At its October 29, 2008 Industry Analyst Day in Cincinnati, Convergys clarified how it intends to integrate its own offerings with the interactive voice response (IVR) products inherited courtesy of its September acquisition of Intervoice, a global contact center solutions provider. Chiefly, Convergys will incorporate Intervoice’s solutions with its own Dynamic Decisioning Solution (DDS), a proprietary engine that integrates with backend customer data and centralizes policy creation, management, and enforcement.
DDS funnels multichannel interactions through a single engine, which interacts with an IVR and/or human agents. The entire solution includes what Convergys calls a real-time decisioning engine, which reacts to customer interactions coming through voice, web, SMS, or chat portals based on its access to backend customer data. While DDS won’t be offered as a free upgrade to Intervoice Voice Portal (IVP) 6.0, it will be available as an extra purchase.
Combining the DDS engine with Intervoice products, such as IVP and the IP Contact Center, adds value to Convergys’s relationship technology management portfolio by lowering costs and streamlining complex backend processes. Coupling the engine with IVP also provides an opportunity to increase automation – another cost-lowering measure – and link the IVR more closely with Convergys’s human agents, providing more seamless customer interaction.
Customer information flies in from different channels, and consolidating that data into a single access point available to backend processes makes disparate interactions easier for the enterprise to manage. This will lower average call lengths, as agents get the information they need in a more timely fashion. Additionally, changes to business process within the engine can be made quickly, with minimal disruption to the process of sharing information between servers, so long as the data warehouses remain open and readable to the engine.
With the acquisition, Convergys needed to integrate Intervoice’s products into its own relationship technology management strategy. One of the biggest hurdles was whether or not the merged companies would be able to break down divisional silos. DDS is designed to do just that, and its integration with Intervoice products is an important step. Enterprise customers in the market for customer interaction technologies would previously purchase solutions piecemeal from different vendors. Convergys, in consolidating a suite of automation and agents linked with backend processes, opens itself to a new customer base. Convergys’s offering is especially relevant given recent customer demands driving both automation and personalization.
Besides creating a superior product, Convergys benefits by linking DDS with Intervoice Voice Portal, a highly scalable platform with Voice Extensible Markup Language (VXML) and Call Control Extensible Markup Language (CCXML) browsers, which are compatible with Intervoice’s extensive portfolio of speech self-service applications. In marketing DDS along with the IVP upgrade, Convergys also has a penetration point for pushing increased automation. An added benefit for Convergys is that, unlike Genesys’ Interactive Customer Front Door (iCFD) which also taps into backend processes to understand customer information and intent, DDS is contact center platform agnostic (iCFD requires a Genesys contact center platform).
The problem Convergys currently has is how precisely to package the solution. Convergys has a sales force that knows how to sell outsourcing services; Intervoice has a sales force that knows how to sell products. Convergys needs to figure out how to sell a combination of the two. While Convergys has experience with speech automation, it is perceived mostly as an agent outsourcer and will need to shift its reputation as a mostly-services provider into one that provides both services and products. Convergys now has Intervoice’s extensive team of speech specialists as well as its respected Design Collective, so it makes sense for Convergys, in marketing DDS, to also try to make significant headway by leading with speech applications and automation.
Ultimately, Datamonitor recommends that Convergys heavily pushes DDS with IVP upgrades and emphasizes the product over professional services. In the current economy, enterprise customers are likely to be wary of solutions that wed them too closely to a vendor’s professional services requirements. Additionally, emphasizing DDS might entice Intervoice customers to move from its legacy IVR to the voice portal in greater numbers.
Convergys is developing a more flexible sales model to accommodate various confluences of technology and human agents; how the company markets DDS will indicate how it will consolidate its products and services offerings in the future.
