Bobby Joseph, Country Director, India & Middle East, Plantronics, talks to Heena Jhingan about the company’s performance in India and the importance of software integration in its products
How is Plantronics’ enterprise business shaping up in India?
We fundamentally operate in three segments – contact centers, enterprise unified communications and retail. On the contact center front, it is a known phenomenon that the IT/ITES sector is on a slowdown, and the growth here has been relatively flat and our businesses also reflect that.
Based on usage, enterprise users can be divided into two groups. An enterprise user in Plantronics terminology would be anybody who uses a terraphone for more than three hours. Today, if you look at the office environment, it’s becoming more open and to do a more secured call is not possible in an open office. The other part of it is Unified Communications, which is being driven by companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Avaya etc. That bit is growing and is growing 100% year on year for Plantronics and that is a big area for future growth.
Though mobile penetration is high in India, headset usage has not really picked up to that extent. So, for us the retail business is not very big. First, we do not advertise and secondly, we are expensive as we do not make cheap quality headsets. Our growth is limited to key select markets largely tier I and II cities on the retail side.
How is the contact center demand evolving and how is Plantronics offering to plug the gaps?
The contact center space is largely divided into two parts — international and domestic. International contact center space in India is somewhat matured. They use good quality telephone systems and headsets and we have a dominant share in that market. The real challenge lies in the domestic market, which is just evolving.
For example, if you call one of the domestic banks, you might hear the background noise and that is not good customer service. But if you look at the MNCs, they invest in noise cancellation headsets. It will take some time for domestic market to go through that evolution.
At this point, domestic contact centers are not worried about what happens to health of the people, what happens to the hearing of the people if they use a non standardized headset or if a particular headset allows you to make long duration calls. Eventually, they will start considering that as well. There is a really long way to go before India catches up on the domestic side. We do have products for this segment and at the right price points.
UC is no more just about hardware. How does Plantronics leverage software?
We have always tried to move away from being just headset manufacturers and look at ourselves as providing enhanced communication to the users. We just don’t make hardware, but are trying to put a lot of software into our products.
For example, the ‘Voyager Legend’ with intuitive intelligence. Assume a customer is a Microsoft unified communicator, the moment he moves away from his laptop, the status doesn’t really change till it switches to idle mode indicating the user’s absence, but that’s not real time. Real time change is when you move away from your laptop and the status immediately changes from available to busy or not available or away. And that’s what our headset does. The moment you move away using a Voyager Legend, “on my Laptop” the status will change. That’s where we built value with software.
For people working on Salesforce, one of the biggest pain points is typing the data in whereas there is a third party application called Popcorn from a company called ThreeWill which is available only on Plantronics headset. It can be downloaded to give voice to text input on Salesforce. At this point of time, users can download it only on laptops or desktops. The next version will also support mobiles. There are a lot of applications that Plantronics is building over the headset and that differentiates us from the competition.
