SYKES Wins Technology Services Recognized Innovator Award

TAMPA, Fla., Nov. 29, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Turning traditional online forums into professional technical support channels has won new recognition for a long-time industry leader.  Sykes Enterprises, Incorporated (Nasdaq: SYKE), a global leader in providing outsourced customer contact management solutions and services in the business process outsourcing arena, today announced it has won a Recognized Innovator award from the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) at the Technology Services World conference in Las Vegas. The company was awarded the prize in the Innovation in Service Economics category for its latest product offering, Online Support Communities.

SYKES' Online Service Communities solution is designed for companies wanting to create communities for their customers so they can share problems and solutions in a peer-to-peer environment, or to improve their existing online engagement. For technology companies, this provides a way for their customers to interact with each other, and to collect real-time feedback on features, issues and customer needs. The product leverages SYKES' expertise and global abilities in customer care to both manage a support community and provide a new set of metrics for monitoring its effectiveness.

"Our early identification of the emerging market for one-to-many and many-to-many online support interactions has allowed us to help more than one client achieve great scale, increasing the number of customer interactions more than tenfold, while only doubling the staff to support it. By providing this alternate channel customers are enabled to interact with our clients' brands far more frequently and conveniently through the customers' preferred support channel, while our clients get the chance to build their brand promise with customers who may have never called in to a traditional call center support channel," said Dan Hernandez, Executive Vice President of Global Strategy.  "Blending SYKES' Online Support Communities with traditional support channels allows us to broaden the reach for customer interactions while also capitalizing on community knowledge and meeting consumers' needs for readily available and easily understood answers to their questions. Winning the Recognized Innovator award from TSIA further validates the strategies behind our comprehensive customer care offerings."

The Recognized Innovator Awards are highly regarded in the service industry, representing the only independently judged awards program that recognizes innovation in technology services products and service offerings documented with customer case studies of measurable business value and results. To win the Recognized Innovator award, SYKES provided real-world examples of how companies are leveraging their technology or services to generate incremental services revenue.  In one case study, SYKES' Online Support Community solution decreased the client's customer unit cost per transaction by more than 86 percent.  The new solution also increased the client's customer touchpoints by more than 600 percent, creating a new source of revenue.

"SYKES has clearly demonstrated that it understands the value of service economics and can strategically partner with technology service organizations to provide them with innovative tools that help run a profitable and highly performing services business," said John Ragsdale, Vice President of Technology Research for TSIA.

Recognized Innovator winners were selected by a panel of judges, including industry experts and TSIA members. More information on Technology Services World and the Technology Services Recognized Innovator Awards can be found at www.technologyservicesworld.com.

About SYKES

SYKES is a global leader in providing customer contact management solutions and services in the business process outsourcing (BPO) arena. SYKES provides an array of sophisticated customer contact management solutions to Fortune 1000 companies around the world, primarily in the communications, financial services, healthcare, technology and transportation and leisure industries. SYKES specializes in providing flexible, high quality customer support outsourcing solutions with an emphasis on inbound technical support and customer service. Headquartered in Tampa, Florida, with customer contact management centers throughout the world, SYKES provides its services through multiple communication channels encompassing phone, e-mail, web and chat. Utilizing its integrated onshore/offshore global delivery model, SYKES serves its clients through two geographic operating segments: the Americas (United States, Canada, Latin America, South Asia and Asia Pacific) and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). SYKES also provides various enterprise support services in the Americas and fulfillment services in EMEA, which include multi-lingual sales order processing, payment processing, inventory control, product delivery and product returns handling. For additional information, please visit www.sykes.com.

About TSIA

The Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) is the leading association dedicated to advancing the business of technology services. Technology services organizations large and small look to TSIA for world-class benchmarking and research, exceptional peer networking and learning opportunities, and high-profile certification and awards programs. Find TSIA online at www.tsia.com.

SOURCE Sykes Enterprises, Incorporated