Convergys focuses on dropped order challenge

Convergys today unveiled an updated version of its CRM platform with new functionality for bringing additional sales channels into the mix and a focus on helping service providers avoid abandoned or “dirty” orders.

Convergys Customer Service Manager 5.0 encompasses an array of customer service processes, including customer and account management, shopping, end-to-end order orchestration, campaign and trouble management, workforce scheduling, and web self-service.

It is the first major release since the vendor acquired Shanghai Hong Xun Software, which markets its products under the name BMI Asia. Those assets complemented Convergys’ traditional call center focus with new capabilities focused on Web self-care, service provisioning, workflow processing and inventory reservation.

Taken together, those capabilities are designed to help slash the number of abandoned orders that result from the lengthy and convoluted order processes – often thirty screens or more for some complex services – that plague many service providers, said Mary Ann Tillman, Convergys’ director of product marketing.

By measures from the Yankee Group and others, said Tillman, as many as 40% of telco orders are abandoned on the back-end, or after an order is placed, due to faulty information about customers or service inventory. Beyond such so-called “dirty orders,” another 20% fail on the front-end of the order process, typically due to customer frustration.

Carriers often have “extremely protracted order processes with many different, moving parts,” said Tillman. “When there’s a hand-off of process or workflow and something drops, either it’s not noted at all or requires manual intervention. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that very beginning of the process, or what happens even before that agent takes the order. If you shift the order management process to start with the shopping process, and you can see what services the customer has cancelled in the past, or what devices they have or where they’re located, you can head off issues down the line by doing a better job of understanding and qualifying that customer.”