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By Root 6820 0

the voice work once done over long-distance fiber-optic phone lines or via satellite has now shifted to text messaging over the Internet. Moreover, 24/7 Customer no longer just waits to receive calls about problems. “It’s all proactive now,” explained Kannan. “Now, when a customer goes online and, say, opens his phone bill or cable bill from the company we are working for, we know about it. Today most of the customer questions revolve around bills that they are looking at online. We know from our software that it is the first bill you have been sent by this cable or phone company. You thought you signed up for a $99.99-a-month cable package and the bill is for $278.00. We can track when you opened your bill online, and if you keep it open for more than two minutes a little dialogue box will pop up and say, ‘Would you like to discuss your bill?’ One of our operators will then interact with you online. This requires a very different kind of operator. So now when we recruit people they have to have the savvy to link things together, and they have to be able to multitask—to know what you are looking at, be sensitive to the context of the dialogue, and then pull up all the relevant information quickly and resolve the problem. So the way we recruit now is that we invite candidates to take an online test where all of this is simulated.”

Seven years ago, when Tom visited the 24/7 Customer office in India, most of the employees there “were entry level,” said Kannan, whose company is actually headquartered in Campbell, California. “They had to stick to a written script, and they were afraid the minute someone got them off of it. A supervisor would randomly listen to the calls of agents and then give them feedback or help them with a customer … Now the software we have is predicting what the consumer is doing, so we don’t need so many supervisors, because technology is now following what our operators are texting, while they are texting! Today what I am most interested in knowing is what else did the customer have issues with, what services did they seem to be looking for. So we ended up transitioning many of our supervisors into new jobs that we created that revolved around analyzing data. These are better-paying jobs, but they require more skill. So we picked out the supervisors who had the science and math degrees to make the transition, and the others we kept as supervisors.

“A call center never employed Ph.D.’s—now I have an army of them, trying to analyze all this data,” said Kannan. “We started doing this about four years ago, but 2010 was the big crossover year.” Now, instead of looking just for people whose jobs will involve answering the phone or making phone calls—of which Kannan still employs many—he’s also looking for statisticians, psychologists, and Ph.D.’s.

“What we ultimately are hoping to do is combine in the same person the technical talent to understand what the data is telling them and the service skills to deliver the new services that the data says people want,” Kannan explained. “If we learn from the data that 80 percent of consumers who receive their first bill from a mobile company or cable are going to pick up the phone and call, we also now know exactly how to service them. It means the agent who deals with them is much better prepared.”

Kannan said, “Everyone in the chain makes more money now because we are able to charge more money, because we are delivering more value to our clients. And people are also much more satisfied with their work. You’re not just calling people hour after hour, trying to sell them a credit card. Now we look for employees who have their own Facebook profiles, who are adept at writing little blogs and have real comfort living and interacting in that online world. The old workers who showed up and just read off a script—a lot of them are gone.

“We want people who have a completely open mind,” he added, “and then the ability to learn constantly and challenge the status quo—no matter what the level of the company where they are employed. Challenging the status quo is the most