Capgemini's New Service Focuses on Business Insight

IDG News Service (Bangalore Bureau) — French IT services company Capgemini has introduced a new offering, Customer Care and Intelligence (CC&I), that focuses on aligning clientsâ¬" customer care operations with their overall business objectives, rather than merely improving the efficiency of customer care.

CC&I will become a standalone offering within the companyâ¬"s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) portfolio beginning Monday, the company said. The new offering draws on expertise from current BPO engagements in North America.

As competition heats up in the BPO market, and the CRM (customer relationship management) segment of this market, outsourcers are offering clients a variety of new value-added services ranging from business process transformation to analytics on call center data.

The CC&I service from Capgemini will initially be offered to clients in the energy, utilities, and telecommunications services sectors, which are areas in which CC&I already has industry expertise, Robbie Brillhart, global practice lead for CC&I, said in a telephone interview Friday.

CC&I typically starts with specialty customer queues, and then extends the business and process insights to the volume, commodity part of an organizationâ¬"s customer care, Brillhart said.

Besides providing operational benefits in the customer care workflow, Capgemini also uses business intelligence tools on customer care data to gather information that could help drive growth in the clientâ¬"s top-line through process, price, product or service changes, according to Brillhart .

A utilities company, operating in a regulated environment, for example, had set up a call center that was not proactive and was mainly focused on taking orders. After de-regulation, CC&I helped this client realign its customer care goals to focus on reducing customer churn in its base market as well as to step up new customer acquisitions, Brillhart said.

Using CC&I, Capgemini also plans to get a foot-in-the-door into CRM (customer relationship management) outsourcing accounts held by competitors. Capgemini can either take on the clientâ¬"s entire customer care operation or roll out best practices and improvement to a customer care operation run by a competitor, Brillhart said.

Capgemini will offer CC&I clients a balanced mix of onshore, nearshore, and offshore delivery, including work-at-home agents, to meet various multi-language and multi-cultural needs. The companyâ¬"s skills-based model routes calls to the best-qualified agents.

CC&I currently has more than 2,000 dedicated customer care agents operating from various locations around the world, Brillhart said. It plans to open an additional 600-seat center in Junction City, Kansas later this month.