Unamic/HCN has been nominated by the Sales Management Association (SMA) for the Piet Heyn SMA Award 2009. The Piet Heyn Award will be given tot a Dutch enterprise who stands out of the crowd through courage and vision in the market.

The Dutch market leader in the area of offshore customer contact, Unamic/HCN, sees an increase of 25% in customer contact activities contracted out to Suriname and Turkey by Dutch companies in 2009. Having customer contacts handled offshore appears to be an attractive way to reduce costs substantially, while still maintaining the quality required by clients. Thus, this trend follows the tendency to outsource to offshore locations that has for years been widely accepted in the domain of ICT services. Countries like Surinam and Turkey are popular as offshore destinations for customer contact activities because of the broad availability of trained people whose mother tongue is Dutch. This growth trend is influenced by the current economic circumstances but also by the generally improved image of the quality of customer service in the low wage countries. The typical customer contact activities carried out in offshore locations are customer service, technical helpdesk and back office processes. In order to anticipate the strong increase of offshore contracts, the workforce of Unamic/HCN in Surinam is currently being expanded from 300 to 400 and the company commissioned the building of a new and bigger contact center in Paramaribo earlier this year.

CanalDigitaal has chosen Unamic/HCN for its customer service. The collaboration concerns a co-sourcing construction whereby from July 1, 2009 Unamic/HCN will carry out the telephone customer service from CanalDigitaal's location in Hilversum. For this the communication platform used by Unamic/HCN will be rolled out to Hilversum and Unamic/HCN installs its own work places at CanalDigitaal.

Hans Reuver (commercial director at Unamic/HCN): "We are very happy with the collaboration with CanalDigitaal. Both our companies suit each other with respect to culture, something that is very important when you go 'in house' with a customer. After all, our colleagues now vist CanalDigitaal every day."

Andrei Noppe (managing director at CanalDigitaal): "We sought a partner with experience in the co-sourcing model and we found it in Unamic/HCN. The fact that we soon come together under one roof makes the communication link literally and figuratively shorter and provides a higher grade of efficiency from which our clients ultimately must benefit."

By merging contact center organisations Unamic and HCN in October 2008, one of the largest Benelux organisations in the field of outsourcing of customer contact and customer processes arised.

The Unamic/HCN organisation consists of three business units: Contact Centers, Financial Services and Interim Management & Training and its core business is taking over customer processes, both individual and as part of a process chain.

Besides this, the support of (inhouse) customer contact operations by means of interim management and training activities is part of the services of Unamic/HCN.

Jeroen ten Haave, CEO of Unamic/HCN: ’With our extensive service portfolio our company offers a 100% coverage in the market for outsourcing and consultancy in the field of outsourcing customer contact processes. A big advantage for our customers to reach cost flexibilisation, cost reduction and increase in ROI are the various combinations between co-sourcing, outsourcing and offshoring which are possible. At Unamic/HCN we call this 'Rightsourcing'. With rightsourcing we aim at the optimum between outsourcing variations which leads to the best quality and cost effective way of performing customer contact activities for our customers.