CXO of the Week: Uthaman Bakthikrishnan, Executive Vice President of ClearTouch

ClearTouch is a provider of a cloud-based call center platform for enterprises, contact centers, BPOs, and financial services companies. Since 2016, ClearTouch has grown its presence from Chennai to offices in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi, and Mumbai, with data centers in Mumbai and Bangalore as well as other data centers throughout the world, which provides the capability and agility to handle various client requirements. To strengthen its services and improve customer experience, ClearTouch has worked closely with local partners such as many major Indian telecommunications companies. It currently serves various Indian companies and multinational businesses in the healthcare, insurance, financial services, banking, and BPO industries.

Uthaman Bakthikrishnan is the Executive Vice President at ClearTouch, engaged in setting and implementing the company’s strategic direction and guiding its product and services road map. He specializes in identifying market gaps, opportunities, right business strategies, and talent for execution. With 25 years of experience in the IT and software industries, Uthaman has directed ClearTouch’s growth over the past three/to five years (in excess of 200% each year) by scaling the company to five locations and more than tripling its headcount. Prior to ClearTouch, he held several roles and one among them is his role as the Software Engineer at Morgan Stanley. A SaaS champion, his competencies include IT Strategy, Enterprise Architecture, Project Management, Requirement Analysis, and Software Development to name a few. 

In a recent chat with Uthaman Bakthikrishnan, Executive Vice President at ClearTouch, he talks about his startup journey and what ClearTouch has been up to in the latest edition of CxO of the Week.

Introduction (A brief non-promotional profile)

ClearTouch started operations in India in 2016 as the first cloud-based contact center platform in India, bringing in 22 years of TCN legacy to empower businesses on their journey of customer experience. With premiere solutions like Voice Analytics and an advanced cloud-based platform, ClearTouch enables contact centers to significantly improve agent performance by increasing efficiency and reducing compliance risk to enhance customer experience ClearTouch’s omnichannel cloud-based delivery model provides customers with immediate access to agents who can help them solve their queries with the newest version of the ClearTouch platform that can 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 over 20,000 call centers across India as well as other international locations.

Could you explain how ClearTouch is enabling Indian businesses to succeed by delivering best in class customer experience?

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

We use analytics to assist BPOs in automating routine processes, and employ predictive analytics to create machine-learning algorithms that can forecast consumer intent and sentiment based on cross-channel activity and then adjust the IVR options. We also use AI to support, monitor and extract useful data from the calls. One of our clients in the BFSI space was looking to expand its operations and faced the challenge of connecting on-field agents with the IT Office located in cities across India. Our solution enabled them to gain more flexibility and scale faster. We offered support in multiple languages, across locations, and at all working hours. This, in turn, helped the on-field agents to liaise smoothly with a decentralized head office. In addition, we onboarded 1000+ agents in 48 hours using our platform to take them online. We also set up a dedicated support team for customer interactions, so customers would always have the luxury of speaking to a person delegated for CX operations.

What motivated you to begin? Tell us about the company's journey in India and the issue it sought to resolve?

We are a firmly established organization in the US, addressing the needs of the customer experience space. We felt that the opportunities in India, the Philippines, and Vietnam were reasonably large. As a first step, we started our operations in India, and we are looking at expanding our operations to the Philippines and Vietnam next.  In India, most customers have many ad-hoc requirements that need to be incorporated into the platform when it comes. Most available platforms in the market are not flexible enough to accommodate these changes.

Our platform is architected in a way that it is easily extendable with additional features and can be easily integrated with other IT systems. Everything in our platform is API-driven. In fact, we offer all our customizations to customers at no additional cost. It comes along with our platform. The Indian market is diverse and very unique, with the requirements being very different from that prevailing in the international market. This is where understanding the Indian market and its intricacies help ClearTouch better understand, map requirements, and serve our customers.

What are 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 offers a comprehensive collection of simple, automated agent tools, as well as cutting-edge apps for omnichannel communications, workforce engagement, compliance and data management, integration and automation, intelligence, reporting, and analytics. We provide a thorough grasp of contact center requirements together with a special pricing strategy that promotes quick scalability and immediate adaptability to shifting business requirements. This pricing strategy includes no contracts, monthly minimums, or maintenance costs.

Some of our product offerings include:

• List management service: List Management Service (LMS) allows enterprises to interact with data in real-time. LMS has a number of features that helps save time and increase productivity, by allowing agents to solve complex operations involving mass data. The feature allows companies to create unique customer journeys using data without the help of a CRM.
• Voice analytics: This feature uses audio from recorded calls and converts them into structured data for searching and analyzing. It 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.
• Workforce management: Our WFM solution allows for a higher customer service level by offering real-time information about call volumes, staff performance capabilities, and various other metrics, in order to ensure satisfactory quality standards by predicting schedules, tracking agents, and forecasting call volumes.

What, as per you, are the five important things that ClearTouch should be looking at today?

As an organization that primarily is focused on enabling businesses to scale their customer service operations, we must focus on customer experience and technology trends that are driving customer experience.

• Understanding customer trends: To better serve customers and gain a competitive advantage, organizations should look at having dedicated research teams who will help and analyse customer insights and further provide recommendations for actionable insights.
• Leveraging analytics across customer journey: To fully understand a customer and implement better CX strategies it is vital for businesses to leverage analytics. Advanced analytics is the key differentiator that can make significant improvements in customer satisfaction.
• Automation of workflow with AI: While contact center operations have great benefits like scalability and speed, adopting AI will help enterprises with robust data and history about customers, empowering agents to enhance customer service operations and also automate repetitive and manual processes.
• Omnichannel customer experience: Engaging with customers across touchpoints of the sales cycle has become a central platform to succeed in the new digital world. It exponentially improves the quality of customer engagement by offering a seamless, integrated experience across various channels of their choice.

 How customer experience can be enhanced in contact centers through solutions like Voice Analytics and AI-enabled chatbots?

Voice Analytics helps enterprises understand the customer experience, by providing advanced insights into call quality like the instance when a customer is convinced or the moment where a customer loses interest. Voice Analytics makes use of Artificial Intelligence to analyse various aspects of a call, such as speech rate, tone of the caller, call holds, the vocabulary used, etc. Natural language processing (NLP), transcription, and speech recognition technology are used to identify issues that may have occurred during a call.

In April 2020, one of our BFSI customers faced the issue of unprecedented call volumes, resulting in delayed customer queries that ultimately affected the customer experience. Our solution was to automate customer service processes by using the Voice Analytics solution to display 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 up to 45% within two months.

What are the key trends dominating the Indian cloud contact center ecosystem?

As per International Data Corporation (IDC) by 2024, 40% of organizations will implement dedicated cloud services either in a private cloud or in a service provider facility due to performance, security, and compliance requirements. Here are a few trends that will power the cloud contact center space in 2022 and beyond-

• AI-enabled customer interactions: AI will be in use for call routing, and automation of tasks to help agents achieve a faster response time, better first-call resolution, and enable seamless customer service.
• Implementing immersive customer experience: AR and VR have the potential to transform customer interactions profoundly. It provides customers an opportunity to observe the products in real-time.
• Hybrid Infrastructure: Hybrid systems based on the cloud are easily scalable as per an organization’s requirements. There is no requirement for a physical network that needs a setup.
• Unified desktop solutions: To achieve integrated contact center solutions, they must employ a unified desktop that would allow agents to access different types of information all at once from a single screen.

How has Covid-19 accelerated the transition to cloud contact center?

As per a report by MarketsandMarkets, the cloud contact center market is set to reach USD 54.6 billion by 2027, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 26.1%. With evolving customer expectations, it is vital for traditional call centers to adopt technology solutions. Cloud makes call center platforms more accessible. The advent of the pandemic has especially seen an increase in the adoption of cloud-based call center platforms in the past two years, as it provides agents the flexibility to work from the comforts of their homes. Moreover, the cloud makes it easy to integrate AI/ML solutions with best-of-breed IT solutions to provide a single view of customers. There are numerous benefits to cloud-based contact centers-

• The flexibility of work modes: Cloud-hosted solutions allow agents to work across multiple contact centers and locations, thus providing maximum flexibility.
• Agent efficiency: Cloud’s interface helps equip agents with easily accessible data across various channels and touchpoints.
• Scalability: Cloud allows for unlimited scalability, helping agents and enterprises scale their business operations as per the requirement.
• Economical: Using a pay-as-you-go consumption model hosted on cloud solutions helps contact centers integrate solutions