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Even as the voice/non-voice debate made many of the large customer service companies look at other services for "growth" and "margins", vCustomer continued with its commitment to customer care. It believes that the "services" component in what is today the top favorite of BPO companiestransaction processingwill continue to get diluted and get fully automated. Customer care, on the other hand, means caring for your customer, and that can never be done without some service elements.

That does not mean that it is afraid of automation; in fact, automation is the core differentiation strategy of vCustomer. While traditional call centers have played on the IVR to make them more and more intelligent, vCustomer has now significantly invested in what it calls the next wavevoice portals based on voice recognition. At the same time, more customer service is happening on the Web, and self-service is emerging as a fast growing opportunity. vCustomer has now created solutions that integrate these two.

More disruptive, however, is its bundled solutions (developed in-house) and services approach. A customer signing up for that would not have to pay for licenses for packaged software, and can get that at one-tenth of what he paid for licenses. By doing so the company has thrown an open challenge to solutions vendors. It is just few steps ahead of what other BPOs call the platform approach.

It has also taken the consulting path to understand and create customer care solutions for clients specific needs. That is possible because it is focused on two industriestechnology/telecom and retailthat it believes will provide significant services opportunity for a long time. Most of its clients like MCI, HP, Cisco, Netgear, Linksys, FingerHut, and Target are from these two verticals. It is trying to develop hospitality expertise too.

In India, vCustomer maintains a low profile. But, despite that, it has scored high on employee satisfaction surveys such as DQ-IDC Best Employers survey.

vCustomer, like most customer services firms, is excited about Indias domestic opportunity and has already got a few clients in the consumer and insurance industries. DQ

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