'SupportSoft is a provider of real-time service management (RTSM) solutions'

-Brad Colwell, solutions director,
Asia-Pacific, SupportSoft

What
are your offerings in India?

Our products ensure that the services have the appropriate level of
automation for installation and background support. So consumers don't waste
time setting up the equipment or configuring things, or dealing with technology
that is not necessary.

We aim to provide
packaged solutions. We have a very good understanding of the business,
especially if you look at our DSP business (digital service provider business),
we are working with the top telecommunications providers in the world. So we can
bring in that domain experience to India. ARPU is declining all over the world.
How will telecom providers cope with that in the future? There is a
telecommunications provider in Belgium-Belgacom. It has about a million
subscribers today. A few years ago, they decided to offer value added services,
and decided they needed some sort of automated installation solution. In Europe,
it is expensive to send a truck to the house, so they went to the market with an
automated installation solution.

Does
automated installation has a market in India, given the labor arbitrage
advantage that India enjoys?

For places like India and China, it is even more critical, but for different
reasons. Obviously, here the labor prices are lower, but when you look at the
target of 20 mn broadband connections in less that five years, what is the
bottleneck in getting there? You can continue to hire labor. But, there is
physical threshold that you will reach. So there is a need for automated
solutions. So that not only is every service technician doing x number of
installations per day, they are going to do x+1 installations per day.

How
will this take care of the need to constantly train increasing number of people?

Let us say there are multiple services in the home. There is a technician
who can handle high-speed data, but next month, the home may decide to add IPTV
or VoIP. But the technician may not know much about IPTV or VoIP. How do you
manage this cross-training. You will need to provide some tools to the
high-speed data person. This is where solutions like network view become very
important.

The technology enables
the network to automatically configure the CPE to receive any of the newer
services, such as VoIP or IPTV, to a customer who is already subscribing
high-speed data. And the more services you add, the more sticky the customer
becomes, and the less he are likely to churn.

What
is your value proposition to the carriers?

India carriers have the challenge of acquiring customers and utilizing their
service engineers more effectively. One of the things they have to look for are
repeated truck rolls. How can they eliminate those truck rolls and shrink the
time required to install the products and offer new services? As a start provide
the customers with an automated installation solution. This is not only about
turning on the CPE, it is about turning on the services, to validate everything
in the PC. Today, this is something the consumers can do even on their own,
provided the house is wired correctly. This is about land grab, trying to
acquire as many new subscribers as possible, and spend a minimum time on those
that have already been hooked up.

So,
you are offering an alternative to CRM?

With our solutions, the agent can also fix the problem, either by guiding
the customer or by issuing a text guidance. We want to provide service in real
time, for that we need information about the customer in real time, whether the
customer is connected or not.

When I call you that I
have a problem, I expect a resolution then, not wait for a truck to roll in to
solve the problem. We offer a level 1 call center operator the ability to
automatically solve the problem without needing a truck.

Alok Singh

aloksi@cybermedia.co.in