| Contact Center/CRM Views and Analysis

July 2009

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The Flexible Revolution

July 30, 2009

If there is one word that is the key to getting through this current economic climate and to enable taking advantage of opportunities when conditions turn brighter and that is flexibility.

Call it the 'Flexible Revolution' if you like. With a recovery that promises to be slow and painful firms that are encumbered by expensive fixed objects: buildings or hardware, processes, and thinking are unlikely to make it and if they do they will struggle. Companies that have embraced flexibility: opex not capex, leasing and hosting software, hardware, and hardware only if necessary, video/web conferencing not travel, and telework not bricks-and-mortar, are more likely to shine through.

O' Nortel, O' RIM, and O'Canada

July 27, 2009

Yes, I am a Canadian, having been born and having a spent most of my adulthood in my 'Home and Native Land'. I admit it, which is how Canadians tend to look at their nationality rather than the chest-beating of Americans at theirs. Which I also am, and a Brit too through as the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado put it "a set of curious chances."

So it is with the viewpoint as a Canadian as well as biz/tech journalist that I have been following and writing about the Nortel corporate tragedy: of engineering genius destroyed by criminal-bordering senior management corporate greed, incompetence, and stupidity right down to the final acts.

If one were to apply The Mikado's creed of "making the punishment fit the crime" I would ship/export the usual and known suspects in the barred-windowed buses to Federal Prison Industries a.k.a.

A Salute To The U.S. Army, InfoCision, and West, for PaYS

July 21, 2009

"For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot"--Rudyard Kipling

"What can you do with a general? When he stops being a general?
Oh what can you do with a general who retires? Who's got a job for a general?
When he stops being a general?"--written by Irving Berlin, sung by Bing Crosby in 'White Christmas'

Anyone who has served or who has had family and friends serve their country through the military can relate to these famous poems and songs. My grandfather was a Tommy: a British soldier who underwent the horrors of The Somme in World War I, fighting the Kaiser.

Memo to Canada's CRTC: Shame the Telemarketers, Release the Names

July 13, 2009

After months of well-deserved criticism over slack enforcement of Canada's new Do Not Call (DNC) regulations the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has finally shown some courage actually issued violation notices to two telemarketers. That is out of some 700 firms that are under some form of investigation. Some nearly 7 million Canadian numbers are on the DNC list. CRTC has also refused to make public the amount of fines these outfits face.

The Honduras Mess and Nearshore/Offshore Risks

July 8, 2009

The recent military coup in Honduras illustrates one of the risks of locating contact centers and other operations in other, and poorer countries where there are great income and other social disparities between classes, and that is political instability.

A firm that sets up centers in such nations must calculate the odds that its employees could be injured or killed and their buildings damaged, destroyed, or taken over, and business lost. Customer/client data could be endangered too if it is stored on computers.

It is truly unfortunate in Honduras's case that the political situation had deteriorated thought not well to begin with.

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