Putting Customers First: Eight Contact Centers Worldwide Recognized For Outstanding Innovation In Customer Service

What do a bank from Melbourne, Australia and a health organization from Florence, Italy have in common with a global telecommunications company based in the United States? Each is one of the world's most innovative customer service organizations for 2005, recognized for outstanding use of technology by a panel of 22 global industry experts who specialize in customer service. Their innovations ranged from creating video customer care centers, to building IP-enabled contact centers, to using SMS-based text messaging systems to prevent fraud – all of which resulted in major improvements in customer care, efficiency, and business value.

The panel selected Carta Si, the leading credit card issuer in Italy with 880 member banks and 7.5 million cards in service, as the most innovative company overall based on the final voting. Each of the other seven organizations were recognized for their innovation. Selected from a pool of over 100 nominees, each of the finalists traveled to San Francisco or Paris to present before a panel of industry analysts representing firms such as Yankee Group, Forrester Research, Gartner, Ovum, and Datamonitor.

Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., an Alcatel company, and sponsor of the awards, asked each of the eight finalists to demonstrate how their company created compelling business and customer benefits using new technology. In addition to reviewing printed background materials, the industry analysts considered presentations from each company and engaged in one-hour roundtable discussions before submitting their ballots.

The judging criteria included:

• Using multi-media to provide a consistent customer experience across channels.
• Tying together different departments or business units to deliver benefits to customers.
• Embracing innovative new metrics of agent performance.
• Leveraging customer information to drive specific improvements in customer service
• Linking the contact center with partners and others to deliver a complete customer experience.
• Creating compelling business benefits in the contact center that extend beyond typical customer service transactions.

Carta Si – Leading Italian Credit Card Processor Gains Top Honors
Through its IP contact center solution Carta Si was able to improve customer service while better managing its multiple locations and improving its capacity to handle more than 20,000 calls per day. Given the competitive nature of the credit card business, Carta Si was looking for new ways to deploy information services. Through its IP system, Carta Si can support voice and data on the same connections. Carta Si leveraged the technology innovatively to offer additional new services to customers, including SMS messaging. For example, members have the ability to fight fraud by confirming transactions above a pre-set threshold via an SMS message they receive to their mobile phone. Using the system Carta Si can also support new services, such as imaging via 3G phones. These types of services are changing the vision of how customers relate to the company.

Customer Service Innovation Finalists

• ANZ Bank
  Headquartered in Melbourne, ANZ Bank is one of the five largest and most successful companies in Australia and it has become the number one bank in New Zealand. ANZ has become one of the most highly rated businesses in the eyes of the customer, based largely on its commitment to investing in people and technology for its contact center operation. ANZ has improved customer satisfaction nearly 40% while at the same time reducing costs by nearly 30%, turning its contact center into a model of efficiency with validation and awards from the Australian Government and numerous consumer and contact center groups. ANZ's intelligent routing and automated use of customer information has eliminated numerous customer issues, such as the need to repeatedly provide account information.
  
  
• AT&T
  As one of the world's largest telecommunications holding companies and the largest in the United States, AT&T faced the challenge of transforming customer service on a massive scale. AT&T implemented a major corporate initiative called the, ‘Contact Center Transformation Program' (CCTP) – which became a multi-year effort that transformed the contact centers by implementing an enterprise-wide consolidated, standardized business process and technology infrastructure. The CCTP improved customer service, reduced misdirected calls, and enabled new speech technologies for self-service. While improving service, AT&T also integrated a wide range of business offerings, such as high-speed DSL Internet, local and long distance voice, and directory publishing and advertising services. The business challenge facing AT&T related directly to its very large base of customer contact centers that covered close to three million customer interactions per month at more than 100 physical locations across the West and Southwest regions of the United States. In an extremely large-scale environment, AT&T was recognized for its ability to improve customer service while integrating multiple lines of business and creating compelling business benefits.
  
  
• Centro de Servizi Montedomini
  Centro de Servizi Montedomini is a state-owned agency dedicated to the care of the elderly in Florence, Italy. They provide health emergency services, rehabilitation, and social and health assistance to the elderly and disabled. In order to improve access, control expenses, and reduce the number of hospitalization and emergency interventions, they initiated the Telecare project, which uses video contact centers to diagnose and monitor patients without the patient having to travel to the Montedomini site. Through the video contact center, Montedomini was able to provide much broader access, by targeting more than 2,000 patients as part of the Telecare project, and providing a platform that the elderly were comfortable with as a substitute for in-office visits. They are able to use voice and video for monitoring, emergency calls and scheduled check-ups.
  
  
• Groupama
  Founded at the end of the 19th century to provide insurance cover for the agribusiness, Groupama is the leading mutual insurance company in France with 8 million customers and more than 33,000 employees in 10 countries. In 2005 they launched an ambitious program to use IP technology to tie together multiple contact centers more efficiently in Lyon France. The virtual IP contact center enables Groupama to improved customer relations across multi-sites while providing services at a lower cost. At the same time, by embracing SIP open IP standards, Groupama gained business benefits by enabling its contact center to use the internet and softphones to dramatically decrease operations and equipment costs in the future.
  
  
• Swedbank
  Swedbank is a leading Nordic-Baltic banking group with 8.4 million retail customers and 396,000 corporate customers in Sweden, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. Swedbank has combined telephone banking and email banking by integrating the two with their IVR system. Swedbank implemented a sophisticated multi-channel customer system throughout multiple regions and business units. In addition to telephone and email, these also include secure email, incoming fax and IVR integration. Ninety percent of calls the contact center are self-service calls. When customers email Swedbank with a questions, their average wait time has improved from 24 hours to only 4 hours and have noticed they are getting their queries answered correctly more quickly. Customers give Swedbank a satisfaction rating of 4.4 on a scale of 1-5.
  
  
• Vanguard
  The Vanguard Group, headquartered in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, is the nation's second-largest mutual fund firm and a leading provider of company-sponsored retirement plan services, managing more than $910 billion in U.S. mutual fund assets, including more than $270 billion in employer-sponsored retirement plans. Vanguard offers 130 funds to U.S. investors and more than 40 additional funds in foreign markets. Vanguard addressed several key customer issues around integrating self-service, the web and email, including a sophisticated system that balances the need for automated service with assisted service. Customers can immediately exit the IVR for agent assistance and have their calls intelligently routed to the right agent the first time, enabling Vanguard to give personal attention to high value interactions. Vanguard is also enabling its agents to find customer data more quickly to better anticipate needs and reduce repetition.
  
  
• Wells Fargo
  Wells Fargo is a diversified financial services company, providing banking, insurance, investments, mortgage and consumer finance to more than 23 million customers from more than 6,200 stores, the internet and other distribution channels across North America and elsewhere internationally. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, the company is decentralized, so every local Wells Fargo store serves as a headquarters to meet the financial needs of its customers. Wells Fargo used Genesys technology to create a single customer service hub that brought together multiple business units and services and integrated a disparate set of infrastructure and PBXs. To improve customer satisfaction, Wells Fargo reduced the need to transfer calls between business units and identified specific customer sets quickly and efficiently routing them to the correct site and agent. Wells Fargo is now in its second year of a three-year contact center infrastructure project to connect nine independently managed businesses using software to improve cross-selling opportunities, increase customer satisfaction, and improve retention rates.