The awards were given to a broad range of enterprises from around the globe, including the largest global ticket selling agency, a major healthcare facility, a regional real estate firm and a Canadian school district. This year’s winners include:

• Ticketmaster
• Reece & Nichols Realtors
• Farmers Insurance
• Wolf Creek Public Schools
• Belgacom
• Groupama
• Annecy Hospital

Each company used technology innovatively to streamline and optimize communications with their customers and their employees. In assessing the awards, Alcatel-Lucent enlisted the help of more than 40 of the world’s top experts in customer service, communications and network infrastructure to judge the entrants. Industry analysts from firms such as Forrester Research, Frost & Sullivan, Gartner, IDC and Ovum participated.

Finalists presented their stories to a panel of industry analysts during the first quarter of 2011. The judging criteria for customer service included interactions, resources, infrastructure, processes and insights; the judging criteria for employee engagement included devices, communication, network, collaboration and management.  In both categories, the analysts also assessed overall innovation and business impact. The analyst assessments place the organizations into comparative performance ranges; those organizations that rank in the top 25 percent of their category receive 3-star awards; those in the top 10 percent receive 4-star awards.

Details of the winning organizations include:

Ticketmaster is the world’s leading ticketing company serving over 200 million fans globally every year and is one of the top five eCommerce sites in the world. Ticketmaster was awarded four stars for their project to convert to a total Genesys SIP implementation, allowing them to virtualize their call centers, increase call center efficiencies through centralized call routing,  improve visibility of real-time data and achieve cradle-to-grave reporting across all customer touch points throughout the enterprise. In addition to the operational advantages, Ticketmaster was able to reduce annual maintenance costs by 60 percent.

Reece & Nichols Realtors is a leader in the Kansas and Missouri real estate markets with 19 branch offices that support over 2,000 real estate agents. Reece and Nichols faced a challenge that many fast growth companies face: the integration of communications systems that incorporate several different types of devices from a variety of vendors in many physical locations. They received a 3-star award for their implementation of a VoIP unified communications system, which has a vastly simplified system administration and gives new flexibility to support sales agent needs for dynamic services such as hotelling and follow-me call forwarding to mobile phones.  In addition, Reece & Nichols could leverage existing systems and network services, making the project easier to deploy and allowing the company to implement SIP trunking in order to reduce monthly circuit costs by 80 percent.  As a result, their realtors enjoy the communications flexibility and mobility they need to work face-to-face with customers and to be successful.

Farmers Insurance is the third-largest insurer in the United States of passenger automobile and homeowners insurance, and also provides a wide range of other insurance and financial services products. Farmers received a 4-star award for their ServicePoint initiative to leverage the Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution solution and automate the prioritization and distribution of work items across their network of service centers. By better leveraging their agents and identifying skills for both calls and non-call work items, Farmers was able to speed up task completion and increase customer satisfaction from 82 percent to 87 percent with notable improvements in timeliness and first call resolution.  Notably, they also experienced increased employee satisfaction through the new systems.

Wolf Creek Public Schools is a leading school district in Alberta, Canada with 33 schools, approximately 7000 students from kindergarten to grade-12, 475 teachers and 350 support staff. Wolf Creek uses technology as one important contributor in developing a sense of “Digital Citizenship” in young students. It was a 3-star winner for building open networks that help to link students and teachers, for putting into place a technology governance model that ensure technology deployments support the district vision, and for helping teachers to adapt to new ways that students might communicate and collaborate. Wolf Creek is well-prepared for the increased adoption of smart mobile devices that both supplement and substitute for classical desktop computers in the district’s vision of excellent learning environments.

Groupama is France’s second largest multi-line insurer and the leading mutual insurer with a broad spectrum of business lines including life and non-life insurance, savings, and a high-calibre financial structure. Groupama is driving innovation into its customer service strategy through the use of a visual customer service application delivered through the iPhone, the “ Groupama toujours là ” iPhone app. Groupama received a 4-star award for this mobile platform, which it combined with workforce optimization capabilities to ensure the right number of call center agents are available at the right time with the right skill set. Since the visual customer service application is embedded in a mobile device, effective at the right time and providing to agent the customer GPS position. By combining the three capabilities, Groupama empowers its customers to choose how, where and when they engage with customer service and are assured that they will interact with a very capable agent when they choose to interact with the call center.

Belgacom is the incumbent Belgian operator, a strong player in voice, broadband and digital TV (fixed and mobile), and has defined “the Customer is King” as their main goal to improve their service. Belgacom received a 4-star award for their implementation of the Genesys intelligence Customer Front Door (iCFD) which was not only able to improve customer service, but also helped drive additional sales through the contact center, which increased the contact center’s value across the organization. Furthermore they installed a call back manager in order give their customers an optimal service by reaching their contact centers and working now on the integration of their contact centers with the web (multi channel routing).

Centre Hospitalier de la Region d’Annecy is one of the leading healthcare facilities in France, an hospital with 1100 beds,serving over 22,000 patients every year, 17,000 of which are surgical operations. Their innovation focused on a unified communications solution including multifunction terminals at patient bedside, and wireless access for roaming doctors and nurses.  Annecy Hospital received a 4-star award for the way they used technology to streamline health care functions such as the prescription process.  In this case, doctors at bedside can enter a prescription order which is then automatically transferred and prepared with 80 percent automation and, if appropriate, delivered by robot back to the patient room.  Annecy is better able to practice medicine, and better serve its patients.

“The goal of the Dynamic Enterprise Awards program is to identify innovative enterprises and share the story of their technology journey with analysts and with other customers,” said Nicolas de Kouchkovsky, CMO, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. “We hope these award winners help other organizations to understand and adapt best practices for customer service and employee engagement.”