Convergys Employee Care Augments Customer Service with New Web Functionality

Convergys Employee Care is part of the Convergys Corporation, which employs 41,000 people in more than 36 contact centers and three data centers in North America and Europe.

Employee Care provides comprehensive, innovative human resource and benefits administration services to employees of multi-national companies. Companies who outsource transactional and administrative human resource activities to Convergys are able to reduce costs, increase responsiveness and flexibility, focus on more strategic human resource initiatives and enhance employee satisfaction.

Convergys' fully integrated Employee Service Center provides one point for its clients' employees to obtain information and/or enroll for benefit programs. Convergys handles over 12 million employee contacts annually, providing quality service to over 1.2 million Fortune 500 employees.

The Convergys Employee Care Division manages and supports a Web site for one of the company's largest 401K savings plan clients. The client's Web site provides employees with access to their 401K savings accounts, allowing employees to process loans, view account balances, change investment allocations and request withdrawals. Access to accounts is provided via three different touch points: IVR (Interactive Voice Response), Web and online representatives.

Convergys was asked to add functionality to the website by providing a cash withdrawal capability. On the development side, Convergys wanted to reduce its own operating costs (including ongoing maintenance costs) by eliminating the use of existing proprietary middleware, bringing that piece of Web development back into its own shop.

Convergys's existing system had been in place for five years and was working well. Convergys was looking to build on it, not replace it. DataDirect ClientBuilder was selected because of its ability to interface with the legacy system and incorporate online screens, business logic and current rules into the new, upgraded website.

Building on the existing system also meant a substantial reduction in costs and development time, because the ClientBuilder application primarily would be used to pass data between HTML pages and the online system. This would limit the amount of new coding and business logic that needed to be incorporated into the customized ClientBuilder modules. Finally, by using ClientBuilder, Convergys would be able to move all of the various system components to NT servers, further reducing costs while allowing for improved internal System Support.

Convergys met their production due date, one week ahead of schedule and two weeks ahead of the time it would have taken using their proprietary middleware. This resulted in a 40% savings in development costs.

According to George Acker, Director of Employee Care Development for Convergys, "The product was very easy to learn, and we did not experience any problems with the ClientBuilder tool set. Implementation happened quickly and easily."

Convergys realized financial and operational benefits as a result of implementing ClientBuilder. Not only is this new system less complicated, it allows the company to cut expenses and have more control over its environment by eliminating the old proprietary middleware and the vendor needed to manage it. In addition, Convergys was able to move from UNIX boxes to NT boxes--an additional financial bonus.

"By our best calculation, we will save 40% on future development costs," commented Acker. "This is a tremendous savings to the company. Convergys has reduced its reliance on a third party proprietary middleware and now has a cost-effective alternative for future Web development."