Customer service is everything a company does to help a customer who gets in touch with it, usually because something has gone wrong. A UPI payment fails but the money leaves the account. A parcel does not arrive. A new phone comes out of the box with a cracked screen. The customer then calls, chats, emails or sends a WhatsApp message, and the company must answer. The industry also calls this customer experience, or CX.
Most of this work runs on software that companies buy from specialist makers. It falls into three groups, and each group is a zone on this page.
The first is the contact centre. In India it is usually called a customer care centre. A large one is a floor of hundreds of agents answering calls, chats and messages. Contact centre software sends each call or chat to the right agent and records it. Other products plan the agents' shifts and score their calls. Conversation intelligence turns every recorded call into text and checks it, instead of a supervisor checking only two or three calls per agent a month.
The second is the help desk. Here a support team answers in writing. Each customer email becomes a numbered ticket, with a priority and an owner, until someone answers it and closes it. Help desk software holds that queue. Customer success software then looks after the customers who have already bought, so that they do not leave.
The third is reviews and customer feedback. Many customers never contact the company at all. They leave a one-star review on Google, or rate a chat from 1 to 5. Software collects these reviews and ratings, replies to them and reads them in bulk, to find out what customers think.
Across all three, software now answers more and more of the contacts itself. A voice bot answers a phone call with no person on the line. An AI customer service agent can also act in the company's systems, for example to book a refund. The industry has always priced its software per agent, a licence called a seat. Some new products charge for each problem solved instead, as explained in SaaS pricing models. One more idea runs through all of this: omnichannel service, which means handling one customer's call, chat and email in one place, with one history.
India matters to this industry in two ways. Indian engineering centres build a large share of the world's customer service software. And Indian outsourcing companies, which run customer care for other companies, run a large share of the world's contact centres on it.