In the last three weeks, Convergys announced that three major North American communications service providers, including AT&T Mobility, have implemented or agreed to implement its relationship management solutions in their customer service operations.
AT&T Mobility has signed a five-year license and support contract with Convergys and has now gone live with Convergys’ Dynamic Decision Solution. This product is designed to assists customer service agents in providing consistent and proactive care by enabling centralized policy creation and management. It also provides automated and real-time policy enforcement across all contact channels.
“The system augments other systems to let us bring the key and pertinent data out of back end systems and make it available to our centralized policy engine where customers can create and define policies in line with the way they want to run and conduct their business,” said Bob Dunfee, director of front office systems at Convergys.
Convergys also went live this week with another large U.S. wireless operator with millions of subscribers and recently signed a three-year master agreement with a potential value of $50 million that expands its relationship with another U.S.-based service provider. Convergys’ customer agents began taking calls for this service provider in January.
In addition to providing the policy and policy enforcement mentioned above, Convergys' Dynamic Decision Solution supports contextual and personalized interactions for all customer care, billing and service delivery customer interactions. The enforcement engine it uses is augmented with system integration services to work with a service provider’s existing CRM and billing and operations support systems. It also employs the schema derived from the McKinsey and Company’s Customer Lifecycle Management process to create a single view of all the data needed to calculate customer’s lifetime value.
All this equips customer service representative with the specialized intelligence they need to automatically evaluate customer events against policies and take the appropriate action to save a customer. The information is provided via a pop-up window on the CSR’s desktop.
“That way if a high-value customer calls in, the operator can decide to offer a free handset upgrade if the customer’s contract is coming up for renewal. And they know not to make the same offer to low-value customers,” Dunfee said.
Convergys also got one of its Middle Eastern customers to upgrade its billing and customer care platform as well. Nawras, a mobile operator in Muscat, Oman, has more than 1 million subscribers. It upgraded its Infinys platform to help support the convergence of its voice and data services.
And last month Convergys took on another Indonesian operator to add to the business it is already doing in-country with Telkomsel. PT Hutchison CP Telecommunications (HCPT) has gone live with Convergys’ Infinys Rating and Billing solution to enable real-time charging and balance management functions for both prepaid and postpaid customers.
HCPT is a subsidiary of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Telecommunications International Ltd and holds a National 2G/1800MHz and 3G/WCDMA license. Hutchison Telecommunications International Limited currently offers mobile and fixed-line telecommunication services in Hong Kong, and operates mobile telecommunications services in Macau, Israel, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Ghana, and Thailand.
Giles Newcombe, senior director of channel and business development of Convergys’ EMEA market, said it is all about offline convergent charging. “Operators want to be in a position to allow customers to buy any service regardless of their payment method,” he said.
This helps them act more like the retailers they need to be, he said. “Not just with Hutchison, but all over we are seeing leading operators move away from being operators of networks to trying to be really good retailers in a fast moving marketplace. And good retailers don’t segment their marketplace based on how people intend to pay,” Newcombe said.
John Shen, CTO at HCPT, said that having a single convergent platform for both its pre- and post-paid subscribers significantly improves the company’s time to market with new services and its operational efficiency.
