Uday Challu and Vishal Dhar have been driven by billion-dollar dreams since they co-founded tech support company iYogi in 2007. Today, they are brimming with confidence at moving towards that goal, thanks to Digital Service Cloud, their cloud-based repository of customer information. Fortified with more than six million customer interactions, DSC has helped iYogi get a huge spike in subscriptions, and a 210 per cent up in revenue per subscriber.  

We started iYogi as the first tech support company based out of India with one main idea—to massively scale it into a global consumer services brand. We saw a growing opportunity to create a company that could be worth a couple of billion dollars in revenue and have millions of customers. From the very first year, in 2007, we focussed on what we want the company to look like in 10 years and we started doing things that will take us there. 

Initially, we concentrated on providing tech support to the US only. In 2008, technology support was a $30 billion market in the US alone and we wanted to focus on that. But, we knew we wanted to expand to UK, Canada and Australia as well. This meant that we had to scale our infrastructure in India very fast to be able to provide tech support remotely in different countries. So, in the first two years itself, we hired 500 people. 

But we realised that with the proliferation of technology products—smartphones, tablets, laptops, printers, smart TVs—and the increase in available softwares—operating systems, applications etcetera—it was impossible for any one of our “Yogi”, the tech support person, to have the knowledge base and competence to efficiently resolve all service requests they receive from our consumers in a day. 

This traditional model of providing tech support depended too much on one person’s ability to resolve tech problems. Certainly, it wasn’t the solution for us. We wanted all our tech experts to have a uniform skill set  and technology to fix problems across multiple devices and software applications. So, 2009 onwards, we started working towards standardising the tech support delivery process by documenting the customer interactions—user’s problem and the provided resolution—in a cloud-based platform Digital Service Cloud (DSC). 

What we also did was use DSC to manage a customer’s life cycle. We would capture all details in DSC about the consumer, their tech devices, the software applications they used, their network provider details and usage behaviour. Keeping a track of customer’s history drastically reduced the time required to resolve their queries and helped maintain a personalised relation with them. So much so that 50 per cent of our customers moved to multi-year service plans. This also increased the average lifetime of our subscribers by 66 per cent. 

We continuously worked to automate this platform by keying in more and more consumer queries. With every request that is keyed in it, this platform only gets smarter and helps improve the quality of service delivery. Till date, we have provided tech support to 13.5 million incidents. And, our product team of 200 members has automated almost 50 per cent of the incidents in this platform. Digital Service Cloud now supports over 500 software applications, 35 different hardware devices and 15 peripherals (scanners, printers etc). 

This huge knowledge base has resulted in a better resolution rate in solving customer problems. Ours is 20 per cent higher than the average industry rate, even the large computer and software manufacturers are at 50-60 per cent. 

Also, in 2010, we leveraged this platform as an opportunity for additional revenue generation. We started partnering with retailers, OEMs, anti-virus companies, independent software vendors to market their products to consumers. Since we knew about the user’s technology ecosystem, we could suggest to them the additional products they might require from our partners. 

In next few years, 25 per cent of our revenue will come from DSC.

This is a great opportunity for us to convert the tech support service request into a revenue opportunity. This has increased our revenue from each subscriber by over 210 per cent. In all, now 35 per cent of our total revenue comes from this revenue stream. Such high numbers made us realise the potential of this portal. 

Globally, the market for cloud applications is expected to be over $250 billion by 2020 as per Forrester Research with the India market estimated at $800 million according to Zinnov Management Consulting. With a unique platform as this, we wanted to benefit from it even further. And, from May 2013, we started offering it to other companies as a hosted solution. 

We knew companies especially OEMs, telcos, retailers and service providers who need to provide customer support will readily avail the service of DSC. First, because other players in the industry either have SaaS application or CRM software for various applications, but, no one has customer details, service history, use of tech devices, demographics all in one platform, like we do. 

Also, with the commoditisation of technology, profit margins on the computing devices have gone down tremendously. Due to this, for cost saving, the quality of customer support has also come down. So, through DSC, companies will be able to provide better customer service and use the support call to up-sell and cross-sell—as we did it in our company—turning the tech support call from an incurred cost to a revenue source. 

As we offered it to other companies, we made this platform more customer-friendly, multilingual, adaptable in different demographics and accessible for different kinds of users. Since, it is a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution, it can be easily integrated into the existing infrastructure of any enterprise and is highly scalable and secure.