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Indian CX needs to move to a system of action
This article is authored by Sameer Raje, GM and head, India & SAARC, Zoom.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping Customer Experience (CX) in every market. In India, it is doing something more specific. It is replacing a habit that the industry has lived with for two decades, the habit of making things work using systems that were put in place on an ad hoc basis rather than as thought-through workflows. Customer engagement worked despite the system, not because of it.
Every Indian recognises this habit. You see it in the autorickshaw rigged with a phone mount, in the small business running its books on WhatsApp, in the local street vendor who accepted UPI just the same way he accepted cash. In India, there is a specific word for it: Jugaad (quick fix). There is no clean English translation for the word. Workaround comes closest, but it misses the spirit. Jugaad can best be described as resourcefulness under constraint. And for two decades, it is also how customer experience in India has actually worked.
Supervisors stitched together dashboards across different tools every morning and agents memorised policies that the CRM could not intelligently present. Quality teams sampled a few calls per agent per week and hoped the patterns held. It worked, in the way jugaad always works: imperfectly, expensively, and unevenly. Good customer service in India was usually because of the people holding it together. Services that fell short often did so because the people responsible for delivering them were unable to meet expectations.
The trouble is that the Indian consumer has changed faster than the systems built to serve them.
Customers today expect their grocery order in ten minutes, their bank query resolved on the first call and want their cab to know where they are headed at the touch of a button. The bar for good service used to be politeness and patience. Today it is resolution, and it is measured in minutes. The volumes are high, expectations are sharp, and the cost of getting it wrong is one screenshot away from being shared with a few hundred thousand strangers on social media.
This is the shift that a well-defined system of action can bring.
This isn't a small or niche industry feeling this shift. India's contact centre software market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 29.5% between 2026 and 2033, according to a recent report, making it the fastest-growing market for this technology in the Asia Pacific region. That pace isn't a coincidence. It is what happens when an industry this large finally gets the tooling to match its scale. According to another recent report AI-centric contact centres are 85% more profitable than their low-maturity peers, and 69% more likely to deliver customer experiences rated good or excellent. The gap between organisations that have the right infrastructure and those still stitching together legacy systems is no longer theoretical. It is showing up on the balance sheet.
System of action isn't a product or a piece of software. It's the idea that every conversation a business has, whether between an agent and a customer, between colleagues working on a deal, or between a service ticket and the team that needs to act on it, is part of one connected flow rather than a series of disconnected tasks. The point of a system of action is to make sure conversations don't just get a response; they get to completion.
What's making this possible at scale is AI, though not in the way the popular conversation often suggests. The headlines tend to fixate on chatbots replacing human agents. That's not what Indian enterprises most need. What is actually happening is quieter and far more useful. AI is removing the friction that made every interaction feel like a small act of jugaad in the first place.
Consider what customer service agents in a mid-sized Indian contact centre actually do in a single shift. They switch between five or six tools, listen to a customer while typing notes, while also trying to remember the resolution path for a payment failure case that they handled last week. They escalate to their supervisor when they hit the edge of their knowledge, fill out a wrap-up form after the customer hangs up. The next day, they do it all over again; slightly differently, depending on which tool decides to misbehave that morning.
Now layer AI into that flow. The right answer surfaces in real time as the customer is still describing the problem. The notes write themselves in the background. The supervisor is no longer pulled in for routine queries because the AI has already coached the agent through them. The wrap-up form is pre-filled with the relevant context. The customer gets a faster resolution. The agents end their shift less depleted and the supervisor gets to spend more time on the cases that actually need human judgment.
None of this replaces the humans at the centre of CX. It re-architects the work around them, so they can do what they are actually good at: listening, empathising, and exercising judgment without being held back by the infrastructure.
This is what people in the industry are starting to call the resolution economy. The metric that used to matter most, average query handle time, is giving way to a more honest metric: Was the customer's problem actually solved? The shift sounds small but it changes everything about how a contact centre is designed, staffed, and measured.
For India, the opportunity here is unusual. We have spent 20 years building one of the world's largest customer service workforces. We have agents, supervisors, and operations leaders who understand customer interactions at a depth most markets can only envy. What we have not always had is the infrastructure to convert that human capability into consistent customer outcomes. AI, used well, finally closes that gap.
The other shift worth highlighting is what happens when employee experience and customer experience stop being treated as separate conversations. In a system of action, they are inseparable, two sides of the same coin. The agent's productivity, the supervisor's visibility, the customer's resolution, and the leadership team's view of the whole picture are all part of the same connected flow. Fix the workflow, and the experience fixes itself, on both sides of the interaction.
Jugaad got Indian CX this far. It's our national strength, that ability to make things work under constraint, and we should not be in a hurry to be embarrassed about it. The next chapter isn't about leaving jugaad behind. It's about giving the people who have been quietly doing the workarounds, the agents, the supervisors, and the operations leaders, the infrastructure they should have had all along.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Sameer Raje, GM and head, India & SAARC, Zoom.
