DALLAS, February 21, 2011– ACS, A Xerox Company (NYSE: XRX), today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Unamic/HCN, the largest privately-owned customer care provider in the Benelux.

The agreement marks ACS' first acquisition in the European customer care market - building on the company's global capabilities with a management team that provides regional market expertise. The transaction is expected to be final following the completion of customary closing conditions.

"Unamic's clients will quickly see the benefits of the acquisition as they access the expanded capabilities of our combined companies," said Chris Tranquill, group president of ACS' business processing solutions group. "For ACS, we take an important step forward in expanding our global delivery network, giving clients more options to better meet their business and customer needs."  

The Dutch-speaking customer care market is one of the most sophisticated sectors in Europe by embracing new technology and business processes. Unamic's 14 facilities and 2,200 employees will join ACS' growing customer care services in emerging international markets. Upon the close of the acquisition, the company will operate as "Unamic/HCN, A Xerox Company."

"Unamic is an ideal fit with ACS' approach to fulfilling clients' customer care needs through innovation," said Simon Verzijl, managing director of Unamic. "We share a common business culture that revolves around the client as well as a business model that pursues a diversified customer base."  

Unamic/HCN's expertise in Dutch, French, Flemish and Turkish contributes to ACS' broad suite of languages. ACS currently offers customer care services in 20 languages from 140 locations around the world, including the United States, Spain, Jamaica, Argentina and the Philippines. The company's 38,000 customer care agents receive more than 1.6 million calls daily.  

Unamic's subsidiary, Any-G, is not subject to the acquisition and will continue to operate independently.

 

About Xerox

Xerox Corporation is a $22 billion leading global enterprise for business process and document management. Through its broad portfolio of technology and services, Xerox provides the essential back-office support that clears the way for clients to focus on what they do best: their real business.  Headquartered in Norwalk, Conn., Xerox provides leading-edge document technology, services, software and genuine Xerox supplies for graphic communication and office printing environments of any size. Through ACS, A Xerox Company, which Xerox acquired in February 2010, Xerox also offers extensive business process outsourcing and IT outsourcing services, including data processing, HR benefits management, finance support, and customer relationship management services for commercial and government organizations worldwide. The 136,000 people of Xerox serve clients in more than 160 countries.  For more information, visit http://www.xerox.com, http://news.xerox.com, http://www.realbusiness.com or http://www.acs-inc.com.  For investor information, visit http://www.xerox.com/investor.

In October 2009 Dimension Data's Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report, 2009 has been published. This report is a key resource for decision makers and managers in the contact centre industry. The Report covers the full breadth and depth of managing a contact centre - performance, processes, organisation, technology, as well as strategy, financial and customer management.

Hereunder you find the major themes and findings from 2009.

Read more...

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.