Based on cost-benefit studies with blue-chip organisations such as Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Fujifilm and Direct Line, Transversal identified that often as much as 80% of inbound customer contact can easily be automated at less cost and disruption than outsourcing overseas.
Transversal argues that this can be done without having a negative impact on service.
The average cost of a call handled in India is 拢1.30, compared with less than 30p for web self-service.
Given that companies using web self-service are achieving cost savings of between 20% and 50%, Transversal argues that even companies that have already outsourced their call-centre operations to lower-cost countries can reduce their contact volumes by automating customer service responses over the web.
Transversal's research also identified that company strategy to reduce costs, by driving customer transactions via the web, can have the opposite effect: generating higher volumes of calls and e-mails simply because the website is unable to provide answers to customer queries.
Transversal said it gets these volumes down by allowing customers to search a knowledgebase using "natural language questioning", in the way they might ask an agent, to get the answer quicker than contacting the call centre.
According to Transversal, a large proportion of the queries agents are handling are calls and emails from customers asking the same thing, but in a different way. It says this is causing its own new set of problems with the repetitive work leading to the Indian call centre industry experiencing trouble with agent retention and recruitment.
Gerard Buckley, CEO of Transversal, said: "Taking advantage of intelligent online customer services is the next phase in the efficiency drive that companies need to embrace. Not only is it highly cost effective, but it also ensures that a company has complete control over the consistency and accuracy of the answers their customers are receiving."
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