AT&T and Stream Energy take top honors in customer service as Genesys announces North American Customer Innovations Awards winners

Finalists Transform Customer Service with Dynamic Contact Centers



SAN ANTONIO, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., an Alcatel-Lucent company (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU)awarded today at G-Force customers event in San Antonio the two most innovative North American companies in customer service, as selected by a group of 25 global industry analysts. The Customer Innovations Awards program recognizes companies delivering outstanding and innovative customer service in highly dynamic environments through the use of technology.

AT&T and Stream Energy, both with Texas-based operations, are this year’s winners for North America. Using technology innovatively to streamline and optimize customer service, the companies were honored 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 world’s top experts in customer service to judge the entrants. Companies such as Datamonitor, Forrester Research, Frost & Sullivan, IDC, and Yankee Group participated. Genesys created the Genesys Customer Innovation Awards to recognize those companies who made the greatest strides toward creating next-generation “Dynamic Contact Centers”.

Finalists presented their stories to panels of independent industry analysts at the Genesys Analyst Conference held in San Francisco in January 2008 and at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Forum held in Paris in February 2008. Presentations were judged and scored to obtain rankings. The three overall criteria that determined the award level were innovation, optimization and improving the customer experience.

The most universal common 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.

Eight finalists scored either a “3-Star” or “4-Star” ranking, indicating how analysts felt companies performed based on the stages of the Genesys contact center capability maturity model. Those stages are: establishment, consolidating, performing and optimizing. A 4-Star rating is the highest honor possible.

* North America-based 3- and 4-star Finalists include: Stream Energy, a 4-star finalist is one of the largest privately held participants in the Texas deregulated electricity market, with roughly 300,000 residential customers: www.streamenergy.net Stream Energy was best noted by the judges for its strategic use of customer service, which cut across self-service and assisted service to create a seamless customer experience. IT also created a strategic environment to bring together a wide range of multimedia, live and assisted service
* AT&T, a 3-star Finalist, is a publicly-traded, San Antonio-based telecommunications company: external linkwww.att.com. AT&T Scored extremely well in optimizing the customer experience and using IP to enable virtualization. AT&T’s use of technology not only allowed it to extend the boundaries of the contact center to, but also created consistent business processes and was considered by the judges to be the most highly scaled environment.

“The goal of the Genesys Customer Innovation Awards program is to recognize the world’s most dynamic contact center environments,” said Paul Segre, president and CEO, Genesys. “The winners in North America have 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.”

Finalists were recognized at G-Force San Antonio today. For more information, including previous finalists, please visit: external linkhttp://www.genesyslab.com/community/customerawards.