Company: InterContinental Hotels Group
Company Division/Group: Global Customer Care
Company Description: IHG is a leading global hospitality co. and one of the world's largest hotel groups. The company owns, manages, or franchises almost 4,000 hotels and more than 590,000 guest rms in nearly 100 countries around the world. The Group owns a portfolio of respected brands including InterContinental Hotels, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge & Candlewood Suites and Hotel Indigo.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Contact Center of the Year (Up to 100 Seats)

Nomination Title: IHG Global Customer Care

1. Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since the beginning of July last year (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Global Customer Care (GCC) should be selected for the Stevie Award for their
excellent customer service and dedication to maximizing a positive
customer experience. The team provides global support for over 4,000 hotels
with multiple technology platforms. The average tenure of our associates is 7
years, and there has been less a than 3% turnover rate annually for the past 10
years under the direction of Jacque Plair-Rushin. In the last 12 months, there
has been no turnover.

GCC provides end-to-end support for development, implementation, and
maintenance initiatives through in-sourced and outsourced solutions. The help
desk is available with "live" and personable assistance 24x7x365. We provide
software product management, maintenance, project management, trend analysis
and for approximately 120,000 components and other services. Support
services include statistical reporting, trend analysis and data translation,
data base development, internal/external training, supplier management, asset
tracking, depot maintenance services, hardware system monitoring, contract
negotiations, product certification, software updates and distribution.

Significant accomplishments since last July are:

- Attainment of customer driven SLAs achieved through a collaborative Deployment
and Support Summit that allowed all key suppliers in the support delivery
channel evaluate real cases common to us all and candidly discuss how we could
improve the overall customer experience. As a result, we saw a 10% reduction in
executive escalations and overall first call resolution. This is significant
since a large majority of our customers are owners and GMs who have hotels to
operate.

- The call volume prior to this year peaked at 25,000 calls monthly. This year,
we are steadily averaging 17,400 calls monthly due to performing targeted trend
analysis that clearly allowed the development and implementation of solutions to
drive the trend downward. This represents a 30% decrease in those targeted areas.

- Call center stats for the last 12 months are: 208,000 calls annually; 1.4
cases per call; Avg speed of answer - 1.56 min; avg. handle time - 8 mins; 85%
of all cases resolved on the first call or within 24 hours at the Tier 1 level;
only 15% are escalated to Tier II channels. This is an overall improvement of 7%.

Our customer support organization is a part of the Global Technology Division,
which is development focused, thus, it is often difficult to bring the
appropriate attention to the customer experience. However, support's inherent
role is to be the customer advocate, while also ensuring that products perform
as intended. Therefore, we consistently communicated and mapped trends in
performance to specific products and relative issues that increased call volume
such as product design, deployment process gaps, defects, or training. This
resulted in software patches being quickly developed and deployed through
support's early detection, as well as, better self-help tools.

2. List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

http://thestevies.com/SASCS08Attachments/IHG/

3. Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated team:

As Director of Global Customer Care for IHG, Jacque Plair-Rushin is responsible
for providing global support solutions for IHG's proprietary systems, including
management of suppliers in the support delivery channels. She began her career
with IHG in 1998 as a Senior Manager and strategically worked her way up to her
current role as Director of GCC.

Prior to joining IHG, she worked as an educator and with AT&T for 15 years.
Her career history includes operations, business process reengineering,
strategic planning, training, business alignment and talent development. Mrs.
Plair-Rushin has a B.S. degree in Business Education and M.B.A. in Management.