CINCINNATI — OneCommand announced today that BarNone, a leader in specialty finance and consumer services, has chosen the company to help increase its Internet lead response rate.

By augmeting its online lead generation and BDC operations with OneCommand's Voice Messaging solution, BarNone has seen an 8-percent increase in appointment rates, according to officials.

Dan Staub, BarNone's chief operating officer, said his company has been very successful using OneCommand's technology to rapidly reach Internet customers.

"OneCommand has been a wonderful partner to work with. We buy Internet leads that are complete credit applications and try to reach numbers once from our call center and then if that first attempt is unsuccessful we switch to OneCommand. A voice message is then left for the customer to call us back," he explained.

"This has significantly reduced our costs and increased the contact rate with these customers. The problem is we need to talk to these potential customers in order to schedule appointments. They respond well to our OneCommand voice messages and contact us back on our 800 number. OneCommand has basically built a better mousetrap with good technology and a good concept – it's a great idea," he added.

BarNone was founded in 1995 for the purpose of helping the millions of working people who, because of credit discrepancies, are not able to obtain auto loans to purchase a quality vehicle in a conventional manner. Headquartered in Columbia, Md., the company maintains a 24-hour call center in the Southwest.

Its founding philosophy is to link consumers, dealers and finance sources into one cohesive unit, to facilitate communication and minimize buyer frustration. It has employed OneCommand to help further facilitate communication with these consumers, officials noted.

"BarNone is a leader in the special finance space and we are very excited to help reduce their costs and increase the effectiveness of their call center. Call centers can be a challenge as 60-70 percent of the time the consumer cannot be reached, necessitating several calls. It gets very expensive to make these repeat calls when the costs of the call, pay, benefits, etc., for call center personnel are factored in," said Al Babbington, OneCommand's chief executive officer.

"OneCommand can get those costs down to a fraction of the cost and reaches 85-90 percent of target consumers with an average of just 1.2 phone calls," he continued.

OneCommand indicated it will release the latest version of its powerful technology platform, OneConnect, in the summer of 2008.

OneConnect version 3.5 is designed to arm clients with an enhanced suite of simple and easy-to-use customer communication tools, enabling the design and execution of targeted and effective multi-channel marketing campaigns within seconds.