Q2 2013 Ovation Award Survey

Thank you for participating in the selection of the Q2 2013 Ovation award winners! Associates recognized demonstrate significant and sustained performance that has a measurable impact to Comdata/SVS and/or the customer (cost savings, revenue impact, process improvement, etc.).


Survey Instructions: Eighteen (18) nominees were submitted for the Q2 2013 Ovation Award. Names of the nominees have been omitted to ensure selection based on action and characteristics for which one is nominated.

Please review the details listed below for each nominee and select up to 5 individuals that you believe meet the criteria of the MGH award. To make your selections, click the box to the left of the nomination. Once you have made your selections, please click the submit button.

The survey will be closed on Wednesday, July 24 at 12:00 pm CST . Award winners must receive a minimum of 5 votes. Please contact Mimi Buckley should you have any questions. Again, thank you for your participation in this important process!




(1): This nominee had more than one nomination

#1 This nomination is for the hard work and dedication that __________ provides for the Pilot check turnovers as well as the kiting scheme that was recently discovered. She provided _______________ with the knowledge and where with all and trained eye to be able to look for fraud patterns within the returned check department; and while training her she continued to stay up to par with her own duties/tasks. Please give her the due diligence of this award she has worked so hard for by training and taking on the tasks of others while they were absent.

#2: I am nominating _____ for her very hard work, and dedication in researching the pilot checks, and also assisting _______ with an on going issue with one of our clients. While I was out ill, for 5 months, ____ trained ________ to assist with the return checks, and stayed on top of the demanding work load. I think that she is very deserving, of an award. Please consider her, thank you.



(2): ___________ is always willing to assist even when it's not his primary account base. I have contacted him by e-mail during his vacation because no one else was available after numerous attempts. When I know a customer is needing assistance in a timely manner I call the National TRR rotary and it's 90% going to be ___________ who answers. He never makes me feel bothersome and is very knowledgeable in his role as a TRR. I know once I transfer a customer to______ that they're in great hands and will get 100% effort for his role in the matter. Please recognize ________ for being a great asset to Comdata as a National TRR. Thank you!



(3):During the past quarter, ______ identified the fact that we had missed the opportunity to charge a large portion of customers the appropriate late fees if they paid out of terms. He worked to pull the information together, validate they were under the proper contract but NOT being billed, as well as work with Legal to ensure we were prepared to begin the notification process. He then had to pull all of the addresses in preparation for the customer notification. We are validating the impact annually, but Treasury confirmed we saw a $100K annual increase this past month. During the same quarter _____ was asked to help out with a critical issue involving Kinder Morgan, our largest daily spend client using VCAP. It wasn't his account, but he worked most of the morning trying to find a way to deliver them copies of the vendor remittance statements that were delayed due to a bulk mail server. Until _____ became involved, the client stated they were ceasing all future spend until we could ensure their vendors were receiving payments as planned. Since they spend almost $1M daily, it was critical to get this process fixed. _____ didn't rest until he found a way to make this happen for them.

As if these were enough,______ also received the highest number of I LOVE REWARDS compliments from people outside of his department. All of them acknowledged his willingness to help with any problem that arose. I very much appreciate _____ for his talent and positive attitude.



(4): This past quarter______ was responsible for saving Comdata $105K in shipping costs for card orders placed by a single client, Advantage Sales & Marketing!!! This client has historically ordered cards shipped to individual cardholder addresses, all by overnight delivery. In the past two weeks, an associate made _________ aware of a large card order, all overnight. ________ contacted the client, received agreement to bill them for the card order and still got the cards out on time. This scenario occurred two more times during the course of the week, saving Comdata $15K in shipping costs.

Today, the client sent an electronic card order file for 9,000 individual cards, all overnight to individual cardholder addresses, the equivalent of $90K for one single card order. _________ learned of the order and immediately began contacting the customer to negotiate payment. In my opinion she went above and beyond the call of duty to ensure the client received the best service, but fairly compensated Comdata for their unique card shipping requirements. The positive and immediate impact to our bottom line warrants recognition of this caliber.



(5): We had a large VCAP opportunity for Summit Materials. This was a challenge on several fronts when the request for $3M in unsecured credit came in. 1) The company has struggled financially during the past couple of years but had a long history of success so the analytics associated with the request would be challenging..... This request was not like approving Wal-Mart or Google for credit. 2) Eric Newton and Amy Newton were going to be on site in just two days from the initial notice credit got about the request. Eric and Amy wanted to go into that meeting telling the customer they had been already approved for credit thinking that would make it easier for Comdata to win the business. Therefore, the department had less than half the normal amount of time to work on this request. ___________ wanted Comdata to have the best shot possible at winning the business so he came in over the weekend to the Comdata building and worked on the Summit Materials opportunity. ______ was able to explain some of the company's struggles in the near term and realized this is something Comdata should to do for the long term. ______ was able to get Eric and Amy the approval a couple of hours before their meeting with the customer in Washington D.C. Comdata was able to win the RFP and the customer started transactions in the first week of June and once fully ramped up should be a $50k to $100k net revenue account for Comdata.



(6): I would like to nominate _________ for the Ovation! Reward for her continuous efforts in going above and beyond to support and grow client relationships by providing value-added solutions that grow their and SVS business, her continuous positive attitude and inspirational leadership. _______ demonstrates all of the core values that SVS aspires for each employee:

- Integrity - Clients and her colleagues trust ______ and know that she will provide the right guidance.

- Customer Driven - When presented with unique customer needs for the Arby's mobile payments opportunity, _______ worked closely with her client to better understand their needs and guided our internal team to craft a solution that met the client's needs but also helped define and focus our product offering.

- High Performing People - ________ is very positive and passionate about her job and this comes through in her presentations internally and to clients.

-Accountability - Even with the multiple projects she is juggling, ______ never fails to deliver on her commitments.

-Teamwork - ________ is a strong leader and demonstrates this by inspiring her co-workers to achieve their best.
(7): _________ volunteered his Sharepoint expertise to develop an application that has greatly improved SVS's card order process, which impacts a majority of SVS revenue and over thirty employees in multiple departments. He accomplished this at night, on weekends and in spare moments while doing his own full time job. He has updated the application several times as needed by the business.

____'s "can do" attitude, expertise and work ethic have filled a critical need to improve one of SVS's most important business processes.
(8): ________ is such an asset to the company. In his short tenure, he has allowed so many departments to move towards being more automated. He is always willing to write a new macro at the drop of a dime, and answer all of our questions when we cant get something to work. Just in the past couple weeks, he wrote a new macro for the Merchant Services team to assist in gathering discount information, but this is one small, small piece of his talent!
(9): _________ has been an exceptional team player on the SOA and Mobile projects. In addition to his normal responsibilities of an Architect, he has stepped into very technical issues assisting Team Tandem to research, test, and resolve configuration settings in multiple environments to ensure the success of our new architecture. On the other end of the spectrum, _______ has also written the code for some of the back-end services that interact with the Mobile device application and even established/maintained test data for the front-end demonstration application. He has a broad range of knowledge and capabilities and does not hesitate to get involved where he identifies a need. His willingness to do "whatever it takes" has helped these projects to break through barriers and kept the momentum going. ________ has shown tremendous teamwork and is a very high performing employee.



(10): I am nominating ________ because she exceeds all core values. As far as her Integrity, she never hesitates to make herself available to any and everyone when it comes to questions, concerns, and/or coaching needs relating to their QA. ______ is always willing to help agents understand their weaknesses and turn them into strengths, even coming in on her off days to have coaching sessions with other shifts. She is Customer Driven, in that in her role, she frequently has to locate problem calls and whenever possible get back in touch with the customer to resolve any issue and create a pleasant experience for them. This falls outside of her job role, but as she is very customer service oriented and wants to ensure customers are happy.

_______ is the definition of High Performing People, because she consistently seeks to complete her work by month’s end on time, every time. She even goes the extra mile to assist both of her teammates in completing their own assigned duties because she truly believes in Team Work. Accountability is her middle name. She has, frequently altered her own schedule to be available for special projects, meetings, and other work related duties that are important to her job but are not necessarily required. She never says, “No, I cannot because that’s my off day”. She comes in no matter what.

As a result, I truly believe ________ is deserving of an Ovation as recognition for her hard work and dedication.
(11): In April _____ was involved in several projects including the eCredit Upgrade/Migration Project and the Iris Migration project. The eCredit Upgrade/Migration moved our eCredit environment to new server hardware, Operating System, and Application Server as well as a database upgrade and adding process automation. The Iris Migraiton project moved our Iris Fraud Detection environment to new server hardware and Operating System but also laid the groundwork to move a final Iris process that remained in an environment 2 versions old that was vulnerable due to the age of the system. Overall Iris was experiencing stability issues that led us to recommending this upgrade. During this time she also assisted with the initial installation of the Percussion/CM1 Web Content Management software used by Marketing and the iCD Training Team to develop and manage web content. These products were key in the rollout of the new www.comdata.com and also the new iCD and FleetAdvance. ______ went above and beyond handling her daily responsibilities supporting various systems in addition to working on these projects. The outcome was all successful implementations with minimal customer impact. Because there were so many tasks, many of them after hours and on weekends, _____ worked a total of 312.5 hours in March!

I believe her dedication and willingness to get the job done without significant impact to customers should qualify her for consideration for the Ovation Award.
(12): I am nominating _____ for her teamwork in keeping the United Way spirit alive throughout the year. She has led the efforts for Food Truck Friday's and has negotiated with each vendor for 10% of their proceeds to be donated to the United Way. She is working with the United Way Associate Team on a project for the summer to collect school supplies called Fill the Bus. Additionally, she arranged a team building event for the Corporate Payments Sales Kickoff Meeting where they will be building rocking chairs to support one United Way agency. ______ thank you for your hard work and organization in keeping the Comdata team supporting our communities.
(13): ________ did an amazing job implementing Brown Trucking ($27k per month in Proprietary Fuel Revenue). Brown is an 1,100 truck company that moved over from T-Chek this year. We received signed agreements in Jan and we were running test transactions in March and fully implemented by April with full real-time integration through TMW. Brown also was the first RFID Comsite 2 customer. They are also using Comdata for Permits, MasterCard T&E, small MC-Fleet, and VCAP. _____ played a key role in making sure the implementation was flawless. With all products, Brown will more than $40k per month in revenue once completely implemented, but Fuel was first on the agenda we could not have had a better implementation...thanks to _____. ______ is also implementing Suddenlink Communications in June (received contracts in April). Suddenlink is a top 300 fleet with 3,500 vehicles. Implementation for Suddenlink has been flawless as well and super quick. Again _______ is the key. _____ is more deserving of the recognition than anyone I have worked with at Comdata. She had been the definition of Standing Ovation this year.
(14): Let me ask you a question, how much time does it take for a new associate to have the type of impact that positively impacts our sponsor bank's expectations? Answer: Not so fast; Please read the nomination details first because_____'s story is even better! The answer is located in the closing paragraph! It is absolutely amazing that _____'s first day on the job was April 15, 2013! For the first time in Comdata's history, we have been able to produce a customer risk assessment that allows us to comply with a significant Regions Bank contractual requirement and also satisfy regulatory expectations. As I write this, there is no one in this company, outside of _____ and myself, that knows the total number of Comdata's active account codes and cust ids, the products they are utilizing, the business type they represent and whether or not, based on geographic location (down to the zip code level), they pose a HIDTA (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area) or HIFCA (High Intensity Financial Crime Area) risk to our company. The organizational skills, data base management skills and sheer intelligence (CPA; BBA in both Accounting & Finance) applied during this process was absolutely phenomenal, let alone taking the time and effort to navigate his way through our organization in order to gather the data was unbelievable to watch! By completing the customer risk assessment in May, Comdata was able to identify those customers that qualified as high risk and only have to run their cardholders against the OFAC Specially Designated National List (SDN) rather than running Comdata's entire cardholder base through which resulted in tremendous cost savings. _____ is currently in the process of enhancing the customer risk assessment that will now include transactional data with the expectation of analyzing types of transactions and whether they were domestic or foreign based transactions. In addition, _____ has introduced two statistical based Anti-Money Laundering (AML) rules to be used in IRIS. The rules are currently being tested and could have a high-value impact on Comdata's ability to not only reduce the number of false-positives currently being generated by our existing AML rules but allow our analysts to focus on those transactions that are unique and truly represent high risk alerts. A variation of the rule referred to as the "average" rule has been deployed as a tool that is currently assisting our AML analysts with the identification of those transactions that are truly outliers which, in turn, allows our analysts to focus on suspicious activity rather than the noise created by unnecessary false-positives. In summary, _____ is a former State of TN Bank Examiner that has come to Comdata with the drive, willingness and an exemplary service oriented attitude to increase revenues, reduce cost, mitigate risk and enhance our customer's experience. Steve has asked us to hire the best of the best and I believe we have exceeded expectations! Oh, BTW, the answer is 65 days!



(15): _____ is a great example of someone adhering to the core values of our company. For the past 2 years, she has been instrumental in the training and success of all Montreal associates, who have been trained in both Implementation and Customer Service for Master Card and Proprietary accounts. She has also created a virtual training which has been key in their success. She has accomplished this by giving all of her time, energy and new ideas to make the training successful despite the fact that she never sees her trainees! Integrity: She has been the main trainer and go to person for my team for the past 2 years, all of this done virtually. She is always sure to give positive feedback to each associate and inform the manager of any problems that occur and ready to propose solutions to resolve the problems to make sure that the associate succeeds. Customer Driven: Even after the training has been completed she is a key success factor for each associate always available to assist, call and even train a customer to make sure the associate is able to experience “real role play”. High Performing people: _____ is organized and always makes sure to respect schedules. Always available after training has been completed to support and/or explain difficult tasks. Accountability: not delivering on time for Carrier is not an option; she will go above and beyond to make sure schedules are met. Teamwork: when you go to her with a new request, even though she is overwhelmed, she always finds 30 minutes or the extra day that may be needed to have the training completed.

Taking all of the above examples and her overall behavior into consideration, we would like to present her with this award.
(16): In an effort to reduce the time it takes for RCS Permit Operations to populate and submit a permit request to the states, _______ developed a unique way to automate the data entry that occurs on some state websites. _____'s innovative approach and tireless effort are helping Comdata realize new operational efficiencies and driving us to look into other opportunities that automation can bring.



(17): The Comdata Data Integrity Team receive MasterCard data integrity and merchant acceptance items from our customer support groups and directly from our customers via a dedicated mailbox. Prior to January 2013, when items were picked up from the mailbox to be worked, they were MANUALLY logged into an Excel spreadsheet for follow up and monitoring/tracking. With the volumes and the amount of detail that had to be captured, the process was very time-consuming! Additionally, the team had to do various manual sorts on the spreadsheet to complete their weekly dashboards/progress reports. In July 2012, just three months after transfering to the Data Integrity Team, Emad was given the following objective: Look for ways to improve the current item reporting/tracking process that will better support the team. Thinking that _____ would come back with a couple of recommendations of products/tools available for purchase that would support what was needed, I was very surprised when he stated that he could build/create a database to support the tasks. And, that is exactly what he did. ______ met with the team to ensure that everyone had input regarding what to include and how things should function/operate. Once the design was sub-databases of merchant locations, and customers, so that the users can select the information from a list to reduce having to key all of the information, which also reduces the potential for key errors. It includes contact information and comments with a timestamp on each comment. Multiple items related to the same issue can be updated with just one click, if applicable, versus having to update each individual item. The history is retained for all closed items as well, which will help with historical research. The database also produces a bi-monthly progress report for all users, with the click of a button! _____ obviously EXCEEDED the objective given to him. Now that we have completed the first full quarter with the database in use, I can honestly say that this is one of the most impressive process improvements that I have ever seen performed/accomplished by one individual, especially considering the short period of time that it took him. The process of monitoring and tracking the items received in the mailbox is much more efficient using the database and it allows the team more time to spend on researching and resolving the reported issue. _____ is an obvious high performer and he is passionate about all tasks/projects given him. He is a great team player, admired by all that have worked with him. A true asset to Comdata!



(18): Prejudice: Preconceived opinion not based on reason or experience. For some of us it’s just a word. For others it is something they have to deal with on a daily basis. As a representative in a contact center some people automatically judge you by the way you sound on the phone. You might have more knowledge than anyone at the company but to some people if you speak with an accent, they automatically make assumptions about you. They assume you couldn’t possibly understand them or know what you are talking about. For whatever reason, some people tend to have preconceptions about someone that speaks broken English or a dialect reflecting a different nation of origin than the United States. As a Quality Assurance Specialist I hear this more often than you would think. For some agents this could become a chip on their shoulder and I can understand this. Agents could react to this with frustration and even anger toward the customer. Of course this would make matters worse in most situations. While it is not acceptable, it is human nature. I think Comdata is lucky to have an employee that has overcome this obstacle. _____ is an intelligent, friendly Philippino-American. While monitoring her calls I have observed prejudice toward her based on the way she speaks. I have heard it – yet I have never heard her speak in an unprofessional manner. She rises above this and provides excellent customer service. Notes from _____'s manager: _____ is already taking highly escalated calls and she has the hard job of being courteous and professional even when callers are uncivil. She is always on time, and never missing time. _____has perfect attendance and this is something I believe she has done for several years now. She is a very hard working employee. She also takes care of the Clientele system, and she is doing that in between calls, not using any AUX time at all. Sometimes I have to remind her that she needs go on her break or sometimes tell her not to work during her breaks! As a Quality Assurance Specialist I can honestly say I think ______ deserves this recognition. I can't see how anyone that knows her would disagree.