This Friday, October 13 at the Cavalieri Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Rome, Italy, we'll celebrate the presentation of The 20th Annual International Business Awards® with more than 340 executives from more than 20 nations.

Winners in the 2023 IBAs were announced in August.

The International Business Awards are the world's premier business awards program, recognizing outstanding achievements in the workplace in a wide range of categories.  This year's competition attracted more than 3,700 nominations from organizations of all types and sizes in 61 nations.  Those nominations were judged over the summer by more than 230 professionals on 11 juries.

Entries for the 2024 edition of The International Business Awards will open in February.  Visit www.StevieAwards.com/IBA to add your name to the mailing list for the complete entry kit.

Grand, Gold, Silver, Bronze, and People's Choice Stevie Award trophies and medallions will be presented to winners on stage this Friday in Rome.  Here is the list of organizations that will be represented at the event:

8X8
A.S. Watson Group
Abu Dhabi Ports Group
ACEN RES
Aires
Ajman Municipality & Planning Department
Akbank
Al Jazeera Media Institute
Asasoft International Trading Company
ATREVIA COMUNICACIÓN S.L.U.
Banco do Brasil S.A.
BANCO POPULAR DOMINICANO
Bases Conversion and Development Authority
BELBİM AŞ
Better2Know
Beyaz Kağıt San. ve Tic. A.Ş.
Borusan
Canapii
CARBO
Celonis
Condé Nast
CPM India Sales & Marketing Pvt Ltd
Cree-Con Construction Inc
DeFacto Perakende Tic. A.Ş.
Deutsche Telekom Services Europe SE
DHL Express (Switzerland) Ltd.
Diyarbakir
Droxic
Dubai Airports
Dubai Digital Authority
Empire Eagle Food Co., Ltd.
Ernst & Young
EYGS LLP
Filinvest Land Inc
Gates Corporation and LAW Creative
Gelecek Varlık Yönetim A.Ş.
General Administration of Customs, Abu Dhabi
Geotab Inc.
Golden Hour
Halkbank
HASE & IGEL GmbH
HCL Software
Health Focus Manufacturers
HELLENiQ ENERGY Holdings SA
Helpware
HeyMo The Experience Design Company
Home Development Mutual Fund (Pag-IBIG Fund)
Horatio
Hugo Boss
Icertis
ICON plc
Keegor
Keyless
King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Center
Koçfinans
Kyndryl
Lee Andrews Group
Llorente y Cuenca
Maersk
Makati Central Estate Association, Inc.
Malaysia Healthcare Travel Council
Maynilad Water Services, Inc.
MCE Systems
MERALCO
Metrobank
MicroHealth, LLC
MOLPED
MONAT Global Corp.
MONLOVE
Newday Media JSC
Nicole Schmitz Leadership Coaching
NJMPF
NN Romania
Noguchi & Peters Ltd.
NTT Data Inc
nupco
NXP Semiconductors Germany GmbH
Octopus Energy
ONE Beyond Success Pty Ltd
One Meralco Foundation
PAGEONE
Partner.co
PPWD Consulting Ltd
Pru Life UK
PT Permata Graha Nusantara
PT Perusahaan Gas Negara Tbk
PT PGN LNG Indonesia
Public Works Authority "Ashghal"
Purpol Marketing
QNET
Red Education
Red Havas
Regen Power Pty Ltd
Resolute Software
Revomed (Thailand) Co.
Rudaw Media Network
Rural Policy Group
SABC Pension Fund & SABC Medical Scheme
Safaniya Offshore Producing Department
Saudi Aramco
SAUDI ARAMCO - NA Well Completion Operations Department
Saudi Telecom Company
SET Maritime & Electrical
Sharjah Media City
SOCAR
SOCAR TURKIYE
SOCAR Türkiye Enerji A.Ş.
Strategic Public Relations Group
SweetScience
Synoptek
TalkLife
Telecom Italia
TELUS Smart Security & Automation
Tepe Savunma ve Güvenlik Sistemleri
The City of Calgary
Trahum
TUPRAS
Turkish Airlines
USPA Global Licensing/U.S. Polo Assn.
ValueLabs LLP
Viettel Group
XBuild GmbH
Ziraat Participation Bank

Headquartered in New York, NY, Stevie Award-winner LivePerson is a global technology company that develops conversational commerce and AI software. Their software enables businesses to engage with their customers in real time through various channels such as messaging, chat, and voice. Customers can easily reach out to companies through these channels, and businesses can respond to them in real time.

LivePerson’s Conversational Cloud helps brands of all kinds make Conversational AI the digital “front door”: their first point of contact with customers, setting the tone for their entire relationship. Essentially replacing in-store greeters, these virtual assistants and automation not only welcome and start customers down the path to what they need but often solve problems outright or even convince them to purchase more. And just as the best salespeople know when to go to managers, they seamlessly escalate to human counterparts as needed.

LivePerson makes life easier for people and brands everywhere through this Conversational AI. Its products empower consumers to stop wasting time on hold or on websites and, instead, message their favorite brands just as they do with friends and family. LivePerson has 1,200 employees globally and serves over 18,000 customers, including leading brands like HSBC, Orange, and The Home Depot.

Making AI More Than a Buzzword
In 1995, the company invented online chat for brands, disrupting communication by removing the need for 1-800 numbers, hold times, and endlessly scanning websites. Later, the company made it easy for consumers to connect with brands on their own time on their favorite messaging platforms, then introduced Conversational AI to automate these conversations, making massive scale possible while still providing outstanding experiences.

Enterprise brands across the globe now use LivePerson’s AI-powered customer engagement solutions to have conversations with millions of consumers as personally as they would with one. With LivePerson, brands have reduced customer care costs by up to 50% and increased annual sales by hundreds of millions of dollars.

2022 was a year of massive AI hype and customer experience (CX) failures. Consumers saw both the chaos that ensues when brands don’t keep up (e.g., Southwest Airlines’ holiday debacle) and the promise of AI to make better experiences (e.g., ChatGPT’s mind-blowing text generation). But between the CX fails and overblown prognostications about AI taking over, LivePerson delivered actual business outcomes that improved real life for brands, agents, and customers.

To keep on the bleeding edge, LivePerson’s team pioneered new AI capabilities that deliver and automate even more meaningful, natural-feeling conversations. These innovations drive the state-of-the-art in Conversational AI forward by improving bot and agent performance, boosting customer engagement, and accelerating time to value — all while cutting costs.

For example, Repeat Intent Rate better measures modern ways of delivering CX, replacing outdated metrics built around human-to-human interactions on legacy channels. This is a leap forward in measuring how brands use AI, like the leap from measuring a newspaper's print circulation to measuring digital performance.

Significant 2022 enhancements and integrations making their platform more potent than ever included:

• AI Search: immediately answers questions without escalating to humans, right out of the box
• On-Demand Recommendations: helps human agents quickly find better answers and bots
• "Small Talk": brings more human feeling to automated conversations
• Repeat Intent Rate: analyzes customer inquiries to identify opportunities for automation and optimization
• Integration Hub: a central place to discover, activate, and optimize thousands of LivePerson integrations through a self-service, no-code interface
• Sales Attribution: credits cross-channel sales to agents or bots who participated in conversations
• Integrations with Afiniti, Cisco, and Celonis to better match agents to customers, extend LivePerson’s CRM integrations into new channels, and combine process and conversational data.

Generating these business results is only possible with deep partnerships with brands, proper integration into their back-end systems, and the data and expertise underpinning outcomes-oriented AI.

Unlike simple chatbot providers that handle superficial cases and language generators like ChatGPT, which pull information from the public internet, LivePerson’s AI is laser-focused on improving conversations between brands and consumers. It is built upon a historical record of billions of CX conversations, with an additional ~1 billion conversational interactions added monthly.

Among the Global Fortune 500, LivePerson now counts 55% of telcos, 25% of retailers, 50% of airlines, 31% of banks, and 40% of technology companies as customers. While Gartner predicts chatbots will become the primary customer service for ~25% of organizations by 2027, LivePerson clients are well ahead, with many already running 40%+ of contact center volume through its platform. This puts LivePerson at Tier 1 partner status.

Since its inception, pioneering the invention of web chat for brands, LivePerson has continually pushed the limits of human and computer connection. Its AI innovations have been recognized by the world's leading awards and recognition programs for customer care, sales, marketing, and technology.

LivePerson won two Gold Stevie Awards for Sales or Customer Service Solutions Technology Partner of the Year and Best New Version of a Contact Center Solution in the 2023 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service? 

Stevie-winner Legal Resources is a legal services provider in the employee benefits space. Legal Resources offers an exclusive network of local primary care law firms to assist employees with all life's legal matters. Legal Resources has been the leading provider and administrator of group legal services for almost 30 years.

Their Business Development team is comprised of Executives, Sales, and Marketing leaders. As a joint effort, these team members collaborate, develop, and deploy strategies that are essential to continual growth in the market. Since the legal services industry remains a niche in nature, unique and effective approaches to product and service creation and marketing are a must; therefore, their marketing and sales strategies are generated in-house.

The Business Development team targets partners like employee benefits consultants, and plan administrators (typically Human Resources professionals) at mid- to large-sized organizations. For growth, the Business Development team markets to multiple channels: benefit consultants to recommend them to their clients, Human Resource professionals to offer their benefit to their workforce, and, eventually, employees to enroll in the plan via payroll deduction.

Increased Growth and Rates of Retention
In response to COVID-19, the Legal Resources Business Development team created and deployed multiple strategies that yielded incredibly favorable growth and retention results. For example, in June 2020 Legal Resources created and launched a Guidance and Assistance program that was open to all of their clients’ employee populations, not just members.

This program offered unlimited guidance and assistance with their Certified Paralegals regarding lifestyle matters; for example, dealing with identity theft, how to file a consumer complaint with the Attorney General’s office, getting in touch with a law firm to get essential documents executed, etc.

Additional projects deployed were centered on education to provide a value add for all growth channels. For example, they created mini seminars that were held virtually and touched on COVID-19-related challenges and how to address them; like consumer issues, COVID-19 scams (like vaccine and employment scams), and information on essential legal documents (like medical directives and power of attorneys).

The Business Development team also executed valuable forecasting on COVID-19 impacts and compiled those forecasts in a COVID-19 Impact newsletter that was sent out to broker partners and clients to be deployed to their workforces. For instance, their team forecasted that the courts being shut down for a period would result in a tremendous backlog in non-emergency hearings and would significantly delay resolutions for open family law cases.

Results
Through collaboration, research, and strategizing as a team, the Legal Resources Business Development team was able to position its products and services strategically; that is, in lieu of being viewed as an expense during an uncertain time, Legal Resources instead positioned itself as a necessary tool that provided peace of mind. The approach was well received.

Providing broker partners and clients with invaluable resources during the thick of the pandemic not only reinforced Legal Resources’ value as an existing partner and vendor but also yielded an 8.6% increase in net membership, which was double the increase from the prior year.

Brokers were happy to be able to forward forecasting information to their clients, helping them reinforce their value and perception of being plugged in. The increase in proposal requests from broker partners soared compared to years prior, validating that their business development efforts were successful with existing and prospective broker partners. Another benefit to their business development response to COVID-19 was clients’ renewed interest in educating their workforces about Legal Resources' plans and services.

Legal Resources won a Gold Stevie Award for Most Valuable Response by a Business Development Team in the 2023 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service? 

Stevie-winner Pronto Marketing is a WordPress management agency for ambitious businesses around the world. From WordPress builds, maintenance, and support, to SEO and Google Ads services, Pronto offers a full-service approach to getting clients' websites and online marketing presence into high gear.

Founded in 2008, American-owned, and based in Thailand and the Philippines, they have a team of over 100 developers, designers, copywriters, SEO, advertising, and customer support specialists.

Pronto Website Support Team
Pronto provides a variety of website and marketing services to small businesses throughout the world, but their core offering is their Website Support service. In this service, clients pay a monthly fee to receive unlimited access to Website Support team of project managers, support specialists, developers, designers, and copywriters.

They currently manage over 1,200 websites and the Support Team handles between 1,500 to 2,000 support requests per month. These requests range from small tasks such as replacing an image on a client's homepage to very large tasks like writing, designing, and developing a new landing page from scratch.

Despite handling such a large volume and variety of requests, the Support Team has historically been able to send a first response to clients in less than eight business hours, and the team and their work is well-liked by customers, with an average ticket satisfaction rating of 98% and an NPS that typically hovers in the mid-40s.

In the summer of 2020, their Support Team was overwhelmed by incoming tickets. Unfortunately, this resulted in their response time to growing exponentially. Clients were sometimes waiting multiple days to get an initial response, which, of course, also led to a decrease in client satisfaction.

Throughout the remainder of 2020 as well as 2021, the Support Team worked through a series of improvements which included restructuring the team, creating new standard operating procedures for common requests, and perhaps most importantly, adding a night shift to handle requests 24x7.

Today, their average first-response time is under five hours, and first-response time for requests marked as "urgent" is typically less than 20 minutes.

There are two aspects to this improvement that make it significant. First is the magnitude of change. Reducing their first-reply time on all tickets by 80% and by 98% on urgent tickets is an absolutely massive improvement. Over the past six months, they have regularly gotten messages from clients on the improvement and how happy they are. 

Second is the consistency of the improvement. This wasn't a one-time project to improve response time during an emergency, but rather an ongoing series of projects to improve the ability to support clients in the long run. Faster response times have been sustained over the past several months.

Pronto Marketing won a Bronze Stevie^® Award for Customer Service Team of the Year - Recovery Situation - Business Services Industries in the 2023 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Interested in entering the 2024 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service?