CIM is the fundamental building block to provide customer centricity

How beneficial is Customer Interaction Management (CIM) systems as compared to other tools available?

CIM is not a tool or a software or a technology. CIM, like CRM, encompasses the philosophy, design, technology deployment and people and process deployment that enables an enterprise to interact with their customers. Therefore there is no 'other tool' available as a 'substitute' for CIM-everything an organization does in the space to achieve a desired objective in their interaction process is CIM.

CIM provides a process and mechanism for customer communications and is the fundamental building block to provide customer centricity. CIM solutions allow businesses to interact with their consumers, capture conversations across all the channels of communications, and convert those precious nuggets of information into meaningful customer knowledge all in real-time. All this, in effect, can help organizations validate business strategy in the most meaningful manner possible, ie, through capturing customer experience at the moment of truth. Apart from making interactions better, it creates a positive brand experience.

What are the major innovations and major technology trends you see in the CIM space?

All kinds of evolving technologies impact the CIM space. Both the technologies within the core interaction domain like speech recognition or video IVRs and adjacent technologies that have a much broader footprint like voice biometrics and IP are examples. Within India with its diverse and multi-layered population, the simple IVR itself is driving an evolution away from face-to-face interactions and transactions to achieve the same results remotely. More and more functionality is offered on the IVR and the IVR itself is getting more sophisticated with some players introducing speech recognition. At the other end of the spectrum, the web is gaining ground as an interaction medium amongst those who have internet access. Banks are pioneering this drive by completely removing the need for a customer who has an internet access to visit the bank.

Where does Servion stand in the Customer Interaction Management domain?

Servion is an end-to-end specialist in the CIM domain with skills straddling multiple dimensions. On the services side, we offer capabilities from sophisticated consulting, design and R&D to break fix maintenance and everything in between hosted offerings, managed services, system integration, customized application development and so on. We have the capability across all the technologies that drive customer interaction with the ability to work with multiple vendors within a technology offering.

Akanksha Singh

akankshas@cybermedia.co.in