Convergys Enhances Credit Card Acquisition Program, Enabling Issuers to Increase Sales and Reduce Costs.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

CINCINNATI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 9, 2003

New Capabilities Improve Outbound Calling Results, Automate Balance

Transfers, and Provide Real-Time Access to Customer Survey Results

Convergys Corporation (NYSE:CVG), the global leader in integrated billing, employee care, and customer care services, announced today the newest update to its Credit Card Acquisition Program. With enhanced data management and new acquisition services, the program enables credit card issuers to increase their conversion rates while lowering acquisition costs and gaining more knowledge of their customers. The program update features new Knowledge Management Services (KMS), integrated voice response-based acquisition and balance transfer capabilities, and point-of-service evaluation (POSE) services.

Convergys, which has provided customer care solutions to the financial services industry for 20 years, developed its Credit Card Acquisition Program by bundling the best service elements requested by top credit card issuers into a formal solution offering. Today, Convergys' Credit Card Acquisition Program handles more than 700,000 separate credit card acquisition interactions each month. The solution is designed for major North American credit card issuers and is available on an outsourced basis. Convergys clients in the financial services industry comprise six of the top 10 credit card issuers, including Capital One.

"Our Credit Card Acquisition Program is the first of its kind in the industry," said Randy Mysliviec, Convergys Senior Vice President of Marketing. "With our value-added services, this program combines our world-class contact management expertise with solutions that credit card issuers can quickly tailor and deploy to meet their specific customer acquisition needs."

The program's enhanced KMS consists of a group of analytical capabilities that card issuers can use to improve the results of their acquisition efforts. Issuers using KMS, a key differentiating aspect of the Credit Card Acquisition Program, have boosted sales per hour by up to 28 percent while cutting their cost per sale by as much as 15 percent.

KMS is a proprietary analytical approach that creates a link between a client's acquisition prospect list and the implementation of inbound and outbound contact programs through a "best contact" approach. It achieves this result through analytical capabilities that determine which prospects are most likely to buy and prioritizes outbound contacts or guides direct mail efforts toward those buyers. KMS offers additional capabilities such as automatic outbound calling programs for non-responders with a high propensity to accept the issuer's product offer.

Convergys' Interactive Voice Response (IVR)-based solutions automate the application process, contacting applicants to verify or obtain data and to notify them of their application status, enhancing issuer's customer care programs and building customer loyalty while reducing costs. The IVR-based solutions included in the latest release also automate balance transfers, rapidly increasing outstanding receivables and generating immediate revenue from new card customers.

The program also features POSE, through which the customer completes a short survey through a live agent, the Internet, or by interactive voice response after a service encounter. Credit card issuers have real-time access to the results giving them valuable data they can use to improve customer service and reduce customer churn.

Other featured services of the Credit Card Acquisition Program include:

-- Convergys Customer Management System, a proprietary system tailored to handle credit card applications. The system generates dynamic scripts to guide agents through the application process, integrates with client decisioning systems to provide real-time approval of applications, credit limits, and balance transfer limits, and provides consultants with online help screens.

-- Reporting, with extensive capabilities that go beyond contact center operational data to provide insight into customers' call patterns to evaluate marketing effectiveness. Internet Reporting (IR) is a Convergys proprietary system that allows clients to access near-real-time call center performance results via the Internet.

-- Recording and transcription services to provide compliance and additional fraud management.

Each day, Convergys customer service agents working in 46 contact centers manage more than 1.7 million customer interactions over the telephone or the Internet. Convergys' comprehensive customer management services enable its clients to achieve greater customer loyalty and increase revenue.

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(TM) employs more than 44,000 people in 46 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.

(Convergys and the Convergys logo are trademarks of Convergys Corporation.)