[May 08, 2014]

Group O and OpenSpan Win ICMI Global Contact Center Award

OpenSpan (News - Alert), Inc., a global provider of worker optimization, activity management and automation solutions, and Group O, a business process outsourcing provider, announced that they won an International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) Global Call Center Award for Best Use of Technology. Group O won this award for its use of OpenSpan's Desktop Automation with Agile (News - Alert) Desktop. The companies worked together to streamline Group O's customer service desktop by reducing the number of applications used, and developed an agile desktop for a more efficient and comprehensive view of customer data. The award was presented May 7 at the second annual ICMI Global Call Center Awards Dinner and Ceremony.

The ICMI Global Call Center Awards is a comprehensive award program dedicated to recognizing the achievements of companies, contact centers and individuals in the customer management industry. It honors the leadership, vision, innovation and strategic accomplishments within the industry. ICMI has organized and managed this awards program for over 10 years.

Based in Milan, Ill., Group O is a business process outsourcing provider that offers strategic marketing, supply chain, packaging and business analytic solutions. As part of these solutions, Group O provides customer care and call center support for clients across a number of industries. Before partnering with OpenSpan, the company's contact center agents worked in a number of disparate applications and systems to support their many clients. This created longer call times and longer lead-time to locate customer information, which potentially impacted call quality and customer satisfaction.

OpenSpan automated many of the manual activities that Group O agents were required to perform and integrated the mission-critical customer information into a 360-degree customer view that transformed customer interactions into gold-standard experiences. By automating these activities, Group O agents can hadle calls faster, provide better service and engage with the customers in a higher-value interaction.

The Group O/OpenSpan partnership has yielded impressive results. Group O found that the OpenSpan solutions helped to improve its average handle time (AHT), quality and customer satisfaction scores:

• AHT on calls supported by OpenSpan automations improved by as much as 40%.
• Overall AHT decreased from 3:30 to an all-time low of 2:54 over a sustained 90-day period.
• Quality Assurance (QA) scores improved from 94% to 96%.
• Customer satisfaction scores increased from 91% to 99% in targeted categories.

In addition, Group O was able to reduce new agent training by a full 1.5 days for new hires, thanks to the OpenSpan solution. This allows Group O to put agents into production sooner, and the transitional ramp-up time to achieving key metrics has dropped by almost 25%.

"We are extremely proud to have won this award," said Paul Flemr, director of customer care for Group O. "What started as a non-invasive, low-risk project has produced remarkable results. The OpenSpan Desktop Automation project at Group O has had a tremendous impact on improving the overall efficiency in the contact center, as well as other key areas of the business."

"OpenSpan is very proud of our partnership with Group O, and we are thrilled to win this award with them," said Eric Musser, CEO of OpenSpan. "Group O is committed to providing customer service at the highest levels. This award is a testament to their drive to go the extra mile for their clients, and the significant results that can be gained with OpenSpan's Desktop Automation."

About OpenSpan

OpenSpan is a provider of activity intelligence and desktop automation solutions that improve performance, drive revenue and increase efficiencies in contact center, back office and retail storefront environments. Activity Intelligence provides actionable, real-time activity and performance insight used to make informed decisions about people and technologies. Leveraging the critical insight from desktop analytics, organizations use desktop automation to streamline worker activity, simplify critical service processes and remove technology barriers as means to deliver a gold-standard customer experience. OpenSpan solutions are deployed on more than 300,000 desktops across the world, and are optimizing billions of transactions in the banking and financial services, insurance, telecommunications, retail and technology industries. For more information, visit www.openspan.com.

About Group O

Group O is a diversified business process outsourcing provider specializing in marketing services, business analytics, supply chain operations and strategic packaging solutions. A Corporate Plus member of the National Minority Supplier Development Council (nmsdc.org), Group O is an NMSDC National Minority Supplier of the Year honoree and is recognized as a Top 5 Latino-owned Business by the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Headquartered in Milan, IL, and with major operations in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Texas, Group O is one of the largest Hispanic-owned companies in the United States and employs more than 1,400. To learn more, visit www.GroupO.com.

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