Here is a company that is challenging Verint and Nice with its contact center solution called Zivah. Chennai-based BK Systems has developed a product that is aimed at enhancing the efficiency of call centers. Since his college days, K Balakrishnan, the company's MD, wanted to do something different. He is passionate about R&D. He started BK Systems in 1993 and focused on IVR solutions.

During 1990s, MNC banks were ramping up operations and looking at ways of improving customer services through telebanking systems. BK Systems targeted this area and positioned its solutions in the telebanking space. Says Balakrishnan, "In order to create a niche in the IT space, one needs to identify a core domain and specialize in it, and hence we focused on products." Over the years, BK Systems has deployed telebanking product for leading banks like Oriental Bank, UTI, and IDBI.

Soon BK Systems started looking beyond telebanking solutions. The company looked closely at the BPO space, more specifically on contact centers. Here quality is of paramount importance, and the effectiveness and efficiency of the contact centers are determined by their First Call Resolution (FCR) rates.

	"Zivah addresses issues that are specific to today's contact centers, and the product can address FCR in a holistic manners"
	K Balakrishnan, MD, BK Systems

Addressing FCR
Today there are global products that take care of several of the processes of the call center, but arriving at peak FCRs has always been an issue. Here is where Zivah makes a difference, says Balakrishnan. Unlike competing products, Zivah enables call center agents with real-time tools that allow them to address customer needs on the very first call, thereby leading to greater FCRs.

For instance, when a call lands up with an agent, he might not be able to resolve all the queries of the customer. So, the customer needs to call back to get his unresolved queries answered. This scenario happens due to lack of information. Traditional logger and QM tools try to work on the logged information, analyze it, and try to identify the reasons why a set FCR has not been met. The in-built proactive tools of Zivah provide the real-time contextual intelligence to agents while attending to customer calls. One of the pro-active tools Zivah provides is the inbuilt messenger through which the call center agents can raise queries to their team leaders or managers, and while having a live call can resolve issues effectively by running a parallel session internally.

Says Balakrishnan: "Zivah is a total in-house development. The entire design and development was done by our core product team. From the beginning we wanted to develop a product that goes one step above competing products. To achieve this, that we mapped the key requirements of contact centers and looked at the abilities of the existing products in the market. After studying the needs we came out with a product that brings in distinct competitive advantage to contact centers." The company confidently says that Zivah addresses issues that are specific to today's contact centers, and the product was built around addressing FCR in a holistic manner. When contact centers are able to address customer queries at the very first instance, they are closer to achieving their objectives.

The product was officially launched last year and the company claims that the initial results have been good. But to arrive at a critical mass, the company needs to showcase it to the larger industry about the real merits of this product. Says Balakrishnan: "The ongoing year is very important to us as we believe that we will reach a critical mass in terms of deployments of Zivah."

Zivah is a daring initiative in the highly competitive contact center solutions market. The market is driven by global players who have products deployed across the world. Given this, one of the key challenges for the company is reaching out and convincing the IT decision makers that their product is superior one and tailored to the Indian market dynamics. India so far does not have a great products story, as it is dominated by global giants like SAP, Oracle or Microsoft. While there are very few companies like iFlex who have carved a niche for themselves, one only hopes product initiatives like Zivah, take off in a big way.

Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in