Chandra Venkataramani, CIO at Convergys

WHAT WE DO:

“Convergys is a third party, business process outsourcing company. Our customers outsource their very critical customer service and sales efforts to us, and we hire agents across the world, train them in our customer’s business and handle calls, emails and chat sessions on their behalf. That’s the core of our business and it’s highly technology-enabled. We have over 130,000 employees worldwide and our 1,500 people string IT team supports them. We have almost 150 call centers around the world that connects all these employees, so our uptime requirement is Four Nines - we cannot afford to have down time.”

How does IT in your organization help make operations more efficient?

“As a team, our first priority is to make sure that we support the ongoing call operations. It is important for IT personnel to have a really good understanding of the business. We ask our IT people to spend atleast a couple of days in a call center to understand what the operations folks go through every day and what their pain points are. Only then, will IT be able to make meaningful recommendations to improve the process and efficiency.  Full buy-in is there from the team now and IT understands that we are here in a very critical, supportive role to the call operations.”