Venkat G on Moving Customer Care Beyond Service

Jeff Kavanaugh:

I'm Jeff Kavanaugh, Head of the Infosys Knowledge Institute, and I'm here at the Infosys Connect Conference in Los Angeles. Very happy to be joined by Venkat G, who leads our customer care area.

Venkat G:

Nice to meet you, Jeff. How are you doing?

Jeff Kavanaugh:

You bet. Good. Well, unlocking AI value is topic of the day, and I can't think of a more appropriate area than customer care. It affects so many industries. And just jumping right in, what is top of mind for you in the area of customer care as it relates to what AI's doing today?

Venkat G:

So, Jeff, first of all, thanks for this conversation. I think I'd like to answer this with a little bit of historical thoughts and anecdotes, right? And way back, let's say 10, 15 years back, when the mobile web and apps exploded, we all thought that's the death of contact centers, right? Death of customer care in the way that we all faced care in the traditional sense. Fast-forward to today, I think a lot of large organizations still continue to have a big presence of contact center, which are people led. I think for us, really, unlocking value is about how do you drive, elevate customer experience, drive more cash flow. More importantly, move these centers from service into revenue, upside and uplift, and do it all with the best of AI and people coming together. I think that's really the value for us to unlock.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

It's almost like you're moving so much of the company to the edge where these points of interaction are happening.

Venkat G:

See, and one of the things about contact centers is it's always been on the edge. And that's probably the reason why it's been a people-centric one than, let's say, a tech-led. Because as you move from the edge of the organization into, let's say, middle and then into the core, you'd always see heavy tech deployments. Yeah. Part of the reason has been historical. Part of it has been that there were other low-hanging fruits of opportunities to elevate and to optimize and to scale and so on. I think now we are at that right inflection point where technology has matured. There are opportunities for us to go in and bring that edge and make it from a traditional front door into a smart agentic front door, where it's a combination of the best of AI combined with people.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

So beyond CRM, just as a relationship to customer value management or creation, right?

Venkat G:

Yeah, absolutely. And again, it depends on sector to sector. Yeah. If you take sectors like retail, retailers, right? And you take retail banking, yes, it's about unlocking value beyond service. Right? It's about upsell. It's about cross-sell. It's about elevating entire outcomes and driving new revenues.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Well, even manufacturing, though. You have people calling up for parts, people calling up for tech service for cars.

Venkat G:

Right. So in manufacturing, what we're seeing is really a manifestation of B2B, let's say, service. Yeah. Especially heavy industrial manufacturing, discrete manufacturing, you see that out. There, maybe it'll be a little bit of a slow mover. You'll still have people, like a big account, national account calls you, you don't want them to talk to a bot. You want them to talk to the designated account lead or a sales lead. But you could now amplify what outcomes these people do. Today, it's people-centric, from handling worksheets to traditional ways of looking up and saying, "I'll come back. Give me a few hours," to enabling them with complete work beds.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

One-call resolution. Single call.

Venkat G:

Yeah. One-call resolution but bringing them that kind of avatars or what we call digital twins. That's going to help them drive better outcomes. Right? Making those humans super humans in sectors like B2B. And in sectors like healthcare, you'd still see people-centric service, but you'll amplify what the agents in the healthcare, be it the payer, the providers do. Because now you could drive outcomes that earlier would not be done in the first call, or it would take days and weeks, or it could even reduce the entire time it takes to drive that outcome. So I think overall, you're going to see an extremely elevated customer experience. And in certain sectors, you could see an uplift of revenue and retention, too.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

And hopefully less wait times for people that do call.

Venkat G:

Yeah. In fact, one of the reasons for the wait time is really about the fact that it's people-led. Because you can only scale and forecast a certain workload. And it might take longer for that rep to answer a question.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Exactly. So you shorten it. Yeah. Right.

Venkat G:

So think of a world where you could have everything, at least the front office for not so sensitive and complex transactions being handled by bots. It's theoretically infinitely scalable. Right?

Jeff Kavanaugh:

No, it's like, "When's my flight? What's my balance?"

Venkat G:

Yeah. So we call it like when is or what is or can I as those things that can be completely automated. Right? And there are different strategies that work well. It's about traditional, better digital technologies like web and app that goes better. Apps have become crowded, menu-driven. In a world that's conversational, people want to have it interactive and have it fluid. It's paradoxical because the more that you want to put in, the worse it gets. So you want to have to simplify it.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

So design elegance.

Venkat G:

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Sometimes that's where the Nordics design of simplicity and elegance plays over and above more and crowded. So going back, I think one is you'd see that strategy really continue to be there. But it's about doing what we call active outcomes. Starting with deflections to agentic automation right then and there in the call. Because sometimes not many customers like getting deflected to another channel. So you're going to see a lot of focus around that. And I think the real value to unlock is going to be about being predictive and proactive. You build intelligence so that you can anticipate customer need. What is customer care? The real North Star vision of customer care is delivering outcomes to customers without they even realizing that they had a need for it. I think you got to go there, and you could see a lot of investments happening around these strategies. We have a very clear point of view that we are starting to take to customers that's resonating well, and it's going to be a balance. It's going to be heavily tech-led, but let's not forget, it is going to be people as an important constituent of the solution. So it's going to be AI-led with superheroes of humans coming in.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Given that dichotomy, where is tech getting in the way of the people-led?

Venkat G:

See, I think in many ways it's not tech that's the fundamental problem.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

I mean, like interoperability, integration, dirty data, things like that. Yeah.

Venkat G:

I'll come to that, and it goes back to what Peter Drucker used to say, right? "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." So when you go there, it's about execution, it's about time. But within the tech paradigm of the question, I think the fundamental problem is around two or three broad areas. Data continues to be a nuisance. For example, the other day we were talking to a large customer, and we were talking about, "Hey, why are you having this kind of volume of contact center?" And they said, "Okay, let's look at where the call analytics is." And a third of their calls have what is called no code, meaning they've not yet been able to scientifically, in a legacy, non-AI way, been able to determine why these calls were there. So imagine a third of your data doesn't have the right tagging. So what you're going to do is going to impact only the rest of the data, and the question is, how good is the data quality? So I think that data continues to be a huge challenge because this is data on the edge, and it's across channels. That's one. Second, as you said, integration, and integration to complex systems. As you drive your outcomes of automation from simple what ifs and can I into explain to me why I was partially done. It's like saying, "Okay, what's my bill?" Versus, "Why is my bill high?" are two questions in the same domain, but one is at a level of very simple to the other one being the most complex query.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Why didn't you get back to me?

Venkat G:

Yeah. Yeah. No. Why didn't you get back is probably an easy answer, but why did I get a partial refund?

Jeff Kavanaugh:

That's what I meant. But why- Right?

Venkat G:

Yeah. It's reasoning-based.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Yeah. It's human.

Venkat G:

It's multi-system data and information being analyzed, and so on. So it's about integration to complex systems that's going to become a problem. And the third is a lot of these ideas are not yet at scale. So as you deploy them at scale, you're going to have what we call enterprise challenges, which is performance. You're going to have security and guardrails, which is obviously a very important foundation. Latency. And the other element is how does tokenomics kick into all this? And so I think we are early days, but very exciting days for us to go in and explore and make this a new wave.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Contact centers or customer care centers, AI, we've got to talk about people. Is it the people plus the AI? Are people working for the AI? Are the people not even around? How is the future of this playing out?

Venkat G:

I think, to be honest, you'll see a combination of all of that. I think, as in fact, Jensen Huang said, "It's not about AI that's the challenge. It's about people with AI versus people without AI." I think that's really going to be the new paradigm. But having said that, I think it's also important we keep our feet on the ground. Extremely low-value functions are going to get disrupted. The question is, what does the organization or the brand or the product do with those people? A lot of our customers are starting to say, "Okay, how do I elevate what people are doing?" You are going to see companies that are having cash flow challenges wanting to reduce and optimize. You are going to have a good number of those organizations. But a lot of our customers, actually Infosys customers, are fairly healthy organizations who look at, yes, optimizing people within this function, but redeploying them into other needs of the organization. Traditional attrition, redeploying them into higher-value customer service outcomes. You're going to see all of that. So depending on sectors, you're going to see AI-first with people. And in certain sectors like healthcare, you're going to see people still continuing to be a critical element.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Augmented.

Venkat G:

But with AI.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

All right. Well, listen, I know you've got to get back to the conference. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it.

Venkat G:

Wonderful, Jeff. Nice meeting you you once again. Thank you.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

I'm Jeff Kavanaugh. Until next time, keep learning and keep sharing.