Saturday here in northern New Zealand, Jimmy Buffett playing in the background, a nice warm sunny day, played tennis in the morning, my wife and oldest son off to check out a new beach, Steinlagers in the fridge for the barbecue later on tonight, why don't we look at a few news items that don't fit the normal weekaday CRM-focused coverage of First Coffee:

 
This one's of interest because it involves beer: Wipro Technologies, the global IT services business of Wipro Limited, has announced that its Business Process Outsourcing division, Wipro BPO, is setting up a Shared Services center for AmBev, the largest brewery company in Latin America with such brands as Brahma, Becks, Stella and Antarctica.

 
The Shared Services Center is slated to provide services to AmBev across Latin America in the areas of finance and accounting, order management, customer services and HR Services. The partnership is expected to provide financial benefits across AmBev operations in the region, with services provided from Wipro's facility at Curitiba in Brazil.

 
Renato Nahas Batista, Zonal Vice President at AmBev, said the partnership with Wipro will focus on transforming the existing Shared Service Center and provide services across Latin America for AmBev.

"Wipro's capability to transform processes, implement SAP and provide service delivery is a strength," says Ashutosh Vaidya, Head, Wipro BPO.

Wipro's Consumer Products Industry practice has a team for Food & Beverage industry, focusing on helping food and beverage companies re-engineer the way they meet end consumer's needs through Information Technology products.

...

We like this one because we always like seeing mobile advertising lose the shotgun approach: ComScore, which "measures" the digital world, reports that fewer European consumers say they are receiving advertisements for mobile products and services, while more receive adverts for consumer goods such as food, fashion, restaurants, travel and financial services.

Over the past year, the number of people receiving SMS adverts for mobile products and services fell nine percent in Europe, while the number receiving offers for non-mobile consumer goods and services climbed 15 percent.

Overall, ComScore's research shows, slightly fewer Europeans report receiving an SMS ad, with a decline from 112 million in August 2007 to 110 million in August 2008.

 
The fastest-growing category of SMS advertising since August 2007 is food, the company found at a rate of 53 percent, followed by clothing/fashion at 38 percent and restaurants at 37 percent.

 
Advertisements for restaurants and food also boast the highest level of response, with 16 percent of those receiving an advert for a restaurant responding and 13 percent of those receiving an offer for food, such as grocery coupons, responding, ComScore officials say.

 
The number of consumers responding to an offer for a mobile product or service remained flat, at four percent.

 
"While the majority of SMS adverts are still for mobile products and services, the mix is beginning to shift toward consumer goods and services," observed Alistair Hill, analyst, ComScore. "Mobile advertisers are beginning to show a higher level of sophistication in their targeting efforts, as the targeting criterion is no longer 'has mobile phone' but is based on knowledge of consumers' tastes and behaviors."

...

 
These survey results come on the heels of an announcement that 45 percent of Sales Simplicity Software 2008 sales were to builders who elected to remove an inadequate Sales/CRM system and replace it with Sales Simplicity.

 
The survey found that an overwhelming majority (95 percent) of Sales Simplicity survey respondents said that their "overall level of satisfaction" with Sales Simplicity is either very satisfied, satisfied, or somewhat satisfied. Sixty six percent answered "very satisfied" or "satisfied."

 
Respondents represented builders of all sizes, but 94 percent of respondents had between one and 20 Sales Simplicity licenses, and six percent had more than 20.

...

We like this one in that we like BMWs: BMW Financial Services has implemented IP-based communications product from Avaya in a Europe-wide reference installation jointly organized by the consulting firm Cirquent and Avaya.

BMW Financial Services, Munich worked with Cirquent and Avaya to develop the system for its five German contact centers with a total of 450 employees.

"In the case of referral to free advice about places to flow competence and skills of the advisers, regardless of their location. Inquiries by phone can always be a competent partner and will be answered more quickly," officials of the project said in a written statement.

"At the same time," BMW officials said, "the project partners Cirquent and Avaya, the heterogeneous telephony landscape in the service centers to consolidate and thus an important target in the IT strategy of the BMW Group to implement."

Evidently -- First Coffee may be misreading this, apologies all around if that's the case, believe me I'm doing my best -- the Cirquent consultants were working on the project from its inception in 2006 to completion. And based on the rough objectives and requirements specified for the project, chose Avaya as a technology partner because the use of the IP communications product Avaya Communication Manager "provides a significantly faster and more personalized care of the customers of BMW Financial Services."

One thing that evidently impressed BMW was that the flagship Customer Interaction Suite from Avaya offers a range of intelligent routing features, at can be used to reduce unnecessary redirects: "With the help of the so-called load-based routing rules can be defined, calls locations automatically to a free people over," project officials said.

There's also an interface for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which can be accessed at the contact center when an agent is dealing directly with a customer, so the agent can view "the important information on the display screen."

With the new IP system consolidated, a central server in BMW's own data center replaces the existing local telephone systems. The unified platform, the integration of the existing CRM system and the central IT management are moves designed to "reduce the operating and maintenance costs of the system and improve availability," according to BMW officials.

"Currently we handle nearly three million requests a year. Thanks to the intelligent routing and management tools, we can shorten the response time," said Melanie Schillinger, head of customer service at BMW Financial Services Germany.