Recently in Call Center/CRM Category

Rich Tehrani called my attention to this item from the Wall Street Journal:

Eastern Europe Cuts in on India (Unfortunately, this article might not be available much longer without a subscription.)

In part, the article is a profile of Transcom Worldwide SA, a Stockholm-based outsourcing company with a growing presence in Eastern Europe, where it has 1,100 employees. Transcom hopes that its Eastern European operations will help it dominate the growing European call-center market. The article tells how they plan to do that:

"The key, says Chief Executive Keith Russell, is taking advantage of a strategy called nearshoring, a lesser-known cousin of offshoring. In offshoring, businesses seek to lower costs by contracting with offshore service centers to perform functions ranging from telemarketing to technical-support "help desks." India snared a huge share of this market. In nearshoring, the call center is located closer to the targeted customers of the businesses that hire center operators.

"Three years ago, as it became apparent that eight former Soviet-bloc countries would be joining the European Union in 2004, Transcom decided that Eastern Europe could emulate India as a base for setting up call centers. It since has opened centers in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Hungary, bolstering a network of 42 centers in 23 mostly European countries.

"The idea, says Mr. Russell, is to market a combination of India-like cheap labor, strong skills in English and other European languages and a sensitivity to Western culture. Many European companies don't feel comfortable doing business with somewhere as distant geographically and culturally as India, he adds."

According to the article, some companies are looking for outsourced resources in areas where wages are lower; some are looking for areas where good-quality workers are available. The following table is interesting in this regard:

The WSJ article says that Estonia has drawn a lot of attention from call-center companies since the country joined the EU in May 2004. Since then, 54 call centers have moved into the country, employing 1,700 people.

AB -- 4/13/05

Consulting firm Accenture just released a study, "Leadership in Customer Service: New Expectations, New Experiences," the company's sixth annual report on government service delivery. See the full release from today here:

Governments Must Move Beyond eGovernment Initiatives to Enhance Customer Service for Citizens, Accenture Study Finds

Accenture studied the service maturity of 22 national governments in North America, Europe and Asia; it also surveyed 9,000 respondents about their experiences interacting with their governments online, in person and by phone.

How do citizens prefer interacting with their governments? This excerpt from the release is revealing:

"The citizen survey found that while most citizens prefer a number of different methods of communicating with governments, they continue to rely on more traditional, offline channels. Despite the relative Internet savvy and familiarity with online government in some countries, the telephone continues to be the predominant means citizens use to communicate with government. Over the past 12 months, 57 percent of respondents had used the telephone to interact with government, as opposed to only 22 percent who had used the Internet. Yet despite its popularity, the telephone is consistently ranked as the least easy form of communication across all countries surveyed."

Marty I. Cole, group chief executive of Accenture's Government operating group, commented: "This year's research shows that governments cannot afford to invest all of their effort and resources in developing the online channel alone to keep pace with citizen demands. The entire government organization must become focused on delivering services to citizens that are tailored to their needs and circumstances, and are coordinated across the various channels of interaction."

Accenture's study ranks and evaluates governments' online, or eGovernment, programs. As in the last five years, Canada ranked highest, followed by the U.S., Denmark, Singapore and Australia.

Accenture found that governments are not doing that well delivering next-generation services. This excerpt gives some specifics:

"A majority of citizens (55%) believe government is being effective when it acts as a single, seamless entity that can remember all of the details of a citizen's previous contact. However, an average of only 24 percent of citizens across all countries reported the government actually being able to do so. In the United Kingdom, which scored highest in this category, only 38 percent said the government remembered all details of a previous contact. Even in Canada, which ranked number one in overall maturity ratings this year, 70 percent of the respondents claimed that the government had forgotten at least some details of their previous transactions."

AB -- 4/6/05

I took note of this news item today about the increasing use of dashboard applications for business intelligence and performance management:

I was interested to read David Sims's article from today:

EEOC to Debut Controversial Call Center

The EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) is opening a contact center to deal with the calls it receives, over a million a year, mostly just for general information. The American Federation of Government Employees' National Council of EEOC Locals (good night, is that really the organization's name?) objects to the call center, saying that as it will be operated by an outside contractor it would cost federal jobs.

It looks as if the call center will go ahead into operation on a pilot basis, operated by contractor Pearson Government Solutions.

But this article also brought to mind a story I heard on NPR's Morning Edition radio show this morning about the protests organized labor leaders have been conducting in opposition to President Bush's proposed reforms to Social Security. You can listen to the story at:

Labor Targets Wall Street on Private Accounts

Actually, labor leaders are directing their protests specifically at Wall Street firms like Charles Schwab, who they say are the real force behind Bush's push to establish private accounts for retirement savings. The story brings in the additional insight that organized labor sees this issue as one that can help get the movement back into the limelight in an era when its power has been steadily declining.

AB -- 4/1/05

This afternoon, I sat in on a Web conference hosted by Siebel Systems to introduce release 7 of their CRM OnDemand product.

Generally I have to be dragged thrashing and wailing into press briefings, but once I am chained to my chair I settle down and begin to enjoy the experience. And this one wasn't too bad.

If you want to learn about the new product release, an announcement and pretty good overview is here:

Siebel CRM OnDemand Delivers Industry's First Prebuilt Hosted Contact Center Solution

The Web conference today was hosted by Bruce Cleveland, senior VP and general manager for SiebelOnDemand. The actual demo of the product was conducted by Mike Betzer, a VP at Siebel who was the founder and CEO of Ineto, the company purchased about a year ago by Siebel for its on-demand contact center technology. Cleveland referred to Betzer as "the luminary in this industry."

Siebel positions CRM OnDemand as a "complete customer communications platform." I was impressed by Siebel's efforts to provide a product that can be used in an integrated way. Betzer said that "customers are tired of buying multiple-point solutions and trying to integrate them."

In product presentations, I'm most interested in seeing what the user experience is like. Siebel CRM OnDemand does what seems like a good job getting everything into one interface using a tabbed format with left-hand navigation. Here's a sample screen -- might turn out to be kind of small but should give you an idea what it's like:

Some random take-aways I noted from the presentation:

• Siebel acknowledges that Salesforce.com is its chief competitor but claims that Salesforce farms out a lot of capabilities that Siebel's product includes as part of the offering.
• Siebel likes to tout its "Blue Chip customer list," one of which is Ingersoll-Rand, which participated in the presentation and gave a nice mini-case study of how it's using OnDemand to unite its call centers and integrate customer information.
• CRM OnDemand provides a key reporting benefit in providing CRM and call center reporting together.
• Siebel is definitely in the on-demand application business and is investing a lot in this market area.

AB -- 3/29/05

As Web editorial directory for TMCnet, I am the consumer of about 2,000 press releases a week, which come into our site partly via feeds and partly through submissions by company PR reps using our Content Submission tool.

This one about multi-language IVRs came in today via PRNewswire and is a praiseworthy example of good copywriting if for nothing other than its headline:

Press 1 for English, Press 2 for Spanish, Press 3 for Urdu, Press 4 for Macedonian

REDONDO BEACH, Calif., March 22 /PRNewswire/ -- As the global economy expands, and as the population of foreign-born-residents living in the U.S. increases, businesses, healthcare providers, and government agencies, are being asked to accommodate the needs of people who speak languages other than English.

The first contact with clients is often by telephone, and more and more businesses, hospitals, and government agencies, are making accommodations in their telecommunications systems.

The Translation Station, a 13-year old translation and interpretation company, now offers Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system recordings in any of 150 foreign languages.

"This works particularly well in fields where non-English-speaking clients can get most or all of the information they need from an automated system," says Jennifer Gilbert, The Translation Station's Marketing Director. "The financial community is probably the biggest user of the service since virtually all account information can be retrieved over the phone."

According to the U.S. Census bureau, at the end of 2002, the U.S. had 33 million people, 11.8% of the population, who were natives of other countries. By comparison, in 1990, some 20 million people, or 7.9% of the population, had been born abroad.

"When we started the service several years ago, we primarily worked with Spanish," adds Gilbert. "Now it's not unusual for a client to ask us to input a dozen or more languages, and many require the more exotic languages, such as Haitian Creole, Hmong, Farsi, Arabic, Hindi, Armenian, Azerbaijani, and so on."

The Translation Station supports its clients with two additional language services.
"First, for those that need to have more in-depth conversations with their clients we now provide both Over-The-Phone and Onsite Interpretation services. And, second, we offer document translation services between English and any of 150 foreign languages," says Gilbert.

The Translation Station, one of the nation's largest language companies, has provided translation and interpreter services to many of the Fortune 500 corporations, Top 100 intellectual property and international trade law firms, and government offices, including, the Department of Defense, NASA, the U.S. International Trade Representatives, and The White House.

For more information contact:
Jack Bernstein
310-792-3637
Internet Fax: 509-984-3576
jack@thetranslationstation.com

-----

AB 3/22/05

One of my colleagues here at TMC called my attention today to the Predictive Dialer Channel on the TMCnet Web site. This seems like a critical technology for operating an effective high-volume call center, so I spent some time looking at some of the content on the channel.

One enlightening article on the channel is "Your Competitive Advantage Might be as Close as Your Phone!" which incorporates two case studies to give an idea how predictive dialer technology can be effectively used in collections centers.

Seems to me that collections is one business where the center can waste a lot of time, effort and money through inefficient calling procedures. This quote from Fred Blitt of collection agency Blitt and Gaines, PC, will give you an idea how the technology can add leverage to a collections operation:

Moving through the files more quickly and weeding out those with bad numbers also boosts productivity. Those files are then quickly transferred to skip tracing. Additionally, Blitt is confident that they can now touch their vast volume of files more rapidly and "stamp the account" in accordance with the clients' guidelines. Not only do they move through files more quickly, but also more uniformly. "We can now put an unmanned campaign out there that leaves messages for debtors and we know the call has been made. The files can be worked more strategically by having a unique message for different groups. We can apply the specific type of campaign to a specific type of account," says Blitt.

AB -- 3/10/05

I was fascinated to see this release on TMCnet about a new CRM offering from Voxeo:

Blogs, IM, VOIP IVR, and Speech Power New Voxeo ExpressCRM Platform

The release describes a next-generation customer interaction platform that I was eager to learn more about. I especially wanted to know how Voxeo had integrated blogging into the product, as I have read some interesting things about blogging as a knowledge-management tool. Oddly, when I went to Voxeo's Web site, I couldn't find any mention of ExpressCRM!

This excerpt describes the core technology of the new platform:

"Voxeo’s ExpressCRM platform is based on the BizBLOG engine. Created and field-tested by Voxeo over the last two years, BizBLOG is a scalable, secure, Blog content engine leveraging Java J2EE, SQL data replication, RSS syndication, and an XML-based extension API."

AB -- 3/8/05

A fascinating report appeared from analyst firm IDC today:

IDC Envisions U.S. Firms as ''Virtual Diplomats'' in the Middle East of the Future

IDC feels that the establishment of contact centers in the Middle East can serve as a pacifying force -- IDC claims that this has already been the case in Northern Ireland.

This reminds me of some of the thinking of Thomas L. Friedman in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Give people a stake in the globalized economy and they will be more supportive and protective of its interests.

Today's release quotes Stephen Loynd, a senior analyst in Services Research at IDC:

"Virtual diplomacy really has a chance to forge new connections at a confusing time. The precedent was set in Northern Ireland over the course of the 1990s, but perhaps not enough U.S. corporations recognized the multifaceted quality and potential of contact centers as ambassadors for change. Not only does a company that pursues a Middle East sourcing strategy gain in business process efficiencies, but it also has the chance to forge meaningful links with appreciative populations and governments, opening up a whole new set of opportunities for the future."

IDC says that these themes from the Northern Ireland experience could benefit companies considering outsourcing to the Middle East:

-- Smart contact centers - "virtual diplomats" - can become important force multipliers, both for American business and diplomacy.

-- Government involvement and support can play an important role in helping contact centers grow and flourish in the Middle East.

-- Colleges and universities can play a powerful part by helping foster new ideas and alliances.

-- Networks of influential individuals with relevant skill-sets and expertise can help build real momentum for change in a region long mired in conflict

AB -- 3/7/05

You've got to admire those perky optimists at Xerox. They've continued to apply resources into the all-important functions of R&D and innovation, in spite of some rough times (I'm no financial analyst, but my impression is that their financial performance has improved considerably the past couple of years).

According to this report, Xerox is developing an interesting system for tracking customer satisfaction and quickly heading off emerging problems in their customers' organizations:

Inside Innovation at Xerox: a Periodic Glimpse at Work in Progress; Company Develops Innovative System That Rethinks Customer Satisfaction to Rapidly Get Feedback, Resolve Problems

Xerox calls this CRM system the Sentinel Customer Satisfaction Assurance System and is using it now in about 40 major customer accounts. Here's how today's news release describes the way it works:

A Web-based, supercharged customer relationship management system that's unique enough for Xerox to patent, Sentinel defines customer satisfaction as the absence of problems. So with the customer's permission, Sentinel e-mails a simple question to every worker that relies on Xerox at specific customer sites: "Do you have any problem, comment or suggestion for Xerox?"

That question may sound like a standard customer satisfaction survey, but Sentinel is about as much like one as radar is like a flashlight. It differs in both scope and execution, according to Vaccarelli.

While traditional satisfaction surveys are administered periodically to a sampling of people, Sentinel e-mails a monthly "check-in" to everyone at the customer site who might rely on Xerox in any way.

That way Sentinel catches emerging problems. More important, it routes problems for immediate resolution. Happy workers simply delete the e-mail or click on a happy face and write a comment or suggestion, but people with problems click on a frowning face, opening a dialog box and starting what is known as an "adaptive loop*," Vaccarelli said.

Respondents are linked to a Web site where they explain the problem in their own words. The system instantly and automatically notifies the designated Xerox account manager that there is a problem, creates an electronic problem ticket, prompts an immediate telephone call to the worker, and activates a tenacious adaptive loop that keeps the issue on Xerox's front burner until the worker confirms that the problem has been resolved.

Sentinel conditions Xerox and its customers as effectively as feedback systems used by NASA condition astronauts to react to emergencies, according to Vaccarelli. It teaches Xerox people to sense what's going on and make adjustments in real time, instead of waiting for a customer complaint and then following with protracted problem solving. It conditions customers to give feedback because they know it will be acted upon.

Xerox says in its pilot installation of Sentinel, customer satisfaction rates rose to above 95%. Future versions of Sentinel might incorporate text mining and pattern recognition.

AB -- 3/3/05