Hit and run: Convergys plays its own customer acquisition game

Convergys played both the corporate and customer sides of the acquisition game last week by acquiring privately held support-services company Taima, and signing a deal with iBasis to host its Catalys billing and customer care solution.

Buying Ottawa, Ontario,-based Taima opens the door to the ISP market for Convergys and gives it access to a customer list that includes Road Runner, PSINet, Rogers@Home, NetZero, AltaVista and Com-cast. Taima also brings big-name customers such as Nortel Networks and Bell Canada.

In addition to the appreciable list of customers and about 800 support-service professionals, Taima gives Convergys more of the latest in customer contact center technology.

"The technology they were using wasn't dissimilar to [ours], but they had done a nice job integrating a variety of technologies... that very specifically and effectively service the very specific needs of an ISP," said Randy Mysliviec, senior vice president of marketing for Convergys.

Already a leader in the outsourced call center and customer care space, Convergys will integrate Taima's ISP-specific support capabilities, including agent phone support, live chat, e-mail support, auto response e-mail, and agent-assisted and automated self-service.

"We are more of an emerging player in the ISP space," Mysliviec said. "This gives us an opportunity to rapidly grow our presence in customer care related to ISPs."

Contrary to some indicators, analysts still see a strong market for Internet companies.

"In this whole e-world where the valuation of some of the Internet-related or pure-play Internet companies have plummeted or evened out in the stock market, I still think the market has a significant upside," said Brian Bingham, senior analyst at IDC. "As a result, all the components that go along with that - the electronic channels, the software and tech support - will grow significantly as well."

Convergys also plans to take advantage of the residual benefit of its new ISP customer base."Now that we have penetrated the [market] with customer care services, it's an opportunity to talk to them about our billing services," Mysliviec said.

Convergys also will bill for a new kind of service as part of iBasis' hosted Unified Communications platform, VoCore. VoCore will provide services that integrate e-mail, voice mail, fax, real-time communications and the Web. The new enhanced services platform aimed at emerging carriers will include one-touch callback, outbound calling, message notification and single-number reach.

As part of its VoCore platform, iBasis will offer hosted versions of billing and customer care from Convergys.

"We have a subset of customers who are newer in this space. They have a core competency they are focused on. They want to Mysliviec quickly bring additional services to market but can't necessarily pick up the requirement on the customer care side. As part of [iBasis] stating we have a very comprehensive solution by way of VoCore, [Convergys] needed to be a part of that for us to make that statement very credibly," said Lisa Foley, senior product marketing manager of Unified Communications at iBasis.

Though unrelated, the timing of the two deals appears advantageous to Convergys and iBasis. "It's a nice fit with the Taima move. [Convergys] is going to be helping iBasis with some of the competencies they will be adding through that deal," Bingham said.

Although iBasis' Unified Communications platform is new, small-scale and aimed at emerging carriers, the company serves some of the world's largest carriers in its core wholesale business. Those customers include Concert, NTT, Telstra, and WorldCom.

iBasis will host its UC platform in data centers the company added to its central office facilities that support its wholesale business. The VoCore solution consists of systems from Cisco, Software.com, EMC and Hewlett-Packard. Convergys will host the billing and customer care systems in its data center.

"The Catalys solution they selected provides virtualized support, which means we can run a single image of the software in a secure environment for multiple ISPs," Mysliviec said."The ISP can be individually branded so the billing and customer care appears to be coming from the company who is out selling the service."