdone by a well-known management consulting firm on behalf of NASSCOM. Theymeasured around 350 companies and they’ve come up with benchmarks for ITapplications, infrastructure, HR, finance, etc. For example, the IT benchmark is about 1%,infrastructure should not be more than 1.5%, and obviously it depends on industry situation.

For example, if you’re in telephony the infrastructure will be heavy and in case of cloud,switch it’ll be more than a number recommended by them. Today, we’re at 60% of the benchmark number.

Let me segregate between the two. On the internal IT applications such as HR, leavemanagement, transport applications spend is 0.6% – 0.7% today and the industrybenchmark is 1%-1.1% that’s why I said 60% of industry benchmark.

On the infrastructure side, we’re probably a little over industry benchmark. Reason beingwe’re moving from switches to the cloud. On some of the switches, we have long termcommitments, unless they end. That is work in progress. That’ll probably take 12-18months to completely optimize. So, between IT infrastructure and applications, we're alittle bit over 2% of revenues.

There is a context to that infra spend because of the cost of transformation to move to thecloud. Today, we’re completely scalable. We can scale and handle from 100,000 calls aday to 1 million calls a day. We’ve also done some government contracts where they 6/6 would say from tomorrow add another 800 people, there will be 20,000 calls fromtomorrow onwards, without this we can’t do it,” Nat concludes.

Note: This is part one of the two-part interview series with HGS CIO, NatarajanRadhakrishnan.

Courtesy: ET CIO