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.”

What percentage of IT projects meet your time/cost/quality targets?

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

Our Technology team is able to identify areas of bottlenecks in the call center floor and make system or automation recommendations to help ease those bottlenecks. One example is our support of a cable company. The cable bills are fairly complex and our agents spend a lot of time explaining changes to the customers. To simplify this, we automated the process of comparing multiple months of cable bills and lay it all out in one easy-to-read page. This not only improves our handle time, but helps our agents give out accurate information 100% of the time. In addition to this, we have done a number of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) projects that help streamline our call flow and secure our customer information at the same time.

We work really hard to do a very good job on this and I would say that 96% of our projects last year were under budget and under time. We have a good structure around it – every month we have a two-hour project review meeting and every project owner has to be on the call. Each one speaks for about ten minutes about where the project is. We use a regimented process with green, red and yellow status and we discuss each project to help ensure it remains in the green.

We also meet again each month to talk about the performance of a project and our systems, including IT’s financial performance and whether it came in on budget. We’re a public company. We have to make sure that our expenses are coming in under budget every single month. It doesn’t even matter if we can make up a shortfall the next quarter – that doesn’t work for Wall Street – we must all pull our workload every quarter.

The good news is we have a really strong team and a very tenured team. Some of them have been with the company for 25 years, and in this day and age in IT that’s almost unheard of. They are all very committed to the company and they do a phenomenal job. I am very lucky to have this team. The same processes might not work for another company if it didn’t have a strong team like this to come through.”