Contact center industry's first 'balanced scorecard' provides powerful tool to determine effectiveness of customer service programs
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June 4, 2003, Cincinnati - Convergys Corporation (NYSE: CVG), the global leader in integrated billing, employee care, and customer care services, and BenchmarkPortal, the leading source for best practices information for contact centers, announced today the availability of the industry's first benchmark to measure customer experience. The Customer Experience Benchmark (CEB) offers a universal standard to measure and benchmark caller satisfaction for contact centers. The benchmark also provides companies with the data they need to compare their caller satisfaction performance against industry standards and competitors.Developed under the direction of Dr. Jon Anton of the Purdue University Center for Customer-Driven Quality and Dr. Scott Spera of Convergys' Marketing Research Services, the CEB provides a balanced scorecard of caller satisfaction and contact center effectiveness incorporating data taken from live customer surveys after a service transaction is completed. This unique and innovative offering brings together Convergys' expertise in contact center operation and marketing research services with the extensive database of contact center performance metrics that BenchmarkPortal collects and warehouses in conjunction with Purdue University's Center for Customer-Driven Quality. "The Customer Experience Benchmark gives contact center operators the first truly objective benchmark of how satisfied their customers are with the service they receive and how their service stacks up against the competition," said Anton. "The ability to see beyond a center's day-to-day metrics to the impact service interactions have on customer relationships, enables companies to tailor their programs to build loyalty and drive revenue growth." "The CEB reflects Convergys' ongoing commitment to providing our clients, whether they outsource their contact centers or run them internally, with the most powerful and cost-effective tools to serve their customers," said Jack Freker, President, Customer Management Group, Convergys. "The CEB delivers customer intelligence that companies can use in the near-term to gain and maintain competitive advantage." To obtain their CEB, participating companies provide a statistically valid sample of customers who have recently contacted their call center. These customers are then interviewed to complete a short, unique survey to determine the percentage of first-call resolution and gauge their satisfaction with getting through to an agent and talking with that agent. The results are reported for individual contact centers and benchmarked against industry competitors by call type, vertical market, and overall contact center industry levels. These scores are then synthesized into what BenchmarkPortal calls the Anton Index, a quick, comprehensive view of how the contact center compares to the competition. Convergys' customer care solutions offer a "high-tech, human-touch" approach that combines well-trained customer care specialists in Convergys' integrated contact centers with advanced information management technologies and high-tech communication channels, like the Web and integrated voice response systems with advanced speech recognition. Each day, Convergys customer service agents working in 45 contact centers manage more than 1.7 million customer interactions over the phone or the Internet. Convergys' comprehensive customer management services enable its clients to achieve greater customer loyalty and increase revenue, and its knowledge management marketing research services provide added value to contact center operations by incorporating the "voice-of-the-customer." About BenchmarkPortal BenchmarkPortal is the source for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) best practices information for call centers. BenchmarkPortal manages the Purdue Center for Customer-Driven Quality database, already the world's largest, for call center metrics. The company is extending both its national and international reach. BenchmarkPortal provides data to call center managers via a series of unique and actionable reports that allow managers to a) compare their performance against an appropriate peer group of call centers; and b) make optimal, fact-based decisions regarding capital investment, personnel, procedures, etc. These reports, as well as the leading edge research conducted by BenchmarkPortal in conjunction with the Center for Customer-Driven Quality helps contribute to the continual improvement processes of individual customer call centers, and ultimately to improve the performance of this vital sector as a whole, worldwide. For additional information contact: Bruce Belfiore 3130 Skyway Drive, Suite 702 Santa Maria, CA 93455-1817 (805) 614-0123 ext. 25 About Convergys Convergys Corporation (NYSE: CVG), a member of the S&P 500 and the Forbes' Platinum 400, is the global leader in integrated billing, employee care, and customer care services provided through outsourcing or licensing. We serve top companies in telecommunications, Internet, cable and broadband services, technology, financial services, and other industries in more than 40 countries. We also provide integrated, outsourced, human resource services to leading companies across a broad range of industries. We bring together world-class resources, software, and expertise to help create valuable relationships between our clients and their customers and their employees. This commitment is validated by the more than 1.5 million individual bills our software produces each day to support more than 120 million subscribers, and by the more than 1.7 million separate customer and employee contacts we manage each day, both live and via electronic interaction. Convergys employs more than 44,000 people in 45 customer contact centers and in our data centers and other offices in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Convergys is on the net at www.convergys.com, and has world headquarters in Cincinnati.
