dedication to making things simpler is actually embodied across its product lines. Excel 2007, for example, is light years ahead of Excel 2003 in its ability to generate charts, graphs and attractive dashboards. Windows 7 is a huge leap forward in performance and ease of use as compared to Windows Vista, which is just horrible. So it shouldn’t be surprising, given its experience making software that just about anyone can use, that Microsoft would take an every-person approach to something as seemingly complex as analytics.
Dinosaur No More
Powered by Microsoft, Convergys is releasing its new Smart Communications Suite, which should help the company to shed its image of having aging technology. Whether this characterization is fair is debatable, but clearly Convergys recognized the need to make a big image and technology move that made a Microsoft partnership make sense. Always seemingly chasing Amdocs, the big shark in
“The billing and customer care worlds are being flipped on their heads as new services come around,” says McGuigan
To Convergys’ credit, the company has recognized this angle for years. It has a huge presence in the customer care world, with tens of thousands of contact center seats across a range of industries. Convergys was among the first IT providers, if not the first, to promote the concept of lifetime customer value- an early example of predictive analytics applied to improving customer experience. Its new joint offering with Microsoft “gives us a couple of key enhancements to our overall offering and it lets us offer a full CRM function pre-integrated with our BSS. We are building a new CRM platform – so it’s not just dynamics on our biller but taking our BSS apps and all the marketing and sales force management, workflows, and capabilities and
the billing tank, its space has also been invaded by nimble competitors like Comverse, SAS, SPSS and smaller innovators like Metratech. There have been stories for some time that Convergys’ billing business has been up for sale, leading to some speculation about the company’s commitment to its old school technology. Its new relationship with Microsoft breathes new life into its place in the communications industry and should remind us all that it’s not just about billing these days.
Let’s face it, as billing moves more in the ‘this engine can bill and rate for anything’ direction, billing becomes more commoditized. What begins to differentiate billers is on the analytical CRM front; their ability to take all of the ultra-valuable data captured about subscribers in the billing process and drive it into care, sales, personalized marketing, customer retention, Internet-style shopping, and the like.
integrating that with our next-gen shopping and ordering capabilities,” says Curt Champion, Senior Director, Partner Ecosystem for Convergys.
While Convergys needed to make a move, Microsoft’s McGuigan says it was the Redmond-based mothership that pursued the joint relationship first. “We sought out Convergys,” he says. “The billing and customer care worlds are being flipped on their heads as new services come around,” says McGuigan, “so we wanted a partner that understood the critical functions of subscriber care in online and cloud services.” He explains that Convergys’ “focus on real time decisioning and putting the right offer in front of the right subscriber at the right time” meshed with Microsoft’s philosophy on where the communications customer experience needs to go.
Pipeline
Publishing, Volume 6, Issue 12
