Volume 3 | Issue 3
The Dynamic Cloud That Helped Kent’s Customer Service Saurabh Gupta Chief Information Officer, Kent RO Systems Limited
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The Dynamic Cloud That Helped Kent’s Customer Service
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Why the Hybrid Cloud is Taking The World By Storm
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Cloud Accelerator Program
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Why the Hybrid Cloud is Taking The World By Storm - By Daya Prakash
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The Dynamic Cloud That Helped Kent’s Customer Service
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Cloud Accelerator Program
From the team at CCKC The prime objective of this newsletter is to provide CIOs with actionable knowledge in relation to Cloud Computing and to cut through the hype and share insights which are grounded in experience. We believe sharing your journey to the Cloud will help your peers adopt Cloud with more openness and confidence. For further information, feedback, and suggestions on the Cloud Computing Knowledge Circle, email us at: cckc@cioindia.org
The Dynamic Cloud that helped Kent’s Customer Service
Kent RO Systems Limited, best known for its Reverse Osmosis water purifier products, has revolutionized the water purifier segment since its inception in 1999 from Noida, India. From humble beginnings, Kent has slowly built its business through innovative products to emerge as India’s largest and most trusted water purifier brand with an over 30% market share in the segment. Their products, apart from the most popular water purifier systems, include technologically advanced healthcare products such as Air Purifiers, Vegetable and Fruit Purifiers, as well as Water Softeners. Kent RO System’s CIO, Saurabh Gupta, is an IIT Delhi alumnus who heads the Kent IT operations encompassing IT Strategic Planning, Budgeting, Resource Planning & Management, Procurement, Office Automation, and IT Infrastructure. He has spearheaded the company’s IT revolution to a resilient Cloud-based CRM system. Gupta is a technocrat with 15+ years of experience in varied areas of business operations and is also an avid gamer!
IDENTIFYING THE DREGS IN THE SYSTEM The most critical step before embarking on a system-wide change is to identify the problems that plague the existing system. Kent’s list of issues were:
Distributed Data: One of the greatest challenges Kent faced during its fastpaced growth stage was having data that was decentralized. The plethora of data to be maintained for the customers, the call logs to be maintained by agents, and the details of end user resolutions was fragmented. This made monitoring and analyzing data cumbersome.
Change is the heartbeat of growth, and at Kent RO systems, the trigger to move to the Cloud was their vision to make their IT systems future ready to match their projected business growth. With a customer base of over 2 million and counting, their earlier infrastructure was not designed to handle the increasing number of end users, be it customers, 1200+ franchisees, service engineers, 300+ call centre agents, or corporate users. The need of the hour was a robust and dynamic Cloud-based CRM system that would be role-based, scalable, with multiple access points, and available 24X7. It was time for some serious cleanup! Today after their Microsoft Dynamics CRM on Azure adoption, they have a totally different story to tell, a story with a happy ending!
Lack of role-based access: With different kinds of end users (customers, service franchisees, dealers, call center agents, service engineers, and corporate users), information needed to be shared on a need-to-know basis. Hence a system with multiple access points was proposed.
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Scalability: With growth picking up pace, the existing IT system did not scale well to its user base of 2 million customers, 1200+ service partners, and 300+ call centre agents.
Availability: For the successful resolution of a customer issue, it’s imperative that all stakeholders have information that is always accessible, current, and consistent. The existing systems did not meet these business needs.
Kent’s multi-step refinement story After due diligence and evaluation of the solutions offered by various vendors, it was time for the most competent partner to step in, aiding Kent’s Cloud adoption. Microsoft became the partner of choice not only for implementing their Enterprise hosting solution via Azure but also for their CRM (Dynamics) adoption owing to its extensive feature set and user-friendliness. The CIO asserts that the reasons for partnering with Microsoft went beyond just the technical core competencies of their Azure and Dynamics offerings. Gupta adds, “What set them apart was their willingness to provide support for Kent, the geographical advantage of having an India-based data center, and the support provided during the implementation phase.”
Stage 1: Getting over initial hiccups An implementation as large as Kent’s couldn’t have been without any teething issues. The two main issues that Kent faced were:
Stage 2: Leveraging mobile technology to improve reach and availability Dynamics on Azure now forms the
Data porting - Porting the massive database – which was distributed and offline – was cumbersome. However, the problem was expertly managed by the implementation team and the data was efficiently integrated into the new systems. Go live - Because of the sheer size of data and multiple stakeholders involved, it took a lot of planning and meticulous detailing for going live. Training all the stakeholders, getting the infrastructure and application ready and further syncing the activities so that end users didn’t have to suffer because of this migration were the key considerations.
Business Partner
core of Kent’s IT system and provides access to different users via multiple interfaces. Leveraging the advantages that mobile apps provide, Gupta and team have developed apps specifically for their service engineers, customers
Analytics
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Corporate User
Call Center
Once these issues were resolved, the call center went live last April and Kent has never looked back since. Service Team
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Customers
and franchisees, apart from supporting the traditional browser based access. Customer app is available on both iOS and Android platform while other apps are available only on Android platform.
Stage 3: Quantity with Quality
From a fledgling small team of inhouse call centre agents prior to their IT makeover, to an outsourced model with 300+ call centre agents, KENT has grown concentrating on core areas and outsourcing others. Since transfer of technology from their implementation partners last June, Gupta has ably led his 35-member team – comprising 13-14 application developers and a dozen infrastructure support staff – to ensure a smooth transition. Managing a system that averages a mind-boggling 10,000 customer cases per day pan-India is no child’s play. Even though the cases logged look huge, in the CIO’s words, “It’s just a meagre 0.5% of our 2 million+ users”. Given the numbers, it comes as no surprise that Gupta prides himself for having partnered with Microsoft to successfully deploy one of India’s largest Cloud-based CRM solutions. “An implementation that couldn’t have been done better”, is how Gupta sums it
CLOUD ADOPTION: TEST THE WATERS OR TAKE THE PLUNGE!
up. Definitely a feather in the cap for both the CIO and the Microsoft team!
Stage 4: Crystal clear focus on customer satisfaction at Kent At Kent, the adage “Customer service is the new marketing” is taken quite seriously. The Azure adoption, besides addressing Kent’s biggest concerns of “Scalability and Availability” has enabled their systems to become more efficient and productive. The end user experience has gone up by several notches as follows:
Service Engineer: The service engineer, by using the Cloud interfacing mobile application, updates the case logs and upload customer feedback all from the customer premises. This has helped Kent to address customer complaints in a time-efficient manner. An earlier 8-hour turnaround time in the Delhi NCR region now is at a new average of 3 hours. Quicker response times translate to happier customers and higher throughput.
with the customer details once an order is placed (http://rfi.kent.co.in). The call centre gets notified about the new service request and the customer get notified about the installation scheduled.
Customers: For a product-based company, customer is King! Kent has made sure that they provide their customers with easy access to maintain their products via a customer-specific mobile app and a browser-based portal (http://customer.kent.co.in) . In addition to the app, the customer also has access to call center via chat or by dialing 92789 12345. Ease of use of the app, as well as regular and real-time updates have gone a long way in improving their customer satisfaction index. We tried it ourselves and the registration process on the web was truly user-friendly! In a nutshell, the new approach has not only improved sales, customer, and dealer satisfaction but also improved the company’s operational efficiency and competitiveness in a hard fought market.
Business Franchisee: The dealer’s access to the centralized system has smoothened out the post-sales installation process. The dealer now takes on the onus of placing an installation request along
Gupta is a strong advocate for Cloud adoption. Over and above its ability to provide businesses with easy and agile deployment, Cloud implementations helps to cut IT maintenance costs especially for expense centers. His word of advice to his peers who are still sceptical about the cost involved in adopting Cloud is - “The reason why I support Cloud is the difficulty in revamping the hardware inventory very frequently to keep it current. The 3 year ROI always works out cheaper if you outsource than the cost of managing a system in-house including redundancy, AMCs, cost of people of manage the systems, backups, data security and other costs factored in.”
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Why the Hybrid Cloud is Taking The World By Storm - By Daya Prakash Cut to today, we see business-critical applications in the enterprise environment on the Cloud.
Over the past few decades, the Cloud’s burgeoning features and capabilities have made most CIOs virtually giddy with excitement. Historically, email was the first public offering to be put on the Cloud.
These days, there are many flavors of the cloud to choose from — private, public, or hybrid. As the name suggests, a private Cloud is one that’s set up within boundaries of the enterprise and communicates with internal IT systems. It is 100% owned and managed by the enterprise, and its users are largely internal. On the other hand, the public Cloud is a service extended to enterprises by a service provider. Case in point are cloud offerings like Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service — meaningful offerings created and offered to the public via a public Cloud.
And finally, hybrid cloud is a healthy combination of both of the above models, and “uses a mix of on-premises, private Cloud, and third-party, public Cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms.”1 Simply put, it is a set of infrastructure and apps partly governed by the enterprise and partly subscribed through the public domain. As evidenced by reports brought out by the IDC, Gartner, and Forrester Research, the popularity of the hybrid cloud has only grown over the last decade.
So why exactly is the Cloud suddenly taking the world by storm?
The way I see it, there are 2 factors contributing to the success of the Cloud: 06
1. Maturity in adoption: Both from the service provider’s end, as well as adjustments taking place in the regulatory end. Lifting of restrictions imposed by government authorities and regulatory bodies has resulted in an overall development and maturity of the whole ecosystem. 2. Innovation: Today, many players are bringing in innovative solutions to the computing problems of the vast majority (be it B2C or even B2B users). Some classic examples of this innovation are RedBus and Bookmyshow — had such apps not been around, one would have to physically visit the venues to book relevant tickets. Such e-commerce apps bring about ease of use, ‘click of a button’ convenience, and eliminate the hassles that existed previously. These e-commerce ventures have given us choice at our fingertips! On a scale of 1-10, the industry-wide cloud adoption at this point is between 5 & 6, and is growing at a rate of x + 20%. This weighs heavily on the fact that the Cloud contributes unique solutions and an enhanced value proposition to its users.
Why Hybrid Cloud adoption is on an upswing: When Cloud adoption increases, hybrid Cloud adoption increases right with it. Let’s look at some of the reasons for this:
1. Investment: SMBs find it much easier to adopt public Cloud (for areas like HR, Finance, Marketing, Accounting), as the flexibility of the offerings allows them to purchase what best suits their need. Large enterprises already have a heavy investment in IT infrastructure, and can’t do away with private cloud internally. That’s why large organizations are perfect candidates for contributing to growth of the hybrid Cloud.
2. Sensitivity of data - This is another crucial factor aiding in the adoption of hybrid Cloud. Compliance and regulatory challenges specified by statutory bodies stipulate that companies have to keep sensitive data on premise, in a secure manner. However, as mentioned above, such regulatory requirements are slowly being eased out.
3. Captive team: Employees whose skill sets have been nurtured and developed on existing IT systems by their companies cannot be let go off.
These factors are now compelling large enterprises as well as SMEs to look for something innovative on public Cloud. What’s more, we are gradually seeing an increasing footprint of public Cloud within the enterprise or enhanced ratio of public in hybrid Cloud environment. This increase is fueled by the advancement and innovation of Cloud offerings. With refresh cycles every 3-4 years, enterprises are being given an opportunity to relook at what to maintain on private Cloud vs what to move out to public. The trend is to move slowly and gradually onto public or hybrid Cloud, thus making the overall IT footprint very lean.
The way forward: The trends in the IT industry point to the development of microservices and containers, which in itself will fuel Cloud adoption.
But what do I mean by microservices and containers?
Take an organization’s HR function, for instance: there are activities such as employee recruitment, appraisals, leave calculation, salary calculation / payroll processing etc. Each of these functions can be broken down into multiple sub-systems — and could be treated as a microservice in itself. When these
The author is Executive Director at CIO Association of India and Ex-CIO of LG Electronics.
microservices are aggregated and put in overall containers, it becomes a Cloud offering. Thanks to these and the other factors mentioned above, I foresee overall Cloud adoption only increasing in the coming years, ultimately leading to higher adoption of hybrid Cloud.
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Cloud Accelerator Program Industries all over the world have recognised cloud computing as the way forward and are turning to it for their communication and collaboration requirements. Microsoft is working on an innovative program to help you better reap the benefits of cloud computing and incorporate it seamlessly into your IT strategy. Microsoft has three main tracks to help you begin your cloud journey: Track 1
Strategy - This is the beginning of the process which focuses on senior decision-makers of the organisation. Microsoft will present a special brief to help them understand the benefits and aspects of working on the cloud. Track 2
Planning - Once the leadership is convinced of fully exploring cloud capabilities, the next step is to plan a migration process. Whether a quick cloud assessment of your company needs or a detailed adoption blueprint, Microsoft will help you chart your cloud implementation process. Track 3
Tapan Garg Founder and CEO CIO Association of India P1, Gem Wellington Old Airport Road Bangalore 560017 E: tapan@cioindia.org W: www.cioindia.org
Getting Started - Microsoft’s advanced migration service will ensure that your organisation’s infrastructure and application move seamlessly to the cloud. Now your organisation is ready to go! To know more, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/india/datacenter/cloudaccelerator-program.aspx
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