NelsonHall recently visited CSS Corp’s contact center in Chennai, India to learn more about its operations and its current focus on developing its premium technical support services. The center opened in July 2010, supports 28 clients (primarily in the high tech and telecoms sectors), and has ~2,200 employees providing customer care, technical support, premium technical support, and analytics offerings.

Agent recruitment & advancement

In terms of agent recruitment, CSS Corp hires from colleges, and has a summer training program that sees approx. 65% of program participants go on to become CSS Corp employees. The hiring profile includes engineers and non-high tech customer care agents.

CSS Corp is working to address customer channel shifts from voice to chat, and this is reflected in its recruitment priorities. In recruiting customer care agents for chat work, CSS Corp is initially more focused on typing accuracy than speed, and requires candidates with typing speeds of just 20 words per minute minimum. Ideally, agents progress to 35 wpm, but speed is not a deal breaker.

Hired agents typically spend 12 months with the company before advancing to premium technical support, and currently there are ~380 CMS agents at this level. CMS agents can move up to engineering, enterprise, and applications positions, and these advancement opportunities are used as an incentive at recruitment time. CSS Corp has ~400 engineers trained in IoT and ‘smart home’.

Technical support initiatives

CSS Corp’s technical support initiatives include:

• Increased focus on automation, omnichannel, and analytics
• Increased focus on inbound sales, especially for a high tech electronics client
• Using social media (Facebook) to update customers of high tech clients in an effort to reduce calls to contact centers
• Encouraging collaboration with other providers to deliver strong premium level customer care – e.g. when other service providers are closely involved in providing support services to the customer, CSS Corp premium support agents will call the other provider(s) and conduct a joint call until the customer’s issue is resolved
• Focus on revenue generation for clients – e.g. in providing white labeled premium technical support for a global networking company, CSS Corp is working with the client to move from FTE-based pricing to outcome based-pricing.

CSS Corp’s premium support offerings are built on its Active Delivery Framework, which is supported by a suite of proprietary tools including:

• Active Edge – a social CRM and knowledge management tool providing agents with a full omnichannel CRM view of interactions in voice, email, webchat, and social media formats. This offering is not licensed as a stand-alone, but this could change in future based on customer demand
• Active-I – a support augmenting tool with proactive fault detection and resolution, asset intelligence, and call scheduler support
• Active Insights – a platform solution providing analytics and business intelligence support. It provides a unified view of the customer, and an analytical engine for insights and recommended actions, in an effort to drive cost reduction and revenue growth.