Avoiding Churn-Burn with Next-Gen Self-Care

Some companies seem to be making headway in developing relationship management solutions that go the next level. Convergys, for example, has announced three North American wins for its relationship management solution, along with its recent acquisition of Shanghai, China-based BMI, a customer service management firm whose software supports 30 million subscribers of China Netcom. In addition to providing policy and policy enforcement capabilities, the solution — Convergys' Dynamic Decision Solution — supports contextual and personalized interactions for all customer care, billing and service delivery customer interactions.

“This acquisition supports an overarching perspective of helping our customers help their customers better,” says Bill Koopmans, general manager, Information Management, at Convergys. He believes BMI’s capabilities will help Convergys accelerate its Infinys customer care product roadmap around the CRM functions and workforce automation. For example, the Dynamic Decision solution is an enforcement engine that will tie to service provider’s existing CRM and billing and operations support systems so that data can be applied to schema derived from the McKinsey and Company’s Customer Lifecycle Management process, which helps to create a single view of all the data needed to calculate customers’ lifetime values.

“People are looking for ease-of-use, and they want to get information faster, in a secure manner, and be able to get to it through the Web, cell phone, a regular voice call, chat or e-mail,” says Rahul Jindal, director, Web Product Development, in Convergys’ new Relationship Technology Management group.

Based on the sales volume coming from another vendor, Comverse, self-care deployments are growing. Of the 32 new customer wins Comverse had in 2007, several were centered on self-service, including deals with Setar out of Aruba, Orange UK, Starhub out of Singapore and one Tier 1 U.S. carrier.

Orange reported that approximately 25,000 calls per week have been deflected from the call center to its self-service portal. Starhub has deployed Comverse Self-Service Solutions to provide its consumer customers with a single, converged online view for managing all their StarHub accounts. James Woo, vice president of IT at StarHub said that since the launch of self-care the company has already seen improvements in its online customers’ experiences and cost efficiency.

“It is clear that self-service is here to stay. It is not a fad,” said Alice Bartram, chief marketing officer at Comverse.