Bengaluru, Karnataka, India: CSS Corp, a new-age IT services and technology support company, today announced that it has won the Gold Stevie Award in the ‘Contact Center & Customer Service Outsourcing Provider of the Year 2020’ category at the 14th Annual Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service. The awards were presented to honorees during a gala banquet on Friday, February 28 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, NV.

CSS Corp was awarded for emerging as the premier outsourcing services provider at the awards. Over the last few years, CSS Corp has been investing heavily in enhancing its capabilities as an end-to-end managed CX services provider, leveraging best-of-breed technologies, and has become a strategic partner of choice for global brands with its business transformation-themed services. Leveraging new age technologies like AI, automation, analytics and augmented-reality, CSS Corp has transformed customer support from an effort-led to an intelligence-led ecosystem. Customers of CSS Corp have been realizing tangible outcomes through CSS Corp’s differentiated outcome-based and gain sharing models which have helped them in their transformation journey.

Speaking on the occasion, Manish Tandon, Chief Executive Officer, CSS Corp said, “global outsourcing brands look for partners that can synergistically bring together best-in-class technology, operational and people expertise, and flexible business models, to drive outcomes for them. I believe over the past few years, CSS Corp has positioned itself as a leader in partnering with reputed organizations and driving outcome-focused CX transformation for them. We are extremely proud to win the Gold Stevie award as the world’s leading outsourcing service provider while surpassing some of the industry’s biggest names at the awards. This award is a testament to our continued pursuit of service excellence driven by our values of customer centricity, deep tech innovation and spirit of partnership with our customers.”

CSS Corp’s presence as a global leader in providing exceptional customer service has grown over the past two decades. It has built a world-class delivery ecosystem through digitally-infused operations, and an award-winning talent development platform. The company drives B2C and B2B customer experience and technical support services. In the last 2 years, CSS Corp has emerged as the industry’s most awarded mid-tier global services company with over 35 international awards.

The Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service are the world’s top honors for customer service, contact center, business development and sales professionals. More than 2,600 nominations from organizations in 48 nations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were evaluated in this year’s competition. Winners were determined by the average scores of more than 180 professionals worldwide on seven specialized judging committees.

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CSS Corp is enabling leading mapping companies to accelerate POI extraction from geotagged images through AI-ML led automation

While navigating using a mobile device, we often select a source and a destination that are well-known and frequently visited places, such as hotels, apartment complexes, tourist attractions, corporate offices, etc. In mapping parlance, these places are called points of interest (POI). Most location-based applications and services need accurate POI data to serve their users effectively. Among several ways to capture POI data, extracting it from geotagged images is one of the most popular. Geotagged images contain geographical metadata like latitude, longitude, and place names, etc.

However, mapping companies often find it challenging to get detailed POI data generated from geotagged images accurately. Fierce competition in this field has created a demand for high quality and freshness of POI data. It necessitates using efficient processes that bring reality to the maps in real-time or as soon as possible.

A leading mapping and location data platform provider was under immense pressure to scale their services and capture the market share rapidly. A critical component of their services was seamless POI extraction from field-collected geotagged images while maintaining quality and accuracy benchmarks. Done manually, this process can be tedious and time-consuming. CSS Corp was able to support them through rapid deployment of trained resources at scale, empowered with an assisted automation approach, that accelerated the time-to-market for their services. It leveraged its proprietary Geo.Intelli system which uses artificial intelligence for automated extraction of POI data from geotagged images, resulting in faster and efficient processing.

Geo.Intelli is a smart GIS system that automates the geotag extraction for POI location from images and leverages NLP to check the completeness of POI or address name. Its AI-ML based APIs automatically extract the relevant data from images, perform a quality check on images, and reject images that are blurred, non-geocoded, or in invalid format. To ensure high accuracy, the system automatically cross-validates the extracted data with reference source data like area, city, latitude, longitude, and ZIP Code. It also allows for multiple POI addition from a single image.

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CSS Corp a new-age IT services and technology Support Company, today announced that it has won the Silver Stevie® Award in the “Innovation in Customer Service in the Telecommunications Industry” category at the 2018 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service. The results were declared during the award ceremony on Friday, February 23 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada. CSS Corp was acknowledged for its deep expertise in enhancing customer experience and improving top-line revenue based on the customer insights generated by support operations.

The Premium Tech Support (PTS) platform from CSS Corp was recognized for its industry-leading innovation and unique value proposition. The platform enables Hi-Tech and telecom companies to launch customer support operations faster, infuse intelligence into interactions, and drive additional revenue opportunities. PTS encompasses pre-built telecom specific domain offerings, 360-degree customer context, intelligent process guidance, and actionable insights that enhance customer interactions.

CSS Corp’s PTS platform is built on a revenue-sharing framework that transforms cost centers into profit centers and converts non-revenue generating customer queries into revenue streams. Using the platform, customers also have the flexibility to add new services to the platform and augment their existing portfolio. The platform leverages AI & analytics to gather deeper customer intelligence and proposes the best services and products that drive additional revenue.

Speaking on the occasion, Manish Tandon, Chief Executive Officer, CSS Corp said, “Our relentless focus on improving customer engagements has helped us to rapidly innovate for our customers and yield powerful and measurable impact to their business. Being a new-age services company, customer experience and revenue generation through digital has been our core focus, and we constantly endeavor to deliver contextual intelligence to our clients that helps them transform their cost centers into profit centers.”

“We are thrilled to be recognized by Stevie, for the second time in the last 6 months. We will continue to innovate and push the envelope to ensure our services blend with our customer expectations and drive business value.” he further added.

More than 2,500 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were evaluated in this year’s competition. Finalists were determined by the average scores of more than 150 professionals worldwide, in seven specialized judging committees.
About CSS Corp

CSS Corp is a new age IT services and technology support company that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence, automation, analytics, cloud and digital to address customer needs. The company partners with leading enterprises to help realize their strategic business outcomes. Its team of 5,500 technology professionals across 16 global locations are passionate about helping customers differentiate and succeed. For more information, please visit www.csscorp.com.

About The Stevie Awards

Stevie Awards are conferred in seven programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards, The International Business Awards, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 10,000 entries each year from organizations in more than 60 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at http://www.StevieAwards.com.

 

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CSS Corp, new-age IT services and technology Support Company, today announced that it has been recognized as a ‘Leader’ in NelsonHall’s Cognitive Customer Experience (CX) Services NEAT 2020 report in the CX improvement capability market segment.

The report analyzed and evaluated the performance of 14 global CX service providers, against a two-axis dynamic metric on their ability to meet future client requirements and deliver immediate benefits.

CSS Corp harnesses the power of cognitive technologies, intelligent automation, data analytics, and deep learning to power its world-class CX services.

The company stands tall as a distinguished industry player in combining technical innovation with strategic delivery excellence to drive successful business outcomes in CX operations for its global clients across industries.

NelsonHall’s report recognizes the unique combination of CSS Corp’s home-grown cognitive platforms and services that empower their customers to tremendously accelerate growth and profitability, provide delightful customer experiences, and eliminate unnecessary effort by leveraging cutting-edge technology interventions.

“Today, clients expect service providers to leverage emerging technologies for simplifying their CX operations and delivering tangible business outcomes. CSS Corp’s ability to proactively address these demands has made us one of the most recognized global service providers in the industry. Our robust strategy and expertise in cognitive technologies to streamline CX operations, has not only created positive business transformation and overall customer delight for our clients but also led to huge strides towards pioneering the next wave of disruptive technologies. We are glad to have been recognized as a ‘Leader’ by NelsonHall in their flagship report. It is yet another testament to our state-of-the-art technical innovation and CX services in managing large-scale operations for our customers in the burgeoning CX ecosystem”, said Manish Tandon, Chief Executive Officer at CSS Corp.

“In a competitive environment, continuously moving up the CX benchmark, CSS Corp has strong capabilities to predict and pre-empt technical support issues. Its position as a Leader in cognitive CX services NEAT 2020 for CX improvement is a testament to its deep IT and digital expertise to augment agents with proprietary cognitive tools and models and enhance live interactions by bringing additional value to the customer conversation”, said Ivan Kotzev, Lead Analyst at NelsonHall.

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CSS Corp has held a ‘Computer Literacy Program’ at a Government Girls Higher Secondary School in Chennai from January 11 to February 2, 2018. This initiative is done to engage the students in Digital Literacy for which they carried out various training programs and set up a computer lab in the school.

CSS Corp’s objective is to reach out to students to augment their computer knowledge. The entire CSR activity was executed with the involvement of CSS Corp employees.

Keeping the CSR initiative in mind, they conducted engaging sessions with the students led by the employees. The activities involved:

• Training and conducting workshops on safe internet usage for higher secondary students
•  Populating useful tips on importance of safe disposal of e-wastes to higher secondary students
•  Career counselling on their overall development for 8th and 9th grade students
• Setting up a computer lab with 25 refurbished desktops & UPS

In the past, they have also conducted digital literacy programs for Grade – 11 students for close to 2000 students across schools in Chennai like Government higher secondary schools at Perungalathur, Tambaram, Saidapet and P. K Government Higher Secondary School at Ambattur.

 

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Over the past few weeks, the coronavirus outbreak has made us realise how interconnected the whole world is. With an increasing number of cases of the deadly illness raising fears of a global pandemic among people, the impact of the shutdown across the world has started to hit the tech industry of the country.

At the time of writing, there have been more than 400,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with more than 21,000 deaths; along with more than 140 countries and territories have reported coronavirus cases, and the international stock market has witnessed the biggest dip since 2008.

While we are talking about the reeling impact of the virus on human life, the massive disruption in the analytics industry is also worth mentioning. According to Pravin Rao, Nasscom vice-chairman, also the COO of Infosys, the IT sector is going to see some indirect impact with the sudden outbreak of this global pandemic — COVID-19. In fact, economists have estimated that this virus outbreak could potentially reduce the global GDP by almost 0.3%.

This coronavirus outbreak is acting as a reality check of the fragility in the systems of doing business and the uncertainty associated with it. It has already caused significant disruption throughout the tech industry, with huge tech conferences and trade shows cancelled and companies expecting to miss their revenue forecasts. Additionally, the virus is shaking up business and consumer behaviour on a massive scale.

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In the early days of computing, demands from business stakeholders pushed the evolution of technologies as new capabilities were built to order.

Over the last decade, technology has shifted from demand-side to supply-side economics. The emergence of capabilities first dreamed of by technologists, not business strategists, has moved IT from an enabling capability to a differentiating one.

In my view, 2018 will be about striving to realise tangible outcomes from the transformative initiatives happening across organisations today. Global brands are looking to leverage technology to beat their competition and serve their customers better.

There are some underlying megatrends that will drive these initiatives in 2018.

 

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The term optimisation is not only mathematically important but also closely linked to any business. Everyone aims to optimise the way things are executed, processed, or delivered. For a given problem, there is always going to be the best way among the many possible solutions or approaches, and this is usually referred to as an optimised solution. Here are a few examples of business optimisation:

• The one-way airfare between New Delhi and Bangalore is INR 5000. There are nine flights scheduled every week with a seating capacity of 120 to 340, depending on the plane type. The average occupancy per route is 150 passenger seats. Research shows that if there is a 3% reduction in ticket cost, then the occupancy is likely to increase by 12 passengers, on average. The constraints are plane type, occupancy rate, scheduling, time, and discount offers. The value of fare that can maximise the revenue and profit with the given constraints is a classic example of an optimisation problem.

• A tech support business servicing a large global client has daily incoming calls in the range of 20000 to 35000, in a 24 x 7 mode. The support staff is equipped to handle seven languages, and work can be executed in four different centres. The cost of operations varies in each region, and the tech-support specialist/engineers’ availability also has certain limitations. The setup of this project’s operations is another such case of business optimisation with the given constraints.

To solve any optimisation problem, there are three main fundamental elements that one needs to understand.

1. The single numerical quantity or objective function: It forms the goal of the problem. This objective function must be either maximised or minimised. The best fare for travel is an example of minimisation.

2. The variables and attributes associated with the problem statement: Their values can be varied, and their impact is likely to be observed on the objective. In the tech-support business, some of the variables are incoming calls by time-day-language, availability of right skills in each centre, cost of operations per seat, attrition rate and calls by technology-module pattern.

3. The constraints: There is no business without constraints. Most of the constraints can be mapped to a combination of time, cost, quality, and tools & technology. Understanding the restrictions and limitations of a constraint can help in solving optimisation problems.

In the context of optimisation, a heuristic is defined as a method driven by rule-of-thumb without any specific procedure. A metaheuristics method is designed by leveraging more than one heuristic methods and thus inheriting all heuristic methods’ characteristics. Natures inspirations, such as ants searching for food, wolves hunting their prey, the formation of water droplets, diffusion of two chemicals, cell formation, the attraction between electrostatic objects, gravity, have resulted in the ‘Metaheuristics Algorithm’.

Metaheuristic algorithms’ adoption rate is surging in engineering, finance, retail, healthcare, insurance, and biomedical science. The optimisation is a critical factor in solving business and engineering problems. These algorithms can be summarised as a form of stochastic optimisation (an optimisation method that generates and uses random variables) independent of the surface gradient for optimisation. Most of these algorithms are inspired by different sources of nature and evolved from a purely mathematical model to a highly intelligent method of solving problems. Metaheuristics, along with machine language, is gaining wide acceptance in solving complex problems.

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It was in the early 90s when the Internet was made public. It changed the course of human life. Just like the Internet, Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to alter the world.

Moreover, it has started to play its part. Many organizations have and many are adopting and planning their infrastructure in order to create an IoT architecture.

With further expansion of the IoT architecture along with Cloud IoT architecture comes the question of its security and safety. As IoT architecture is a complex body with many layers attached. Thus, its safety becomes crucial.

Here we have leaders of the industry on how they plan to secure Internet of Things architecture and tips to keep it safe to give you a better perspective on your own system.

 

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CXOs are increasingly recognizing that stepping up their digital game would lead to more efficiency, innovation, and customer satisfaction. But the problem is, ‘where does one even begin?’ Experts recommend, it begins by mapping your digital customer experience journey – which is pretty much like a road trip. It helps brands in understanding their customers’ needs and behavior that can help improve the brand’s product or service.

In an exclusive chat with CXOToday, Vivian Gomes, SVP & Head – Marketing & Inside Sales, CSS Corp., discusses why mapping your digital customer journey is becoming more important than ever in the current scenario, the key challenges and opportunities in this space and how brands can develop their customer journey map, going forward.

Why is digital customer experience getting more important given the current business scenario?

Since the onset of the pandemic, the relevance of creating no-touch experiences has become even more apparent. The entire ecosystem today is evolving around virtual operations, especially, in the B2C context. Customers are becoming more empowered and self-service is a rising trend that is seeing applications in many fields as an enabler in facilitating seamless customer engagements. With this changing business landscape, mapping the customer journey becomes critical to creating digital experiences that will differentiate.

How and why is it important to map your digital customer experience journey?

Businesses today are dealing with digitally-savvy, conscious consumers whose purchase priorities and buying behavior have changed. With the digital highway wide open, brands are understanding the importance of using modern, new technologies such as real-time messaging tools, AI, automation, chatbots, and self-service among others to remove friction from customer interactions. Mapping the digital customer journey becomes imperative to ensure that customers receive a seamless experience and any impediments along the journey are removed.

What are the biggest obstacles companies are facing around digital customer experience?

Digital customer experience is a goal that is easier said than achieved. The key to providing best-in-class CX is personalization, which relies on gathering intelligence about the customer context. This calls for smooth and efficient data capture mechanisms and analytics-led decision making. With so much dark data that is not being used and functions operating in silos, organisations are still grappling with data ecosystems that are yet to mature. Also, many companies are caught in the web of technical debt which prevents them from creating agile infrastructure ecosystems needed to engage today’s consumers effectively. Finally, structuring CX calls for a cultural and mindset shift in the organization. All this takes time as there is an inertia that impedes progress.

What are your recommendations to CXOs looking at designing their CX strategy?

If we look at the evolving technology landscape, cloud technology, data analytics, AI, automation, and other next-gen technology enablers, which were considered cutting-edge before, have become table-stakes today. It is not only important to create a holistic plan to weave in these technologies into the overall strategy, but also to create champion change agents who will be willing to adapt to change and drive it at the grassroots levels. It is also important to build the right digital infrastructure that can support omnichannel experiences.  Lastly, mapping the customer journey to create frictionless and empathetic brand experiences should be the way forward for companies.

It’s important to be mindful of trends in the digital customer experience space so that CXOs can quickly adapt their strategy to meet the latest industry insights and create an effective customer experience. In this video, Gomes talks about the recent trends in the digital customer experience space.

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