Convergys removes the invisibility cloak of multichannel care

Individual companies may be winning awards for customer care with satisfaction rates in the high 90s, but the overall picture painted by IDC is less rosy at 73.5%. With satisfaction rates dropping and the dollars spent on customer care rising at about 12%, Convergys announced its strategy for helping companies change that number: It's called the Lifetime Value Optimizer, or LTVO.

On the drawing board for three years and introduced last year in limited production, the LTVO is now ready to transform customer care, said Jeffrey Gordon, senior vice president of advanced development and new markets for Convergys. “It is in production and producing value for our early adopters,” he said.

LTVO is a software and services solution designed to maximize the lifetime value of a customer by enabling real-time policy management across multichannel customer management operations. The software is based on a process called Customer Lifecycle Management, developed by consulting firm McKinsey and Co.

“The whole customer care infrastructure is under stress right now, and that's not a situation that bodes well for anyone,” Gordon said.

The stress is being caused by a number of factors, including the pace of introduction of new services and the complexity of converged services. It also is being caused by a fragmented but necessary multi-channel customer care process. The biggest factors are that companies have little visibility into what is happening between them and their customers as those customers use e-mail, Web chat and call center options for contacting them. Nor do companies take full advantage of all the information they have about their customers to proactively ward off customer service calls by reaching out first.

Convergys says its LTVO addresses these issues and help companies transform their customer care operations to be more customer-centric by improving the timeliness of special offers — for example, pitching a product after failing three times to solve a customer's problem may not endear one's customer to them, but if the customer service rep does not know about the other contacts, he or she will attempt the sale; employing proactive care by making an effort to improve a situation when it's known there has been a problem; improving self-service automation; and maximizing the efficiency of the customer service representative.

Paul Hughes, vice president of communications software strategies for Yankee Group, described it as an overlay system that collects data from multiple sources and provides the ability to apply policies across the enterprise.

This helps them know the difference between a first contact with a customer that gets resolved satisfactorily in 10 minutes and one that does so only after the customer has failed to get a problem resolved through other channels. It also allows a company to answer the same question the same way through multiple channels and keeps everyone aware that the question was asked.

“Every time you touch a customer and fix a problem proactively, you build customer equity and customer satisfaction and reduce the cost of service at the same time,” Gordon said. He also said problems are not caused by impersonal electronic interfaces for care, but by their lack of sophistication, and he encourages more automation, not less.

Gordon said companies don't need a major overhaul of their care infrastructure to reach a higher level of efficiency. “That might help, but there are things that can be done right here and now through changes in attitude, training, point-of-view and selective, supplemental technology added to the infrastructure,” he said.

Convergys' services organization provides recommendations on configuration, policy creation, implementation and ongoing measurement of the effectiveness of the solution. They base this expertise on their experience handling more than 1 billion customer contacts per year.