Brokenness Into Beauty

Convergys is one of the world’s leading providers of customer care, human resources and billing outsourcing services. The company’s business is divided into several units, Customer Care, Business Support Systems (BSS) and HR Services. Customer Care, the largest of the subdivisions, offers customer service care services for businesses through 77 contact centers as of June 2008. In fact, Convergys is the No. 1 provider of outsourced customer service in the world and the clear market leader in the United States, with 8 percent of the outsourced customer care market (or more han twice as much as its closest competitor).

HR Services provides employee care services to some 1. 2 million employees in 40 countries in areas such as benefits and payroll operations, staffing and training. With BSS, Convergys manages telecommunications billing and business support system software for large communications companies around the world. As a leader in customer management for over 30 years, Convergys is uniquely focused on helping companies find new ways to enhance the value of their customer relationships and deliver consistent customer experiences across all channels and geographies.

Every day their 75,000 employees help their clients balance the demands of increasing revenue, improving customer satisfaction, and reducing overall cost using an optimal mix of agents, technology, and analytics. Their actionable insight stems from handling billions of customer interactions annually for our clients. Among Fortune 500 companies, over half of the top 50 are clients that trust their most important relationships to Convergys. Convergys has approximately 89,000 employees in 68 customer contact centers and other facilities in India, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, United States, Canada, Costa

Rica, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. In the western United States, Convergys uses a business model that offers entry-level customer-service work at pay not much above minimum wage, geared toward students and other beginning-level workers. It pays generous tuition reimbursement for enrolled students, and seems prepared to manage the turnover rates that such a comparatively mobile”one could say ‘restless’”workforce tends to cause. Large numbers of especially first- and second-year employees leave its ranks.

As a result, Convergys is virtually always hiring and training phone center workers. Convergys as recently been phasing out the staff of their call centers in the United States, and increasing staffing in their Pune/Bangalore/Manila call centers. This reduces the salary and benefits cost, which should prove to increase revenue. Unfortunately this has not helped the stock prices. Convergys develops detailed training programs for these new employees, and offers support for front-line call center workers dealing with customer problems.

Convergys recruits a significant portion of its call center, chat & email support staff from India and the Philippines. The business of this company is centered around labor cost arbitrage. Not possessing any other significant strength may work against this company in the long term. As tar as short-term prospects go this company seems well positioned to profit. Convergys claims to be highly flexible when it comes to client relationships. They offer to come up with the best possible solution in every possible situation.

Convergys Mission: Provide Customer Relationship Management software and services that create valuable relationships between our clients and their customers. Convergys Vision: Convergys will be the recognized global leader in innovative Customer Relationship Management solutions, and: Provide for our clients: Leading-edge products and services that offer a compelling value and create a competitive edge. Create for our employees: An environm