Nissan Motors Ignites Growth and Profitability with Blue Pumpkin

Workforce optimization helps meet aggressive goals, 400% first-year ROI estimated

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Jan. 5 -- Blue Pumpkin, an industry leader in enterprise workforce optimization solutions, today announced significant results from its implementation with Nissan Motor Acceptance Corporation (NMAC), the financial services division of Nissan North America, that include a projected return-on-investment of 400% in the first year alone.

NMAC selected Blue Pumpkin over leading competitors, including IEX and others, to help grow the company, recognizing that even a small gain in customer loyalty would lead to a tremendous revenue impact. As a key driver of consumer and dealer satisfaction as well as repurchases, NMAC plays a pivotal role in Nissan's ability to meet aggressive company-wide goals that included achieving: an additional one million units in sales, an industry- leading 8% operating margin and a zero net automotive debt.

"With Blue Pumpkin to improve our people-processes, we see a great impact on our business," said Sean Hicks, senior manager of customer communications for NMAC. "The people who interact with customers are the frontlines of our brand -- they directly represent our company. So faster response times, happier customer service reps, delivering the right answers to inquiries the first time and other benefits from workforce optimization not only save us a lot of money, but they also help build our brand equity and customer loyalty -- absolutely critical in our competitive industry. As a result, NMAC doesn't just run a model contact center, but we're also helping Nissan make very real gains towards its sales and profitability goals."

In the first five months of using Blue Pumpkin's solution in early 2003, NMAC realized the following results and more: average speed of answer was 66% faster to under 50 seconds; agent schedule adherence improved from approx. 70% to an outstanding 95%; forecasting errors reduced from 20%+ to under 5%, decreasing the reactive need for unplanned overtime hours by 39% and other unnecessary expenses; and managerial administrative hours cut by 58%, shifting their attention to more important areas.

"As a company obsessed with performance in its people and products, Nissan brought us on board to help transform its contact centers into a true best- practices operation," explained Doron Aspitz, chairman and chief executive officer of Blue Pumpkin. "More than focusing on just tasks and productivity, like manufacturing units in an auto company typically would be, NMAC was forward-thinking to recognize that workforce optimization drives the customer satisfaction and cost controls that are essential to a company's growth and ongoing success."

"Blue Pumpkin paid especially close attention to our challenges during the sales cycle and followed through with support even after implementation," continued Hicks. "The other solutions we evaluated didn't have the features and add-ons we wanted, the integration capabilities we needed or the suite strategy to build on our workforce optimization investments at our own pace."

With Blue Pumpkin, NMAC now had the visibility in an extremely complex and multi-channel environment to put the right people with the right skills in the right place, ensuring they are doing the right things and doing them well. As it continues to evolve its operations, NMAC is looking towards other elements of the Blue Pumpkin Workforce Optimization Suite to tie together best-of-breed solutions in scheduling/forecasting, performance management, activity management, strategic planning and more.

About Blue Pumpkin

Blue Pumpkin is the only workforce optimization vendor that that can deliver both the science and the art required to optimize the performance of a company's most valuable asset -- its people. Addressing critical business challenges with both innovative technology -- the science -- and best- practices professional services -- the art -- we help our customers align performance measurements with business goals, develop strategic staffing plans, deploy resources, evaluate the results, and implement on-going improvements. Blue Pumpkin solutions deliver proven value to more than 1,000 organizations worldwide such as AOL Time Warner, AT&T, eBay, E*TRADE, Federal Express, JetBlue, Mercedes-Benz and Visa. www.bluepumpkin.com.

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