Cutting edge Support in Connected Times

Superlative customer experience is what differentiates a good support organisation form a great one. In the era of connected enterprise, it is not merely about technology anymore, it’s all a game of numbers, about drawing the right conclusions from available data and working it to best customer support. That’s what CSS Corp excels in, shares Raj Reddy, EVP & Chief 

Delivery Officer, CSS Corp.

1. CSS Corp is one of the world’s leading support partners.  How do you see the brand in the next 3 years? Do you have anything planned out in terms of new technologies, markets or strategies?

CSS Corp is a premium tech support company. We have been in this business for the last 16 years. We are the pioneers in terms of setting up this industry in India, today we have more than 100 customers that we support, across different segments. We call them Enterprise Tech Support, Consumer Tech Support, Infra Support, Outsource Product Development Support, so or core business is only support, that’s what we live and breathe every day. As we speak, our primary market is US and some of our global customers do take us to other geographies like US and Asia pacific. As a focused market we look at the US primarily because of the maturity level the market has.

One of the core objectives that we look to support in future businesses is supporting Internet of Things, and as you all know, US is leading that space of putting together technologies  around internet of Things. We have some very good case studies where in the past we supported Internet of Things. We are seeing a lot of traction in that space, and definitely see it as a major segment to go after

2. The ‘connected’ world makes customer delight that much more of a challenge.  How do you meet this challenge at CSS Corp?

In the connected world the first and foremost important thing is providing superlative customer experience. It is the experience that makes them feel good about any support. In any given connected home, if we are talking about the home market, a given user at any point has about 8-10 connected devices in use. These devices talk to each other, there is software that integrates many of them. We today command about 30 % of home support market, through some of our customers. We do white-labelled service with many customers. In the connected world we have technologies and IPs that sit on customers systems and automatically detect issues pro-actively and then resolve them non-intrusively. That itself provides that experience during the free hours of the customer. They like it, we are getting repeat customers into our fold, and definitely, it is a way to build revenue to us.

3. What role does analytics play in your delivery and customer strategies?

Going back to IoT, it is very important to understand consumer behaviour, in terms of usage of these technologies, in terms of geographical and demographic mix of customers, each one of whom would behave differently.  A customer sitting in Costa Rica, or China or in Chicago would behave differently. It is extremely important when we are supporting technologies, to understand customer behaviour. That would come to us when we look at the support data. We keep getting customer technology requests for resolution but it is only  when we run high end predictive analytics of the data, that  we understand what the customers are saying and what are the top issues. We can then identify drivers, that would help us to provide preventive support and also highlight to the customers some of the product features that need to be changed in the product configuration, so those issues do not recur. We have a lot of customer who feel good about our analytics led support; in fact we have been rated by one of the top partners by a top analyst firm in an analytics space as leading technology support provider.

To create superlative customer experience it is extremely important to have one view of our customer. This is something we have patented in terms of the framework that we have. A given consumer has multiple interactions in a given day. For example I use face book, I use twitter, I purchase some merchandise in Wal-Mart., I have my own social network on social media, I have some devices on which I do transactions…and of course my professional networking. So you can integrate the number of touch points that the customer has today, when you put a number of such customers together, it will give a sense of directional movement. I am capturing that behaviour, and reverting to my customer, whose consumers these people are, going back to give him insights. We call the framework Active Insights. Giving those insights about this one customer view definitely would help our customers to further expand and enhance their market view.

4. Cloud, mobility and social media are the buzzwords today. Does CSS Corp have any specifc support plans for these technologies?

CSS Corp has been front runner for these techs- cloud, mobility, analytics and social media. Today as we stand, we are one of the premier consulting partners with Amazon. About 6 years back we did start a number of engagements using AWS, which definitely positioned us in a different space. We do assessment services, migration services, and a number of services on the cloud. And we do all of this at the speed the customer would like to have because Time to Market, at the price the customer is happy about, is the customers’ key concern. Of course, the quality of service is key to the experience and we gain because it is reliable and predictable service that they would look for. Since these are extremely business critical applications, they would be moving up to the cloud. And today we can boast of a number of customers that we have onboarded onto the cloud and also provide monitoring services to.

For example for one of the Fortune 100 FMCG companies, we migrated more than 3000 of their websites to the cloud, today we are monitoring them worldwide, with all the efficiency and responsibility that customers look for.

In mobility, we do a lot of work in terms of mobile device testing, management, monitoring, as also ensuring cross platform validation of the number of mobile devices that we have. We have also created an IP we call it SmartWare, which can, onboard any application to a smart phone enabled platform, extremely fast.

For Analytics we have an active analytics platform called Active Insights, it is quite robust and customers are loving it and we are seeing a big traction in that space as well.

5. RIMS   are catching on in a big way, thanks to cloud adoption. CSS Corp has plans of making it a whole support and service segment. How do you think the market for RIMS support stand in India?

First of all, globally infra management services were only limited to the top 3-5 consulting companies that have become really big, till about a few years back. But now customers are very aware, they have learned during the process how to outsource IMS services. They are going for the best of breeds for different set of services in infra, to outsource their services. Of course, in India, the biggest opportunity is to be a specialist in one space in Infra. That gives you the business you need, and there is trillions of dollars worth of business out there.

That is on the global side. But in India, with the new government talking about smart cities, it is going to provide a huge opportunity for many technology outsourcing providers. Primarily because of three things that come as a package, when it comes to smart cities – financial support, the infrastructure support and the technology support. Incidentally, we support all three.

Naturally smart technology support becomes the backbone for many of the other things that need to happen for a smart city to come into effect. This would also mean the huge network that needs to be setup, for the smart city to run. This would also mean a huge opportunity for all Indian outsourcing service providers to cash on

The government is talking about more than 100 cities to be smart cities. I am sure it will be a great opportunity to enter early on and invest into some of those technologies.

6. Today, in the India market, what do you identify as the single biggest challenge to innovation that runs on new technologies?  We could be talking automated support, or Device Integrated & Standalone Proactive & Pre-emptive Support Solutions.

In India I feel we are extremely innovative. There is no dearth of innovation and there is a lot of spirit of innovation, not only in entrepreneurs. Today, students from any of the IITs and IIMs are opting to be entrepreneurs, at however small a scale. They are making big bets on harvesting their own ideas and bringing them to the market. In any technology company today, everyone is excited because   the new government is creating hope, which is helping these companies is targeting the sky. The governance, approval processes, some of those  elements  need to be sorted out, of course there a big plan out there through the digital India movement started.  The people who are running it have done it all, they are driving the whole momentum so I am sure it is going to be done in a  big way and will  move in a way that  is needed for a creative and innovative India, going forward.

7. Where do you see the biggest market growth for CSS?

For us the primary market is US. Almost 85%  of our revenue comes from US, rests from other geographies.

We see this continuing for some time; we are also seeing good traction from the APAC space, especially Australia, china, Indonesia and Philippines.

In terms of services, consumer tech support is definitely the space where we would like to enhance ourselves.  Infrastructure support is going to be another focus area going forward. Of course the new service lines that we have invested  in, in the last few years, is giving us good returns – cloud migration, mobility, analytics. There is another space where we have invested and probably we are the top two in the world, and that is premium tech support. This is vetted  by some of the premium analysts  in the reports. We would like to retaining that position, maybe even becoming number one.

8. CSS Corp has a very strong CSR initiative in place, which also includes wildlife conservation. Do you think enterprises should take their CSR more seriously? Do you see more value to the brand due to CSS Corp, and TIGER  support initiatives to things like the forests and environment?

CSR, in my personal view, is extremely important. Every company needs to give back to the society  that you live in. It should go back the long way, where you live, where your employees are, the investments need to be out in different places.

In India, the govt has been quite flexible in terms of where you’d like to contribute. The recent legislation of 2% of the corporate going on CSR is a great move.

At  CSS, we have been contributing to CSR for quite some time now. There are three areas we have identified for CSR, one is enhancing employability, second is ensuring the eco system is preserved by contributing to eco- waste management and the third is tiger conservation. In all these areas we have invested  a good amount of effort and all employees have been contributing. For example, we trained more than 500 students in TN to make them more employable, and we also hired some of this people who we trained.  For the Tiger initiative, more than 500 cameras have been distributed in many reserve parks in the country to help in tiger conservation; it is adding a lot of value in terms of this contribution.