MultiChoice
selected as global innovator in fourth annual Customer innovations awards


MultiChoice recognized for transforming customer service via Dynamic Customer Engagement
Barcelona, June 10, 2009 – MultiChoice, a leading Premium Television Entertainment provider in South Africa, was named one of the world’s top innovators in customer service by an international group of industry experts in the fourth annual Customer Innovation Awards. Sponsored by Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU), the Customer Innovation Awards recognise outstanding companies for their use of technology to deliver innovative customer service in dynamic environments.

Out of an entry pool of more than 200 companies, 28 industry analysts, including independent analysts and those who work with international firms such as IDC, Frost, Datamonitor, Yankee Group, McGee-Smith Analytics, CommFusion and Forrester Research, selected MultiChoice as one of eight winners based on MultiChoice’s ability to improve the customer experience by creating an intelligent Customer Front Door (iCFD). The iCFD leveraged sophisticated speech recognition to improve customer satisfaction by breaking down the barriers between self service and live service when customers need to talk to a live agent. A representative from MultiChoice presented to the industry analysts during a panel session at Alcatel- Lucent’s Enterprise Forum held in Paris in March 2009.

Using speech technology coupled with built-in business processes, the systems at MultiChoice quickly identified a customer’s needs and intent to determine whether to use automated or live service with the customer. As a result, overall customer satisfaction rates improved by simplifying and enhancing the customer experience, reducing the time to deploy new services.

The system has reduced call volumes significantly. It is now able to conduct real-time fix of technical problems and has the ability to read out instructions to customers. In some cases the customer solution simply required a “Smartcard reset” that was conducted on the back-end system. In these cases a message was sent from the automated interactive voice system (IVR), to the back-end.

MultiChoice was committed to going far beyond traditional voice self service. The system identified customer profiles and transaction histories, and even used demographics to personalise the service where possible. Based on its historical experience with customer’s preferences, there are customers who prefer interaction with a live agent, and are provided with this option. Customers who are calling about the same query within a 24 hour time frame are routed directly to an agent, as well as those who spend more than eight minutes using self service in a- 24 hour period.

The system performed so well that the time it took customers to get an answer decreased from 74 seconds to less than 20 seconds, and 20% of MultiChoice customers now prefer the automated system.

The Customer Innovation Awards judging process held each winner to the highest standards in customer care, evaluating each candidate against 20 individual categories. Three criteria determined their overall scores: innovation, optimisation and improving the customer experience. The common element each of the winners shared was their ability to improve the overall customer experience while linking business issues to customer service, resulting in a more strategic approach to customer interactions.

This year the winners scored either a "4-Star" or a “3-Star” ranking (on a scale of one- to four-stars), indicating how analysts felt the companies performed when compared to the four stages of the Genesys contact center capability maturity model. Those stages are: establishment, consolidating, performing and optimizing. MultiChoice was awarded three stars indicating the company is operating at the performing phase of the contact center maturity model.