The cost to serve customers is increasing, competitive pressures are intensifying, and the customer care industry needs to strike a new balance between cost and customer experience. That was the view of Sukant Srivastava, Convergys MD and country manager, India, at this week's FT Outsourcing conference.

Srivastava said that cultural change is required in the shift from human voice to automation, and the associated move from reactive care to predictive/analytic care and continuous improvement – both of which changes he seemed to suggest were inevitable.

Indeed, he painted an immediate future for customer care outsourcing of multichannel self-care technologies and virtual/secret agents, which he described as “the next level of self service, remembering customer preferences, correcting the experience in real time”.

Pressed by sourcingfocus.com about whether there is any hard evidence to suggest that customers see automation as representing an improvement in customer experience, Srivastava was not able to supply any research; indeed, he seemed to suggest that more technology was the answer to the question – a form of self-perpetuating and -fulfilling market cycle. This suits relationship management, customer care and employee care specialist Convergys, which has 75,000 employees. $2.8 billion revenues, and a claimed one billion customer interactions annually.

The flaw in the customer experience, conceded Srivastava, is when customers receive different experiences across different channels, adding that “when technology is employed in a very static and mechanistic way [it] creates a negative experience”. Many companies have not kickstarted any investment in creating the much sought-after 'single view' of the customer (the Holy Grail of the CRM world), because it requires an overhaul of their IT systems. Inevitably that would entail a significant upfront investment, which is hardest to do in an economic downturn when people look for the short-term certainty of the slashed cost base.

Nevertheless, “the biggest thing” for clients, he maintained, is still “how do we become more proactive in anticipating customer needs? Our conclusion is that the global customer care companies are going to have an edge,” he said.

Srivastava finished by saying that “an agent is going to become an advisor”, and that self-care technologies will do the donkey work of managing customer interactions.