At a time when booming e-commerce is leading to disintermediation (elimination of dealers and retailers), Bangalore-based BNA Technology Consulting has launched what it terms as 're-intermediation' through a web-based solution called LivServ.
Once a visitor logs on to a website that is using this tool, he is greeted by a team of agents who engage him in conversation and provide pre-sales support through personalised instant messages.
"With LivServ, we are marrying the direct sales model with intermediaries to create a new form of value-added intermediation to facilitate direct sales. Our solution helps a probable online customer to get answers to all his technical questions (the service that normally a shop assistant would perform) before he buys a products online," says V Ranganathan, managing director of BNA Technology Consulting.
BNA Technology Consulting is offering the solution as a business process service. It runs a BPS contact centre with over 60 trained agents with domain expertise on various sectors to provide the pre-sales support.
A customer - say a credit card company - does not have to bother about the platform on which this technology runs, thus saving expenses on hardware as well as sales agents.
Within two months of its formal launch this year, the company has bagged several clients in different verticals like UTI Mutual Fund, Imtex.in, a machine tool exhibitor promoted by the Godrej Group, HomeStead, the service apartment wing of the Brigade Group, Tanzell (resorts), Shakti Resorts and serviceapartmentbooking.com.
The company is also in advanced talk with a host of companies in the BFSI segment. A customer, which buys the services is given a line of code. The code is pasted on all pages of the customer's websites. According to BNA, by using this technology a customer can typically raise its client conversion rate to 5-15 per cent from the normal 1-5 per cent.
LivServ is an instant engagement tool with presence detection capabilities. The technology is based on instant messaging capability. However while normal instant messaging is usable only when two persons are available to each other online and is only meant for live chart, LivServ is specifically designed to help online buyers with pre-sales
support through instant messaging.
"We have dispensed with the buddy system required for normal instant messaging. Once a visitor enters a website that is using our technology our presence detection technology immediately sends us an alert. Our trained agents are there to welcome the visitor and engage him in live conversation to offer qualified pre-sales services," Ranganathan adds.
Another advantage with this tool is that while in the case of a normal advertisement, a company has limited scope to draw out a detailed comparison between its products and those of its competitors, in case of LiveServ the agents can do so through a personalised chat, the way a sales agents does in a normal showroom.
"When a company opens a virtual showroom on the Internet, there is hardly anybody to support visitors. Since the host company is not able to see the visitors, about 95 per cent of visitors just walk out. With this technology you are capable of creating a virtual showroom which is a replica of the physical showroom," said Ranganathan.
