New technologies being tested in the value-added services space could help mobile operators cut costs in hiring additional call centre agents and scaling up call centre operations, as they foray into rural India and attempt to service India’s estimated 300 million subscribers in the coming years.
Location sensitive billing, paying customers to receive calls or texts and interactive media portals are just some examples of the recently-announced value-added services being employed by mobile operators to differentiate themselves in the wireless market.
OnMobile, an Infosys-incubated company that provides SMS, WAP and GPRS solutions to 110 million telecom subscribers belonging to Hutch, Airtel, BSNL and all other major telecos in India, estimates the value-added services market (especially voice-based) to grow at a rate of 100 per cent and touch Rs 1,000 crores in the next 12 months.
The company will be taking customer-level automation to the next level and sources indicated that either Hutch, Tata Teleservices or Airtel could be one of the first operators in India to introduce a new "customer self-care technology system" in their call centres in the next three months. Speaking exclusively to this newspaper, OnMobile’s co-founder Arvind Rao said, "Speech recognition is a complicated technology. This system will use speech recognition to automate routine call centre interactions with high customer satisfaction and will enable telecos to reduce the cost of call centre agents. Calls made to call centres are toll free and telecos have found that the it is difficult to scale up call centre operations in addition to hiring additional staff to serve the ever increasing subscriber base. We are currently testing the beta stage of the product and will introduce this system in multiple languages in the coming months.".
Location sensitive billing, paying customers to receive calls or texts and interactive media portals are just some examples of the recently-announced value-added services being employed by mobile operators to differentiate themselves in the wireless market.
OnMobile, an Infosys-incubated company that provides SMS, WAP and GPRS solutions to 110 million telecom subscribers belonging to Hutch, Airtel, BSNL and all other major telecos in India, estimates the value-added services market (especially voice-based) to grow at a rate of 100 per cent and touch Rs 1,000 crores in the next 12 months.
The company will be taking customer-level automation to the next level and sources indicated that either Hutch, Tata Teleservices or Airtel could be one of the first operators in India to introduce a new "customer self-care technology system" in their call centres in the next three months. Speaking exclusively to this newspaper, OnMobile’s co-founder Arvind Rao said, "Speech recognition is a complicated technology. This system will use speech recognition to automate routine call centre interactions with high customer satisfaction and will enable telecos to reduce the cost of call centre agents. Calls made to call centres are toll free and telecos have found that the it is difficult to scale up call centre operations in addition to hiring additional staff to serve the ever increasing subscriber base. We are currently testing the beta stage of the product and will introduce this system in multiple languages in the coming months.".