Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, an Alcatel-Lucent company announced the winners of the fourth annual Customer Innovation Awards program this week.
According to the company, the program is an annual competition that recognizes outstanding companies for their use of technology to deliver innovative customer service in highly dynamic environments.
Over 200 companies were in the running this year, and a diverse group of 28 industry analysts selected eight winners over a period of several months that spanned the Genesys Analyst Conference held in San Francisco in January 2009 and the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Forum held in Paris in March 2009.
The list of eight winning companies includes:
· Presbyterian Health and Personal Nucleo from the Americas;
· DenizBank, Etisalat, FedEx Express, and MultiChoice from EMEA; and
· Global Speech Networks and Tokio Marine from the Asia Pacific region.
According to an official release, winners were selected based in part on a presentation in front of the industry analysts demonstrating how and why its customer engagement strategies make them among the elite customer service organizations in the world. The judging process held the finalists to the highest standards in customer care, evaluating each candidate against 20 individual categories. Three criteria determined their overall scores: innovation, optimization and improving the customer experience. The common element each of the winners shared was their ability to improve the overall customer experience while linking business issues to customer service resulting in a more strategic approach to customer interactions.
This year the winners scored either a "Four-Star" or a "Three-Star" ranking. Four stars indicate the highest honor possible; achieving three stars is regarded as an exceptional achievement.
From the official release, here are some details on the Four-Star winners:
· Etisalat Egypt, the Egyptian 3G service provider was selected because it has created one of the world's most advanced multimedia contact centers, combining video, voice, and SMS, with voice recognition, avatars, and other advanced self service choices. The video call center and IVR technology allows this fast growing telco provider to enable 7 million Egyptian customers to interact with agents live via their video enabled mobile phones and the 3G network 24 hours a day.
· Presbyterian Health, New Mexico's largest provider of health care, was selected because it integrated a complete range of technologies, including the Web, live agents, automated voice, patient options for scheduling proactive call-backs from key contacts, and business processes that can route requests to the appropriate person virtually anywhere in the system. Among the technology advances at Presbyterian was the addition of "virtual hold" software that lets patients opt out of hold and choose their own time and contact point for a call back.
· FedEx Express was selected because it has created one of the world's most sophisticated systems to improve the customer experience in a highly complex environment - which spans 16 languages, 17 markets and nearly 90,000 different types of transactions and inquiries. FedEx Express created a single virtual customer service operation that brought together 18 different contact centers, while enabling cross-channel experiences that include chat, SMS, Web, kiosks and other customer entry points into a single threaded conversation.
· Global Speech Networks, a leading Australian provider of customer service software on-demand, was selected because it created a flexible platform that brings together a variety of next generation technology, including voice recognition, IP technology, email and phone, and other multichannel interactions. In addition, Global Speech Networks developed a core set of business processes that dramatically reduce the time to deploy, change or scale customer service technology. A flexible voice platform that combines voice and assisted service is one of the key capabilities of the Global Speech Networks implementation.
