October 2003

We manage our clients' customer lifecycle through the application of highly skilled front-line, enhanced technology and best practice processes. We consistently deliver increases in customer loyalty and lifetime customer value.

CIS: What is your vision of the future of the CRM/contact center/teleservices industry?

Schwartz: This is a very exciting time for the industry. Clients' needs are evolving rapidly, and we need to respond by being less of a simple vendor provider to being a leader in the clients' strategic solution development. Our industry will lead the way in creating the CRM future by:

' Helping clients meet the ever-increasing demands of their customer base;

' Integrating a broad range of services, including complete customer lifecycle management, business process outsourcing, further penetration of global markets and global customer servicing; and

' Integrating live customer contact management with advanced technological automation capabilities.

At APAC, we have modeled our strategy to increase our focus on client relationships, making sure that we have the best strategic minds working to address our clients' needs. We drive full lifecycle management ' helping our clients gain the best understanding of their customers, adding business value at every contact.

CIS: What, in your opinion, is the most pressing issue facing our industry today?

Schwartz: Companies today must differentiate their outsourced solutions through quality, greater customer service and the application of strategically applied technologies balanced with the need to be cost-effective and provide our clients with a greater return on their outsourcing investment.

We must accomplish this through attention to our clients' customers' contact needs and the creative application of technology, people and processes to ensure that we drive customer loyalty and make it easy for customers to do business with our clients.

CIS: What are your recommendations to alleviate such problems?

Schwartz: At APAC, we focus on establishing strong client partnerships to leverage the combined strengths of both our 30 years of experience managing customers and our clients' industry knowledge. Outsourcers and clients alike must anticipate customer needs and look for ways to not just cut the costs of service delivery, but dramatically improve the value of the customer relationship. At APAC, we view the relationship as a whole, not within the confines of a single contact. To realize the greatest value from the customer, we ensure that each interaction possesses the key components of high quality service and state-of-the-art technologies that create solutions that anticipate customer needs.

CIS: What is your vision for future trends in the teleservices outsourcing market regarding profitability and international competition?

Schwartz: The international delivery model presents continued opportunity ' and heralds a very exciting time for the industry. The international delivery model will cause clients who have not previously outsourced to open up to the possibilities, leveraging a new solution model and demanding a new level of return on each customer relationship.

CIS: What is your company's specialty and mission statement?

Mergele: SER's mission is to deliver innovative software solutions that enable companies to maximize productivity, achieve unprecedented operational efficiencies and enhance customer service.

Across a wide spectrum of industries from financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing and teleservices, to education, government, energy and travel ' SER is helping companies streamline their business operations. Behind our products and services is a team of professionals who are fully committed to delivering quality service to our customers worldwide.

Since 1989, we have been providing innovative solutions to the contact center industry. We were an early champion of a burgeoning teleservices industry and a pioneer of the customer-centric predictive dialer. While many companies have changed their focus over the past 14 years, SER maintains its ongoing commitment to delivering solutions that enhance contact center effectiveness and, most important, ensuring the continued success of the industry. Today, our company holds more than 20 patents related to contact center technology. Our dedication to supporting the continued success of this industry is clearly the reason 8 of the top 10 outbound teleservices agencies in the United States use SER's contact center solutions.

CIS: What makes your services unique and how can users benefit by using them?

Mergele: With over 14 years of experience, SER has a proven track record for delivering pioneering solutions that provide real value to our customers. This year alone, SER has introduced a number of solutions that further extend our product offerings to both the outbound and inbound market. At the core, we are a customer-driven organization delivering mission-critical technology that is essential to our clients' ability to maximize productivity, reduce costs and ensure success.

For outbound contact centers, we have been recognized as 'best of breed' with our Call Processing System (CPS). Designed to enhance agent productivity and elevate contact center performance, CPS combines predictive dialing capabilities with the inbound and call-blending features required to compete in today's dynamic operating environment.

Recognizing that agents are the most expensive resource in any contact center, our focus is on enabling our customers to achieve the highest level of productivity. Our new outbound dialer, the TSP500, uses SER's patented dialing algorithm, SmartPace VI, to maximize the number of live connects an agent can achieve. Even before the called party has finished saying 'hello,' the switch instantaneously connects the call to an available agent and displays the called party's database information on the agent's screen. We have always prided ourselves on our system's sensitivity to virtually eliminating abandoned calls.

Another focus for contact centers is delivering superior customer service. We address this critical component by providing a number of great management, supervisory and quality tools.

In the area of quality control, we're quite excited about our quality assurance suite that includes our automated quality monitoring product, SERTAINTY, and our automated call validation product, SERTIFY. SERTAINTY automates call-monitoring activities to evaluate and directly improve agent-customer interactions. SERTAINTY alerts supervisors to events such as calls where agents use inappropriate language or have not adhered to the script ' significantly improving agent performance and increasing customer satisfaction and retention. SERTIFY verifies the accuracy of 100 percent of a contact center's transactions by comparing every order variable entered by an agent and validating it against the recorded confirmation.

SERTAINTY and SERTIFY use speech recognition technology to listen to and flag only those calls that actually need to be reviewed by a supervisor. Both can be integrated with a contact center's existing call recording investment. Combined, SERTAINTY and SERTIFY deliver a quality assurance solution that enables a contact center to monitor and validate 100 percent of all calls and automatically track and measure key performance indicators.

CIS: What, in your opinion, is the most pressing issue facing our industry today?

Mergele: There are two issues that seem to be of pressing concern. The first and most visible is the issue the industry has faced for the last 30 years. Since the 1970s, doomsayers have been predicting that the teleservices industry will cease to exist. Unfortunately, the unsavory business practices of 'the few' continually draw the attention away from the credible applications of teleservices that drive our economy. As you know, our industry employs nearly six million Americans and generates more than $274 billion in domestic sales. However, the media continues to focus its attention on the negative and the government, instead of finding positive solutions to identify and deal with 'the bad seeds,' has created legislation they believe will help. The fact is it will probably have little impact on 'the problem.' Credible companies, like those that make up SER's customer base, will do what they must to comply. For the most part, that means the 'best' doing even better and the 'troublemakers' simply folding up their tents and moving on.

The real issue that is not going away is the shortage of qualified and affordable labor needed to staff contact centers. When all the dust settles from this firestorm about legislation and the industry responds with quality programs, you'll see we're still going to need more highly qualified agents.

CIS: What are your recommendations to alleviate the current problems?

Mergele: First, we must continue to act responsively in our business practices and in our desire to comply with the current legislation. Until the legislation is overturned, our industry is best served by demonstrating how we are complying and how those actions benefit consumers. I believe the leaders in the industry will leverage technology to regain efficiencies lost by complying with the mandate.

We must also lend our voices and financial support to organizations like the ATA and the DMA, and we must actively support the education of the public. As a technology leader, SER is providing financial support to these associations and is clearly on the leading edge of delivering solutions that allow contact centers to comply with legislation without negatively impacting performance or affecting the goals of campaigns.

I think teleservices providers should work with their corporate, financial and industrial clients to develop more targeted campaigns by leveraging corporate customer data, Web site data, data mining tools and relationship marketing opportunities. Doing so will increase the connect rate to consumers who do want to be reached and weed out unproductive calls to consumers who do not wish to be called.

As always, the industry will continue to identify ways to add more productivity to every hour and develop new techniques to manage, retain, motivate and monitor agents.

CIS: What is your vision for future trends in the contact center/CRM/teleservices outsourcing market regarding profitability and international competition?

Mergele: Certainly, the current business climate will foster continued interest in relocating contact centers offshore in an effort to reduce costs and remain profitable.

I also believe we are living in a time when American business is increasingly interested in supporting the homeland. Moreover, to effectively compete in today's dynamic environment, contact center operators will have to fundamentally change the way they do business. Five years from now, those contact center operators that have grown and maintained profitability will owe their success to their use of technology. By having the vision and acumen to deploy leading-edge contact center solutions today, they will be able to reduce their operating costs, increase productivity and create sustainable competitive differentiators that will help ensure their future success.

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