By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Beethoven’s String Quartet in B flat,
Op. 130:
Working Solutions, a provider of remote agent call center services to
Fortune 1000 companies, has launched
three new vertical offerings for the travel, healthcare, and financial
services industries.
Called Agents OnDemand, they’re “designed
in response to the specific inbound calling and customer requirements of these
key industry vertical segments,” and are “the first to extend the proven
efficiencies of the supply chain process and use the high quality,
industry-specific knowledge of an experienced remote agent to deliver a ‘just
in time’ workforce for corporate call centers,” according to Working Solutions
CEO Tim Houlne.
Houlne explains that Agents
OnDemand are designed to let contact centers respond to fluctuating call
volumes by using agents as needed.
It’s an oft-repeated idea today
that companies can save money and increase customer satisfaction by outsourcing
their call centers to providers who use industry professional agents. McKesson Health Solutions L.L.C. of
Broomfield, Colorado, is a Fortune 20 subsidiary that earned a Texas Medicaid
contract to perform disease management outreach to 30,000 participants. Rather than use internal registered nurses,
they contracted non-clinical calls to Working Solutions, who used remote
healthcare agents to handle transactions.
Houlne noted that Business Week and The Wall Street Journal have recently cited forecasts by “industry
experts” projecting that the number of remote home agents will increase
threefold over the next five years.
…
Privacy advocates are asking the Homeland
Security Department “not to include the use of Radio Frequency Identification
contactless chips in its regulations for implementing the Real ID Act for state driver’s licenses,” according to published reports.
In a Jan. 13 letter to Secretary Michael Chertoff, Newsbytes
reports, “the groups assert that RFID costs a lot, lacks standardized
technology and poses potential dangers to privacy from unauthorized reading of
the chips.”
While the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the cost of implementing
the Real ID Act at $100 million, reports say, Citizens Against Government Waste
judged that an RFID chip mandate as part of the act would cost up to $17
billion.
…
Amdocs is happy these days. According to
the Israel
Business Arena, Sprint Nextel has
chosen Amdocs as its sole billing provider for its wireless network.
Amdocs will supply its billing and CRM platform to over 46.5
million of Sprint Nextel’s wireless subscribers under an eight-year contract.
As fellow TMC columnist Susan Campbell
has reported, Amdocs is also working with industry giants British Telecom and
Mobilkom Austria.
“Winning this contract makes Amdocs the undisputed leader of
the US billing market,” IBA says, with
Sprint Nextel, AT&T and Cingular Wireless as clients. In fact, “the only
territory in the US communications market in which Amdocs has not prevailed so
far is Verizon Communications.”
The announcement by Sprint Nextel did not specify the size
of the contract, but it will be in the neighborhood of several hundred million
dollars. It also was not made clear if the contract is for outsourcing, or
whether it is a billing system supply contract in the standard format of a
software license sale, professional services, and customization, IBA says, noting that “billing and CRM
contracts that last for eight years are usually outsourcing contracts… Sprint
Nextel’s announcement was not clear on this point.”
Amdocs has reported results for its first fiscal quarter,
ended December 31, 2005, claiming revenue of $587.0 million, a rise of 25
percent over last year’s first quarter. Net profit was $90.0 million, or $0.42
per diluted share, compared with net profit, excluding $3.0 million of
acquisition-related costs net of related tax effects, of $72.4 million, or
$0.34 per diluted share, in the first quarter of fiscal 2005.
…
Hansen Information Technologies has
announced a $3.4 million contract with
the City of Boston to provide its 100 Percent Web-based Hansen 8 Citizen
Relationship Management, Building Permit, Code Enforcement, and Licensing
product.
No doubt your town was just looking for a Citizen
Relationship Management, Building Permit, Code Enforcement, and Licensing
product.
The three year contract is part of a multi-city agency
enterprise permit and license workflow automation initiative that will be
launched within the Boston Inspectional Services Department.
ISD encompasses five regulatory divisions including Building
and Structures, Code Enforcement/Environmental Services, Health, Housing, and
Weights and Measures. Thus far in FY05, ISD’s revenue is over $25 million
obtained from processing nearly 100,000 permit and license applications. ISD’s
Building and Structures Division alone rakes in $23 million of that revenue,
collected from processing nearly 56,000 permits and licenses. ISD as a whole
conducts over 60,000 inspections a year.
Hansen 8 was selected, Boston officials say, to help reduce
paper-driven processes, shorten permit and licensing turn-around times, provide
extensive activity status and financial reporting capabilities.
The first implementation milestone includes the set-up of a
centralized call center within ISD using the Hansen 8 Customer Service product.
In conjunction with initial implementation efforts, Hansen will work with the city
to provide a master addressing and contact application using the Hansen 8
addressing, contact, and property management data structure.
…
In other gubmint news, Inrange Consulting, now part of Zanett
Commercial Solutions, has announced that it has been awarded several contracts from the State of Indiana to implement Oracle’s
PeopleSoft Enterprise business application for 26 of the State’s government
agencies, including the Governor’s Office, the Lieutenant Governor’s Office,
the Department of Natural Resources, the Office of Management and Budget, the
Department of Revenue, the Indiana State Police, the Criminal Justice
Institute, the Department of Workforce Development, and the Indiana State
Department of Health.
To date, the State of Indiana has awarded ZCS over $2
million in contracted work for Oracle/PeopleSoft implementation services.
…
First CoffeeSM normally doesn’t pay attention to
the gazillion “awards” this and that publication gives out in such categories
as 47 Best Technology Products Released in Southern Idaho This Week, but would like
to note that BlueRoads Corporation, a channel management
Software-as-a-Service company, has been
awarded the annual CRM WizKids award for “innovation in front office
software.”
“The indirect sales channel has not received the same level
of attention in the CRM world as the direct channel,” Denis Pombriant, managing
principal, Beagle Research Group, LLC correctly points out. “However, because
growth in the channel continues to outpace growth in direct sales for many
industries the need for visibility into the channel is critical to maximizing
profitability.”
Accompanying the award was a report issued by Beagle
Research “2006 CRM WizKids: Taking CRM to a Higher Level” which demonstrates
the use of BlueRoads’ channel management suite of products by Avaya Corporation, a global provider of
business communications applications, systems, and services, to increase the
efficiency and output from its indirect sales force.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
Good informative posts.
Thanks.
Telecom,
http://teletunes.blogspot.com
For the record, I believe there were only 46 products released this week in Southern Idaho.