Convergys continues to grow its Customer Service Manager platform and this week announced the latest version, inspired by its BMI acquisition and built around completing its front-end customer and order management capabilities.
Convergys was on Version 3.0 of its CSM platform when it acquired Shanghai Hong Xun Software Co., Ltd. from BMI Asia Inc., earlier this year. The company supports 30 million subscribers across multiple regions at China Netcom. This gave Convergys a bigger footprint in China, but also the technology to take CSM to Version 5.0.
“We are really building momentum behind our BSS/OSS footprint and this is another link in the chain for us,” said Mary Ann Tillman, director of product marketing at Convergys.
CSM 5.0 provides customer and account management, shopping, end-to-end order orchestration, campaign and trouble management, workforce scheduling, and web self-service. The platform comes with more than 50 pre-built service types for a variety of voice, video, data, and content services including cable, satellite, voice over IP, short message service and video on demand. The order orchestration functionality provides a GUI-driven workflow tool and integration capabilities for moving an order through the order process, from shopping and order configuration to order decomposition and customer care.
“We were strong from a subscriber and order management perspective before, but this adds a lot of the order capture and entry capabilities upfront. So it is now a very good end-to-end subscriber management footprint,” Tillman said.
While Convergys supports multiple vertical markets, CSM was built specifically for communications service providers, something Liaoning Netcom, a division of China Netcom, said was important to its deployment. CSM 5.0 also integrates with multiple third-party rating and billing systems, with deployments in production today to prove it. It also has pre-built integration to Convergys’ Infinys Rating and Billing Manager and Infinys Product Control Manager.
Sheryl Kingstone, director of research enterprise applications and mobility at Yankee Group, said that in order to remain competitive, communications service providers are challenged to deliver more complex and diverse services and that to deliver on this challenge it is critical to manage the entire ordering process from first contact through fulfillment.
“Within the telecom space there are many purpose-built systems for particular services, and with everyone trying to offer converged services and bundles, it is important to have an out-of-the-box capability to support those services in a single, concise ordering product,” said Mike Carey, director of product management and architecture at Convergys.
Liaoning Netcom is one of the largest provincial communications service providers in China and has 16 million customers. Those customers are served by a 4,400-seat contact center. The contact centres were using 14 different customer relationship management solutions in 2003 (one for each major market) and turned to Convergys’ CSM to unify them. Convergys did so by deploying a multi-tenant system that allows all 14 major markets to manage their own business rules and customers. This is now the largest centralized convergent customer care and service platform within China Netcom.
