As a new year dawns, we are each afforded the opportunity to look back on the past one, but more importantly to look forward. And as we look towards the future, we continue to believe that today’s customers are not spectators. Rather, they want to be involved and engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship with their service providers.

With that insight, we believe CSG’s charter is to help our clients more intelligently engage and transact with customers. In short, at CSG we define our work and focus as “The Business of Customer Interaction”.

Over the past 25-years, we’ve provided customer interaction management software and services to some of the most progressive companies in a growing set of industries. And, we continue to provide innovative solutions to maximize every customer interaction. Today, CSG offers clients capabilities and solutions that touch over half of U.S. households. Our solutions reach customers at virtually every touch-point – from facilitating interactions on the web and the call center, through service technicians and at retail locations, via voice, fax, and email/SMS, to an invoice or billing statement.

More recently, as we’ve expanded the industries we serve, we’ve accelerated our focus on delivering new solutions to address the rapidly changing customer management needs of our clients. Today, clients are demanding not only multiple channels for communicating with customers (e.g., the call center, or through the web), but that these channel solutions be well connected, informed and have a higher degree of intelligence and personalization. In short, we were determined to make the various customer touch-points more actively intelligent.

Appropriately, moments after we ushered in 2009, CSG announced the acquisition of Quaero – a leading Marketing Services Provider – as the newest addition to our portfolio of customer interaction management solutions. The rationale to acquire Quaero was simple: find the most progressive, innovative marketing services provider to inject critical marketing analytics and superior customer intelligence into CSG’s growing set of integrated customer interaction management solutions.

More specifically, with Quaero, CSG can now collectively offer – to existing, new and prospective clients – a powerful set of solutions that help predict consumer behavior and drive more valuable interactions, enhancing customer care and marketing strategies.

With combined CSG and Quaero solutions, we’ll continue to deliver more powerful ways for our clients to engage and transact – more intelligently – with customers.

So, here’s to a productive and profitable 2009! We believe it will be “The Year of the Intelligent Customer.”