Genesys Honors Customer Service Innovators

The world's top global innovators in customer service, as selected by a group of 25 global industry analysts, were announced today at G-Force Berlin by Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories. The Customer Innovation Awards program is an annual competition that recognizes companies for their use of technology to deliver innovative customer service in highly dynamic environments.

Six of the eight companies honored this year came from Europe. This year's selections from Europe included Belgacom, BT, Lekane, Philip Morris International, Sky, and UniCredit Global Information Services. This year's winners also included AT&T and Stream Energy, both with Texas-based operations. The companies were chosen for transforming their customer contact centers, increasing customer satisfaction, and improving the contact center's alignment with company business goals.

In sponsoring the awards, Genesys enlisted the help of research and consulting firms such as IDC, Datamonitor, Forrester, Frost & Sullivan, and Yankee Group. Genesys created the Genesys Customer Innovation Awards to recognize those companies making the greatest strides towards creating next-generation "Dynamic Contact Centers." The three overall criteria that determined the award level were innovation, optimization and improving the customer experience.

The most universal thread among all of the innovators was their ability to link business issues to customer service, achieve optimization, and treat the contact center as a strategic opportunity. The organizations also consistently scored high in the "strategic alignment between contact center and customer service goals" category.

The eight finalists scored  a "3-Star" or "4-Star" ranking, indicating how analysts felt they performed based on the stages of the Genesys contact center capability maturity model. Those stages are establishment, consolidating, performing, and optimizing. A 4-Star ranking, the highest honor possible, indicates the company contact center is operating at the optimizing stage. A 3-Star award is also regarded as an exceptional achievement.

4-Star winners were:

• Belgacom, the Belgian provider of integrated telecommunications services, operates several strong brands (Belgacom, Proximus, Telindus and Skynet). Belgacom scored well by balancing service-to-sales conversion while optimizing its customer service organization. Belgacom used a variety of key technologies to improve the customer experience, including an intelligent Customer Front Door iCFD that anticipates customer needs, rather than forcing customers into an automated system that is singularly focused on cost containment. Customer satisfaction increased 10 percent and, at the same time revenue-generating capacity increased 3 percent.
• BT, a leading global communications provider, operates in 170 countries, with more than 30,000 contact center positions within the company, and more than 100,000 contact center positions managed for its clients. BT undertook a transformational program to improve the overall customer experience and create an agile, global unified communication infrastructure using IP technology and the Genesys SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) Server at the core of the solution. BT was deemed outstanding in extending the boundaries of each contact center and creating global virtualisation across all media. Its customer benefits include intelligent routing that leverages the best BT resources and the integration of true blended multimedia channels.

3-Star winners were:

• Lekane, a producer of software to mobilize and expand the contact center and support mobility. At Telia Sonera, the leading telecommunications company in the Nordic and Baltic region, Lekane created the contact center to reach mobile and field service staff, while managing their availability and presence. Lekane was noted for extending access to experts outside the contact center to streamline and optimize customer service.
• Philip Morris International, based in Lausanne, Switzerland, is the leading international tobacco company. Philip Morris, along with its partner Orange Business Services, leveraged unified communications technology to provide collaboration, rich presence, and streamlining of employee communications. The company was honored for its optimization capabilities that used the Genesys Enterprise Telephony Solution (GETS). This platform provided employees with seamless control of their desktop phones via the computer, and gave information workers the ability to access availability and presence information at corporate headquarters and branch offices in Paris, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and Melbourne, Australia.
• Sky is the U.K.'s largest provider of pay-TV, telephony, and broadband products. Sky has leveraged IP telephony and virtualization to create a solution that can dynamically route customer interactions and enable flexible changes in organizational processes. Sky was recognized for its strategic use of the Genesys SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) Server to extend the contact center across multiple sites. This allowed for a more consistent experience across internal operations and centers of outsourcing, as well as the ability to monitor the global in-house and outsourced operations.
• UniCredit Global Information Services is the ICT company of one of the largest financial services organizations in Europe (UniCredit Group) with more than 40 million customers in 23 European countries and representative offices in 27 other markets. UniCredit scored high points for creating a highly flexible IT environment that successfully met both business and customer needs across its pan-European operations, including extending customer service to its multiple branch offices. UniCredit leveraged business process routing and SIP technology to serve multiple product lines, business units, and languages.

Genesys already honored its two U.S.-based winners, Stream Energy, and AT&T, during its G-Force event in San Antonio, Texas, last month.
 
"The goal of the Genesys Customer Innovation Awards program is to recognize companies that successfully transform their customer service even under challenging and dynamic environments," said Paul Segre, president and CEO of Genesys. "Each finalist has strategically leveraged contact center solutions to achieve an optimal balance of customer traffic, internal resources and business outcomes. The most universal common thread among all of the innovators is the ability to link business issues to customer service, achieve optimization and treat the contact center as a strategic opportunity."