Shopping and the Customer Experience: Zero Degrees of Separation

Shop ’Til Your Order Drops

Convergys released Version 5.0 of its Customer Service Manager in September and with it came enhanced order orchestration capabilities. The latest version was supported strongly by Convergys’ acquisition this year of Shanghai Hong Xun Software from BMI Asia. The product and business unit got another boost last month when Convergys acquired Ceon Corp., which makes product lifecycle management and multiplay fulfillment software.

The company calls CSM 5.0 the new face of the front office in its BSS/OSS portfolio. If that’s true, then order orchestration is its prominent Roman nose. It provides a GUI-driven workflow tool and integrated capabilities that shuttle orders through the ordering process, from shopping and order configuration to order decomposition and customer care.

“If you don’t include the shopping piece, you’re leaving out an important part of the process right up front, and if you get garbage in you’ll get garbage out,” said Mary Ann Tillman, director of product marketing at Convergys.

Tillman said that with triple-play and quad-play services coming of age, there is a level of complexity in the ordering process that hasn’t been seen before. “We have to make sure there is a seamless, in fact a dynamic, connection between these new products that have been defined and what is available to the agent to offer. We think that’s a critical link in the whole process,” she said.

The Ceon acquisition will help Convergys secure that link. Ari Banerjee, director of Enabling Technologies for Yankee Group, said "Convergys' acquisition of Ceon is a great decision that will enable it to empower carriers to transition to a centralized catalog strategy, bringing order to the chaotic product management process that is so inherent in carrier's OSS and BSS environments.”

The problem triple-play and quad-play services present to the ordering process is that, except in rare cases, they are not being delivered on 100 percent next-generation networks or back-office infrastructures. Legacy lives.

“You can’t eliminate legacy systems. You can’t launch new products and do an overhaul of your back office at the same time. And you can’t redefine the ordering process every time you add new services,” Champion said.

What can you do? You can abstract the shopping and ordering process from the back office and downstream fulfillment systems and deliver a solution that overlays the legacy environment to optimize the shopping and ordering experience. This would give service providers who use multiple billing systems and have multiple third-party content partners a common way of creating converged bundles of services.

Another critical element of order orchestration is the product and service catalog. It has to be real-real time and it has to be common. And by common, we don’t mean ordinary. It has to provide a common view of a product or service across all channels of the company. And to be effective in today’s converging environment, a common, dynamic product catalog needs a partner. That partner is an equally common customer database.

“It is important that we evolve to a more universal view of both customers and products. And that view has to come together in real time,” Tillman said. “I know it’s a tall order, but there are ways to do it without breaking the bank.”

There is basic intelligence service providers can incorporate into the shopping process. “But today it would be enough for them to be able to look at a customer profile and know what device they are using,” Tillman said.