ClearTouch is Empowering Indian businesses to provide outstanding customer experience

It is a known fact that the pandemic has accelerated the rate of migration from on-premises solutions to cloud-based services around the world, given the need to provide outstanding customer experience remotely. According to Gartner, 91% of organizations are planning to deploy AI within the next three years and by 2025, customer service organizations that embed AI in their customer engagement platforms will elevate operational efficiency by 25%. The key to successful customer experience is an integrated system that would allow companies to enhance the customer’s overall journey. Mr.Uthaman Bakthikrishnan, Executive VP, ClearTouch in a discussion with CXOToday shared more insights on the same.

1. How ClearTouch has been empowering Indian businesses to provide outstanding customer experience?

A subsidiary of TCN, Inc., a global contact center technology provider, ClearTouch introduced the first cloud-based contact center platform in India in 2016 to empower Indian businesses with its advanced technology platform for transforming on-premises infrastructure to cloud-based services. In the span of five years, we’re pleased to report that the cloud backbone of our ClearTouch platform has helped many Indian companies covering more than 25000 agents in their business continuity.

ClearTouch combines a deep understanding of the needs of call centers with a highly affordable delivery model, ensuring immediate access to robust, omnichannel call center technology. This includes outbound and inbound voice channels, IVR and call recording as well as business intelligence, voice and speech analytics and compliance tools required to optimize operations and adhere to both India’s telemarketing and telecommunications regulations.

Our advanced, cloud-based platform enables contact centers to improve agent performance and enhance customer experience while increasing efficiency and reducing compliance risk. ClearTouch’s “always-on” cloud-based delivery model provides customers with immediate access to the newest version of the ClearTouch platform as well as the ability to easily scale up or down adjusting to evolving business needs. ClearTouch is trusted by companies and enterprises of all sizes in India’s healthcare, insurance, financial services, banking and business process outsourcing industries. We serve 1500+ customers across India and other international locations.

ClearTouch as a brand is currently present in India with operations in Chennai, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Delhi. We believe in organic and sustainable growth and it has taken us five years in India to achieve some of our milestones. In the near future, we plan to expand our presence into other verticals such as e-commerce and edtech in India and we are also looking at expanding to South Asian countries, Philippines, and Vietnam.

2. How enterprises can harness the power of AI to gain deep customer insights?

AI has the power to enhance customer experience at every step of the buyer’s journey. With AI, enterprises can clearly map their customers, their requirements, behavior patterns and can offer endless ways to improve customer experience.

Some of the customer experience use cases for which AI is already used include:

• Frequently asked queries: AI can understand them, and it can start to handle them as part of conversational AI. About 40 to 60% of customer queries are repetitive, which means AI can help you free up your agent’s time substantially to handl9e complex queries.
• Uncover customer issues: AI can assess all the customer support requests and the solution provided for those. It can identify patterns and commonalities in the answers, which can be turned into a self-help FAQ and handled by conversational AI.
• Content customization: AI makes it possible to send highly personalized mails to your customers by analyzing their behavior in your web properties like blog posts, resources content, browsing habits, initial interactions with your emails, and time spent on a web page.
• Product recommendations: AI can understand data and extract customer behavioral patterns in the blink of an eye. This data can help create customer personas, match consumers to products they are more likely to buy, and provide personalized recommendations. AI engines can understand data from various sources like customer interactions, geo-specific events, purchasing behaviors, heat maps on the website, and referral sources, among others.
• Effective training: AI can help train customer service agents based on the information discovered from the past call activities.

3. How BFSI industry can leverage conversational AI to drive customer interactions?

To remain digitally competitive and relevant, banks need to evaluate the continual integration and interaction of data and its influence on customer experience. This will require them to embrace the power of conversational AI-based services that can help amplify their capabilities and make them stand out. The AI strategy has to be carefully thought through, and the customer should be at the center of the process. AI definitely would help improve customer experience in collaboration with human elements.

Some examples of integrating AI objectives may include – freeing up your agents’ time, improving health & safety, reducing employee turnover, or solving a business problem, making your products more intelligent, building a deeper understanding of your customers, making business processes more intelligent, automating core business functions, automating repetitive tasks, among others.

Moreover, conversational AI has the potential to hyper-personalize interactions with customers. Banks must leverage this to drive tailored conversations/interactions and create more interpersonal consumer experiences. For instance, a leading multinational bank and financial services company, has introduced a voice- and text-empowered bot that helps customers make smarter decisions by suggesting ideas on saving money, reporting credit scores, and encouraging bill payments.

4. How will AI-Human collaboration drive future of customer service in the BFSI space?

Consumers still value the human touch despite advancements in technology enablers like AI and ML engines. 85% of consumers still rate skilled and knowledgeable contact centers and retail store agents as key to an excellent customer experience from Telcos.

While classic computer programs could handle structured data and basic tasks, the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are becoming more like humans every day. AI still isn’t great at conversation, much less small talk and asking about grandma’s recent trip to Thailand. It can’t summon up a song for the office karaoke party or give you a hug at the end of a bad day. That said, it’s no mystery why businesses want their customers served by warm-blooded associate – they deliver a personal touch that most people prefer in every situation except maybe when you’re on hold with customer service.

It all boils down to finding a combination of human experience and AI-driven solutions that are domain-specific to drive the value in customer experiences. Undoubtedly, a successful AI-powered customer service system will be an intersection between machines working with humans, not replacing them.

5. Elaborate ClearTouch’s product offerings & value proposition

ClearTouch offers a complete contact center suite with Business Intelligence and Workforce management for enterprises, contact centers, BPOs and financial services companies in India. Our contact center platform features a holistic set of easy-to-use, automated agent tools and advanced apps for omnichannel communications, workforce engagement, compliance & data management, integration & automation, intelligence, reporting & analytics etc. Moreover, we offer a deep understanding of the needs of call centers with a unique approach to pricing – no contracts, monthly minimums, or maintenance fees – that supports rapid scaling and instant flexibility to changing business needs.

We have recently launched a Voice Analytics feature that provides mission-critical support that can be deployed quickly. This feature uses audio from recorded calls and converts them into structured data for searching and analyzing. This solution supports advanced search and filtering, enterprise-grade speech recognition and transcription, contextual call playback data, tagging and commenting, transcript visualization, and full Payment Card Industry (PCI) redaction.

Our experience with 1500+ global customers enables us to bring innovative solutions that are cross-functional. We are proud to be the only company in India for the last five years to offer a managed contact center platform. All-inclusive per-minute pricing with no contracts besides other value propositions such as 24×7 customer support, compliant with DoT and TRAI regulations, integration with in-house CRMs, helpdesk software, and other related applications.

6. Please share some customer success stories

In April 2020, the call volumes at one of our banking customers went up drastically. So, their time to resolve customer queries went up, affecting their customer satisfaction scores. They decided to automate some customer service processes, but there wasn’t any consensus on what could be automated. Our Voice analytics solution displayed all the repetitive transactional queries that the customers sought. This acted as the low-hanging fruit, which the bank decided to automate.

They built the intelligence to handle repetitive tasks by integrating their core banking solution and integrating it with their chatbots. Now, the chatbots could take 80% of their repetitive queries. They provided an option for their customers to talk to an agent at any point, which made the customers very comfortable. This automation freed up their agents’ time considerably, and the customer satisfaction scores improved by 45% within two months.