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| Aegis: Filling the service demand gap |
| Sayantani Kar / Mumbai Aug 23, 2010, 00:15 IST |
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The service industry’s contribution to the country’s gross domestic product is over 50 per cent. The sector is growing at 12 per cent per annum, well above the average GDP growth of 8 per cent. However, the shortage of executives with the right people skills has led Aegis, a BPO of the Essar group, to start the Institute of Customer Experience Management. It will train students in managing ‘customer experience’. The Indian Institute of Management, Indore is partnering Aegis to train students, as are COPC (USA) and SQ Centre (Singapore).
The institute will teach students for 15 months (out of which 11 months will be spent on campus and the rest in the industry). Says Aegis Global Academy President Subir Ghosh: “It is more of an approach from the customer’s point of view rather than an insider’s perspective.”
The trigger for such an institute, which Aegis claims is the first of its kind, came from the company trying to manage the life-cycle of its customers. “We try to make our business less transaction-based and more customer life-cycle oriented,” Ghosh says. The institute will lay stress on students aiming to service a customer through his life-cycle than just sell a service or product.
The 3Cs (customer centricity, customer experience and customer lifetime value) would not only be taught but also used to screen the aptitude of students for entry. The first criterion would be customer-centricity that has around eight measurable attributes such as one’s urge to reach out to strangers in a group and so on. Customer experience is next, which is the experience that a customer takes away from interacting with a company’s products, people and processes. It includes attributes such as customer orientation which teaches how far one will inconvenience oneself for the customer. “If the service manager is about to take his lunch-break and there is a query from a customer that can be solved if he can delay his break, will he do it? This will ascertain that capability,” says Ghosh. The third is customer lifetime value which will deal with the time a customer gets serviced for rather than merely focus on a portfolio of products to sell him. “Take telecom companies, for example. They have a chance to offer value to the same customer from 16 to 60 years of age on an average. But the industry even now mostly works on offers rather than the long-term value to consumers,” Ghosh explains.
Those who graduate could help organisations reorient their approach to products and their delivery. Ghosh notes that around 22 corporate houses have already evinced solidarity for the institute and are eager to chip in with visits as guest faculty once the course begins. There is a ready pool of Essar’s own C-suite who would comprise the visiting faculty. Ghosh also points out the extensive eco-system that Essar is already a part of and which can be tapped for industry insights: “Essar is either a customer or a vendor for most large customer-facing companies. So, we can access its talents for the faculty easily.”
“A vanilla MBA degree is more functional, while this will deal with the right skills needed for front-facing jobs. All these years, people got into the service industry and then went about breaking silos between functions and servicing the consumer. Our students will be ready to service consumers, no matter which industry they opt to specialise in,” says Ghosh. Students can specialise in five sectors: Telecom, retail, information technology-enabled services, banking and insurance. Healthcare and even logistics would soon join the list of specialisation.
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