Jerry Gregoire, former CIO of Dell Computers, once said, “Customer experience is the next competitive battleground.” With a number of services and brands flooding the market today, it is the customers’ experiences that swing the profit pendulum towards a particular company.
Corporates have, in the last two decades, begun to understand that customer is king. This has inevitably led to the mushrooming of customer service centres — not necessarily BPOs — in different industries. And the economics of demand and supply dictates that the academia will not be far behind in lending support to this young sector.
This is exactly what AEGIS Global Academy had in mind when they recently established the Institute of Customer Experience Management (ICEM) in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. It’s the only institute in India and, perhaps, the world over that offers a course in customer experience management.
“Customer service is defined as the sum total of the interactions of the customer with the organisation, process, people and physical involvement. In customer experience management, we actually look at winning the trust and loyalty of the customer,” explains Subir Ghosh, president, AEGIS Global Academy.
Meeting expectations
“When a customer buys something, it is about meeting some expectations. These expectations have to be understood, managed and delivered. There is usually a gap between what the customer expects and what he gets,” says Ghosh.
For the first-of-its-kind venture, Aegis group chose Coimbatore, since it’s the education hub of Tamil Nadu. “Coimbatore is perfect. It has an ecosystem that is conducive for studies — well-connected, good infrastructure, safe and not too many distractions for students,” he explains.
The 15-month PG certificate programme is all the more pertinent to a service economy like India. The service sector contributes to nearly 55 per cent of the GDP and is growing at a rate of 12 to 13 per cent annually.
If customer experience is so
important, why has it been ignored by the academia so far? “Today, the customer life is more important and longer than the product life. But customers’ experiences have been ignored. Many management schools are still in the FMCG mode,” explains Ghosh. He’s quick to add that since the service sector only proliferated rapidly in the last four to five years, the educational institutions may not have had the chance to update their syllabus.
A unique course
Spread across 30,000sqft, ICEM is barely two months old. The current batch has 30 students from different parts of the country. “Customers are definitely given more importance at a global level. But there is no specific course that specialises in customer experience management,” says Sanjay Rawat, academic head, ICEM.
“There are courses in HR, marketing and so on. These are important to a company’s survival but it cannot run without proper customer management,” adds Ghosh.
Test of abilities
Admissions are based on an entrance test called ‘Star Profiling’ that measures the candidate’s attitude towards customer care. This is a video interactive test wherein the candidates pretend to work for a company. The test runs for almost an hour where each candidate is given 30 different roles from various sectors. For instance, if you’re a receptionist attending a phone call, what would you do when someone approaches you for help? The candidate is given multiple options to choose from but there are no right or wrong answers.
Intensive internship and training
Since AEGIS, ICEM’s parent company, is in the BPO field, they have the expertise to teach students customer care management. “At ICEM, we teach students to look at business from the customer’s point of view. This is
important because today a customer decides what he buys and also how much he should pay for it,” says Ghosh.
The course is divided into 11 months of classes and a four-month internship. The syllabus was designed by the faculty with inputs from organisations like IIM-Indore, Service Quality Centre, Singapore, and Customer Operations Performance Center, USA, an international authority on service-chain operations management.
It must have been a challenge to design a system to teach something as empirical as customer care management? “Not really. We have included all subjects that are essential to develop a strong theory base. Most management graduates learn the theories but it takes at least five to seven years at a job to implement them. So we decided that students need to practice what they learn during the course itself. Hence, the four-month internship,” explains Rawat.
Apart from the six faculty members, guest lecturers from IIM-Indore and other industries will also address the students. “This will definitely develop a new learning curve,” says Rawat.
Students are evaluated on their performance in quizzes, class participation, case studies and exams that will be held at the end of the semester. Around 10 days in a month are spent in practical work. Students visit companies in various sectors like retail, banking, insurance, telecom, IT-ITES (Information Technology Enabled Service) and health care.
They spend time observing and understanding how a company works and also interact with customers. Later, they make presentations to the companies in which they give suggestions on how the firms can serve their customers better. “Their scores are based on the feedback from the companies. Their performance will depend on the number of suggestions that have been accepted by the company,” says Rawat.
Role-playing helps them
An entire semester for training is another high point of ICEM. “The uniqueness of the institute lies in its training of students in various industries,” says Rawat. Students get to choose their verticals — retail, banking, insurance, telecom, ITES and health care. During training, they assume the role of business managers and work in operations and customer-centric
departments. The companies decide the project topic students should take up based on the challenges they face.
Infrastructure
The college is equipped with five A/C classrooms that can accommodate around 300-350 students. The campus is wi-fi enabled. There is a library with more than 15,000 books at the moment. There are also discussion or break-away rooms for the students to get together within the campus. There are separate fully-furnished hostels for men and women.
Placements
“After they graduate, students start as junior assistant managers in the service sector. They begin with an annual salary of Rs 3.5 to Rs 4 lakh depending on the industry they are working in,” says Rawat.
AEGIS Global Academy is looking at starting three more campuses. “The service sector is in need of people who understand the customer as well as the industry. That is exactly what we are giving them,” says Ghosh n
Tailor-made solutions
AEGIS has been in the field of customer care and acquisition for three decades. Initially started in the US, it is a part of ESSAR Global. The company came to India in 2005. AEGIS manages customer interaction through call centres, non-voice interactions, back offices and other customer-centric processes. They’re present in 42 locations and are backed by a 39,000 employee-workforce. The corporate headquarters is in Mumbai. The company’s core verticals are BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance), telecom, health care, travel and hospitality, consumer goods, retail and technology. AEGIS specialises in tailor-made solutions that cover the entire spectrum of customer and business experiences — across business processing, technology, and shared services — and offers customized engagement models to further facilitate the ease of doing business.
—janani@expressbuzz.com