RailEnquiry

The onset of 2013 has—as is the norm—raised the question of which technologies will be hot this year. But lost in this talk is one important trend: How Indian enterprise are putting almost all other priorities second to customer engagement. That trend showed up in the State of the CIO Survey, with 47 percent of Indian CIOs saying they plan to complete projects that strengthen IT at the customer engagement front in 2013—a 15 percent rise from last year. S.S. Mathur, GM at the Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), is halfway down that road. The increased use of Web services and smartphones has raised the Indian Railways customers’ expectations. As a result, it’s increasing the stress on CRIS’s systems by 30 to 35 percent a year, he says, as more functions come online. “Because of the increase of Web-based transactions, we are looking at reducing the number of resources every process needs by 50 percent by the end of 2013,” says Mathur. Catching Up with Change Accenture’s Technology Vision report for 2012 suggests that services that combine real-time signals from the physical world with contextual inputs will be a big hit in the Indian subcontinent and will drive customer demands to a new high. As if on cue, many large enterprises are already catching the wave. At Bausch & Lomb, India’s market leader in eye healthcare business, Director-IT, Shuchi Nath Nagar, has found a solution to keep pace with these demands. Two years ago, Nagar realized that the company’s sales representatives were struggling to build a 360-degree view of the company’s customer. “The problem lay in the non-integrated, structured and unstructured activities, such as transactions, meetings, calls coverage, call schedules, survey results, and communications. So, 2013 will be about looking for a complete view of all customers interactions, across channels—and bringing them on a single platform, such that our brand lives to the expectations at all customer connect points,” says Nagar.He devised a customer engagement infrastructure with a wide range of apps to study his customer base at a deeper level. The apps capture operational data such as the time customers spend looking at products or observations made during an interaction. “This data then drives our content development methods,” he says. Mathur at CRIS is handling the situation a little differently. “It’s important to focus on strengthening the first stage of the customer purchase cycle. This is a crucial stage where the customer realizes his need, searches for information, and even evaluates alternatives,” he says. “As online transactions have gone up considerably over five years, we found that the front end is a crucial factor to rejuvenating site performance. Today, the website performs over 12-15 lakh transactions every month for reserved tickets and over one crore transactions for unreserved tickets. However, we still see over 20 lakh failed transactions every month. And that’s why we have begun to strengthen the middleware that supports our ticketing front-end.” Mathur realized that the old code was designed for a limited number of transactions. A robust middleware allows an increase in the number of concurrent customers using ticketing service. Multiple Customers, One Challenge One of the trickier parts of enhancing customer experience is trying to personalize a company’s offerings according to different segments. T.S. Purushothaman, VP-IT at Reliance Big Entertainment, supports the IT for the company’s various services across diverse segments including movies, music, sports, gaming, Web portals, etcetera. But that impressive amount of work involved doesn’t deter him. In fact, he’s using it as an opportunity to cross-sell products./p> However, from cinemagoers, to Hollywood producers, to Internet gamers, Reliance BIG’s customer profiles vary drastically across business functions. Customer profile information sourced from multiple databases can get too wide-edged for a deep and quick analysis of customer needs. “I will be working at making these data warehouses relevant and fast to ensure that the transactional systems scale up as per the new world’s requirement,” he says. The Indian Railways’ customers, too, are varied and include passengers, freight customers, parcel shippers, and others like advertisers, which is why Mathur has employed systems to analyze who his customers were. Segmentation helps. “We have tried to profile customers with similar demographics and psychographics in a single database. Demographics and psychographics (interests, food preferences, location preferences for advertisers) together provide valuable insights into our best customers,” says Mathur. Real Time Service Increasingly, businesses have shown the need to capture more real-time information to meet customer demands. As a CIO of a company that’s deeply into wholesale distribution and exports, Ajay Tyagi, DGM-IT at Relaxo Footwear, feels that customer service without real-time control over the supply chain is a half-baked effort. “In the retail business, systems that quickly respond to retail demands (mainly replacements and exchanges of footwear) at sales outlets are a must. The fact that your competition is able to quickly cater to a customer’s demand to exchange a product, whereas you cannot, is a warning sign that you are lagging. This can only be made possible with a transparent and real-time view of all retail outlets,” says Tyagi. Not surprisingly, CRIS’ Mathur has channeled the existing infrastructure to make it more agile to face similar demands. Dynamic changes in customer demands are worked into the system. For example changes in freight rates need software modification. However, a rules engine is being developed so that such changes can be handled through a workflow built into the system. So the effort is to move software and system modifications down to a set of pre-designed workflows for frequent changes in functionality. Shweta Rao is correspondent. Send feedback on this feature to shweta_rao@idgindia.com