AT&T extends outsourcing deal with Cendant

Cendant Corporation and AT&T Solutions reaffirmed their long-standing relationship today by extending their network services contract another eight years and adding outsourcing services worth another $100 million over the term of the new contract, bringing the total worth of the contract to $550 million.

In addition to assuming the ongoing management of voice-related equipment and services for Cendant’s global customer contact infrastructure, AT&T Solutions, the networking professional services subsidiary of AT&T, will develop a standardized platform across Cendant’s customer relationship management (CRM) infrastructure.

Cendant’s customer contact centers infrastructure spans 75 locations including 32 call centers in the U.S., Canada and Europe. While increasing the value of the contract, Cendant still expects to save more than $40 million in expenses over the life of the new contract.

“We needed to be able to take advantage of emerging technologies and felt AT&T Solutions was uniquely positioned to support all these areas. We felt they were the obvious choice,” said Guy Gray, senior vice president for contact centers and telecommunications at Cendant.

Cendant is pursuing a roadmap for e-business and will count on AT&T Solutions to give it multimedia functionality, which includes interactive customer access to information and support through the Web, e-mail, on-line chat or the telephone.

“The unique piece of the new contract [is] the AT&T Solutions contract for technology platform management for the design, engineering and support of their strategic initiatives in the CRM area. It is a completely new element of the contract going forward,” said Rick Roscitt president of AT&T Business Services. “The important value we think we can provide is in transforming their business into a 21st Century company.”

Although the contract extension is for eight years, the history of the relationship between the two companies suggests the contract could change. “Three, four or five years from now, I’m not sure what that contract will look like because with the changes in telecommunications technology, I’m not sure what service we will be buying from AT&T,” Gray said.

AT&T has had a series of contracts with Cendant that date back to 1992. The contracts have typically been three-year agreements, but generally get renegotiated during the life of the contract to accommodate for new technologies, Roscitt said.

The new standardized platform will allow Cendant to correlate and store customer contact information in an integrated database and share it across contact centers.