Astra Netcom India ::: solutions

Email Response
At Astra, We strive to build exceptional customer relationships for you by guaranteeing high- quality responses. We follow four guiding principles in responding to your customers.

Data Intensive Response We work with our clients to build or deploy exhaustive knowledge bases and response templates. We insist that we be periodically updated about relevant business issues and decisions taken by the client, to enable us to respond better to the customer. Our customer care specialists are taken through rigorous training sessions, which orient them to critical aspects of the business such as web site structure, OLTP systems, key elements of customer service policies and overall cultural orientation. We believe that all of this is vital to delivering a high quality, "best in class" response solution for our clients.

Robust Process Design The process workflow is designed to cater to diverse situations. For typical queries, our extensive knowledge base enables us to access concise and accurate responses. Exceptional problems are escalated first to Astra's Quality Editors and Team Leaders and subsequently to the client, using a carefully designed escalation process. This process is designed to ensure a quick response time and does not allow escalation to "fall through the cracks" due to lack of ownership.

Strong Quality Orientation At Astra, quality is a vital independent function. Our Quality Editors ensure that responses are framed in a structured form and are accurate and complete in all respects. They also facilitate quality delivery through random checks and real-time assistance to our customer care specialists. Our quality team runs periodic quality programs and initiatives including quality circles which focus on building process efficiencies and improving overall quality and productivity of the delivery team through ongoing process redesign.

One Contact Resolution We strive to anticipate the customer's next question and attempt to make the first response as comprehensive as possible to ensure one contact resolution. Our customer care specialists are measured in terms of the number of repeat messages they need to process from the same customer and for related queries. We encourage minimization of number of contacts - it has a beneficial impact on both customer satisfaction and processing costs. We believe that we are well positioned to deliver a strong value proposition to our clients, in terms of
- Consistent quality.
- Substantial cost efficiencies.
- Round the clock support.

Real Time Chat
Real-time chat solutions provide significant advantages over other web based consumer interfaces. It is an immensely powerful tool to build strong customer relationships and to facilitate e-commerce transactions. Given that two-thirds of shopping carts are abandoned before they reach the purchase stage, an intermediate option of real-time, collaborative chat is likely to play a vital role in impacting final purchase decisions, and hence revenues.

In an online world, where all transactions seem mechanized, real-time chat provides a human alternative. It enables highly trained customer care personnel to respond in a customized way to specific queries that an e-customer may have. It also significantly shortens the lead-time to customer interaction. Through an easy-to-use, text based communication format, the e-customer is at liberty to conduct discussions, ask questions, request transactions and physically transact with your online company representatives. Chat also presents a powerful tool to instantly respond to customer complaints in a courteous and warm fashion.

At Astra, we offer specialized chat services to augment your web site and strengthen your web based customer interaction. Our specially trained customer care specialists can interact with your customers on a real time basis. Armed with "best-in-class" chat applications such as eShare, these online representatives can dramatically transform the customer experience and shorten the selling cycle through tools such as personalized text chat, multi-media interactions, online complaint resolution and OLTP.

Instant response to customers Voice
Visitors to your web site can initiate a chat session by clicking on a "chat" icon. Our special team of chat specialists will instantly engage the customer. Selected after extensive training, after having demonstrated the presence of mind and customer skills that are so vital for successful chat, these representatives would interact with your customers through a text-chat window. These representatives would be monitored by trained team leaders who would break into specific chat sessions where:

-	Complexity of customer queries is high.
-	Quality of response of our customer care specialist is not "up to the mark".
-	The customer demands escalation.
-	The representative requests for help.
-	You are assured of quality through our ongoing monitoring process, which supports real-time escalation when required.

Further, evaluation systems for our delivery team are structured to ensure high quality performance, especially for chat applications.

Voice Capability
A productive call happens when a confident customer service agent responds to a customer's needs accurately and efficiently. The call will exceed the customer's expectations, will reinforce the company's brand positioning, and will leave a customer feeling satisfied and valuable.

Astra is voice capable. We believe that a blended contact center offers very high value to your ability to present a comprehensive service format to the customer.

We use quality-of-service parameters such as service level, average speed to answer, calls in queue, calls offered, abandon rate, and agent occupancy in order to assess performance, and, consequently, to enhance customer satisfaction.

Our world-class technology and communications infrastructure provides us a leading edge in servicing customer needs. Multiple E1 circuits, top of the line ACD with a 48 channel solution retaining the ability to record on demand according to predefined schedules and real time quality monitoring, incorporating several levels of redundancy through optical fibers and satellite links ensure absolute reliability.

This technological advantage, coupled with a proven record of delivering outstanding customer service, makes Astra an ideal co-sourcing partner.

Knowledge Management
Converting customer data into customer information and customer knowledge is critical for effective customer service support on the web. At Astra, there are two planks to approach knowledge management: .Providing "right information" to the customer, and using customer knowledge to "treat customers right" .The process of knowledge acquisition begins with Astra appointing a program manager to work on a customer project. Each project goes through an elaborate transitioning process driven by the Program Manager.
The deliverables from a transitioning program are:

-	Understanding the customer's vision, mission and e-Consumer profile.
-	Imbibing the culture of the customer's organization so that Astra functions as a seamless extension of the client's Customer Service group.
-	Design of workflow to access client's OLTP systems and to enable customer response; in parallel, establish processes for reporting and escalation. Imbibe "Best Practices" from the customer.

"Answering questions right".
The program management team works closely with the client's customer service team to evolve a list of exhaustive FAQ's after studying email archives, reviewing underlying business processes and conducting extended discussions with the customer service team. These are converted into standardized templates in consultation with process owners in the client organization. Program Managers then go on to build training modules on client business, processes, FAQ's and transfer the knowledge to trainers who impart training to customer care specialists. Our focus on detail, quality documentation and extensive client interaction ensures that knowledge and people are integrated seamlessly. Consequently, the delivery team is equipped to "answer questions right".

"Treating customers right".
Over time, our team gets involved in data mining, based on past customer queries and eCommerce transactions carried out by the customer. This enables them to access customer history databases to provide customized responses to individual customers. In addition, special escalation channels can be defined for specific customers or queries based on empirical records. Over time, this enables creation of robust customer and query databases, which can be profitably used to design marketing programs, drive product development efforts, update FAQ's and enhance productivity and quality of the customer response team. This provides the basis for customized interactions with customers.

eCRM architecture
As businesses become customer centric, an integrated approach to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) becomes imperative, especially in a scenario of web-centric customer interaction. Traditional customer management typically suffers from various drawbacks, which inhibits both quality and timeliness of customer interaction. Using sophisticated eCRM tools such as EMS, real-time chat applications, OLTP systems, extensive knowledge bases and customer history databases, we strive to provide a robust process and technology architecture to address these drawbacks and enhance the customer experience. In addition, we strengthen customer databases available to our client and provide significant consumer insight to drive their sales and marketing programs. Over time, this translates into increased revenues and reduced processing costs.

Traditional customer management is extremely people-intensive and therefore, by definition, likely to be inconsistent and costly. We partner with our clients to map out customer interaction processes at a high level of detail. We set out response guidelines in terms of format and content, define escalation protocol, integrate customer and transaction databases, provide structured training programs to our people and use "best in class" technology architecture to ensure standardized, high quality customer interaction in a high productivity production environment.

Traditional customer interactions also tend to work with incomplete data and are not always fully accurate. Our knowledge management expertise, coupled with an ongoing effort to update and upgrade customer and query databases ensure that we provide real time information to customers. In conjunction with our focus on one contact resolution, this drives completeness and accuracy in our interaction process with customers. We strongly believe that our experience in delivering customer interaction solutions enables us to architect highly robust customer interaction solutions for our clients.