HispanicBusiness

TORONTO, CANADA -- (Marketwire) -- 01/30/13 -- Ortsbo, Inc. (a subsidiary of Intertainment Media Inc. (TSX VENTURE: INT)(OTCQX: ITMTF)(FRANKFURT: I4T), the leader in enabling real-time, cross-language communication announces an agreement with StarTek, an innovative global provider of business process outsourcing services. The global customer care program makes it possible for an agent to provide web-based customer care across languages.

"We are very pleased to be working closely with StarTek to deliver an innovative solution that enables real-time, multi-lingual customer care for their clients' customers," states Ortsbo president and chief executive officer, Patrick Bultema. "Our solution will enable StarTek's agents to have the ability to provide extraordinary customer care across languages."

StarTek has over 10,000 employees around the world and a client roster which includes some of the largest global brands in the telecommunication, technology, retail and cable/media industries. The ability to provide local language care to all of a company's customers is essential, but it is often infeasible because of the logistical challenges of staffing local language centers, not to mention the prohibitive costs. Language is significant in the process of globalization, particularly for customer care. Ortsbo is experiencing rapid growth and demand by working with organizations that provide outsourced global customer care to a variety of companies and markets. Today, the outsourced global customer care market is in excess of $200 billion annually. In the US alone, there are over 5 million customer care agents.

The Ortsbo Global Customer Care solution makes it possible for an agent to provide web-based customer care across languages. For example, an agent in any location can now work in English, conducting web-chat with customers for a multitude of different languages. Integrated into the web-based customer care technology, the Ortsbo solution enables an agent to type during the chat session in their language, and the customer on the other end automatically sees the response in her or his own language. Conversely, the customer types in their native language, and the agent receives the reply in his or her language. Most importantly, the Ortsbo proprietary technology also tunes the language for the particular domain and customer care context. As a result, the fidelity of the experience truly rivals staffing with multi-lingual agents.

The Ortsbo Global Customer Care solution represents a dramatic value proposition. Companies typically pay a significant premium for multi-lingual agents, often 30 to 50 percent higher wages. Queuing and coverage requirements force companies to hire more than a single agent to cover a new language in order to cover peaks in service volume and promised hours of coverage. Adding a language for one single agent's worth of volume often requires hiring an additional five to eight agents at a higher cost. This presents a logistical challenge of finding agents with the languages needed in the proximity of a company's customer care centers. With the Ortsbo Global Customer Care solution, a customer care center simply "Ortsbo" enables the current agents, and then adds only the agents required to handle the increased volume, without having to make special staffing accommodations for each additional language. This represents an order of magnitude value proposition for most customer care operations.