By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Greg Brown's "Mose Allison Played Here:"
Infor has announced that Turkcell, Turkey's largest mobile phone operator and Europe's second largest GSM operator, has won the Gartner CRM Excellence Award 2007 for Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Turkcell was singled out for its successful deployment of Infor CRM Epiphany, which Turkcell officials say has "dramatically improved" interaction with Turkcell's 31.8 million customers.
Infor CRM Epiphany is a CRM product marketed for integrated marketing, sales, service and analytics.
Turkcell, the only company here in Turkey listed on the NYSE, manages more than 23 million customer interactions per month through 19 different communication channels. "We congratulate Turkcell on winning this award," said Gregg Monastiero, senior vice president of Infor's Strategic Solutions Group for CRM.
The award was presented following a review which involved Gartner analysts evaluating all entries based on proven excellence in their CRM initiatives. From this, Gartner selected three finalists. Attendees at the Gartner CRM Summit in London then evaluated each finalist's presentation against Gartner's eight building blocks for CRM and voted Turkcell the winner.
Attendees at the event, Turkcell officials say, chose Turkcell for its "vision and organized approach to challenges." And believe First Coffee, "organized approach to challenges" is not the usual M.O. here in Istanbul. If they gave out awards for "winging it and somehow holding it together" nobody would have a prayer against these people.
This is, of course, much of the charm and attraction of Istanbul in particular and Turks in general, it's great that things here are fairly relaxed and loose. Of course the guy who installed your plumbing was relaxed and loose as he was doing it, so there are drawbacks.
Gartner officials also cited Turkcell's customer-driven, multi-channel product development strategy designed to reward customer loyalty, another innovation in a culture where, as recently as 1997, the state telephone company actually charged users more per minute for the longer they stayed on a call.
Voters noted the importance of having board-level support for the initiative, and felt that it was clear that Turkcell had made good use of customer segmentation and customization -- beyond the usual Turkish segmentation of "people who buy things from me vs. people who could get hit by a bus for all I care."
Some attendees noted that Turkcell's approach thinks about the experience from an individual customer's view. That this is remarkable here is a good indication of why Turkcell is the only Turkish company ever to get traded on the Big Board.
"We are delighted to receive this prestigious award," said Meltem Sahin, Head of Marketing Insights and Reporting, Turkcell, a position which can't exist at more than a handful of Turkish firms. Still, given that until the 1980s Turkey was a closed, Soviet-style command economy, the progress that has been made here, due to then-Prime Minister Turgut Ozal's throwing the country open to competition, is phenomenal.
"We believe this award highlights Turkcell's continued commitment to providing the highest levels of customer satisfaction possible. With the help of Infor CRM epiphany, we have decreased customer complaints by 30 percent and increased first time query resolution by 15 percent. In the last year alone we increased customer satisfaction in a market where our competitors are facing decreases," Sahin said.
Turkcell has 31.8 million post-paid and pre-paid customers as of December 31, 2006 operating in a three player market with a market share of approximately 60 percent as of December 31, 2006. In addition to wireless telephone services, Turkcell currently offers General Packet Radio Service countrywide and Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution in dense areas.
Turkcell provides roaming with 541 operators in 193 countries as of February 26. Turkcell reported $4.7 billion net revenues as of December 31, 2006 as per IFRS financial statements.
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Staying overseas, which means changing a lot of "s"es to "z"s in officials statements, since one thing Ye Olde England has been singularly successful in exporting worldwide is British English, we note that Luxoft, a large Russian provider of high-end IT outsourcing services, has announced that it is extending its co-operation with investment bank Deutsche Bank.
Luxoft President and CEO Dmitry Loschinin and Deutsche Bank's Daniel Marovitz, COO of Technology for Deutsche's Global Banking Division, finalized the agreement during CeBIT's German-Russian IT Summit, which promotes the cooperation between Germany and Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
Luxoft will provide development resources in Russia and the Ukraine to enhance Client First, a Client Relationship Management package. Moreover, based on Deutsche Bank's experience with Client First, the two companies believe that the product has wide potential in the business community and will therefore work together to market it to organizations worldwide.
Client First provides real-time management of each client relationship by aggregating and centralizing data from many internal and external sources. The system currently serves over 5,000 Deutsche Bank employees across Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.
Client First is used as a CRM platform in a number of different businesses across the bank.
Loschinin emphasized that working with Deutsche Bank has been a truly collaborative partnership, saying "we are taking an almost unprecedented step by working with Deutsche to sell a product that was specifically developed for just one client."
Luxoft was the first company in Europe to achieve Level 5 CMMI quality certification.
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OS2i, a vendor of offshore Recruitment Process Outsourcing services to the American and British recruitment industries, has announced its Reseller and Affiliate programs, designed to "enhance partners revenue streams and broadens their own current offerings by reselling or referring OS2i to their customers," company officials say.
Company officials stress that the partner program is particularly well-suited to US & UK individuals, organizations or associations serving Recruitment or the Human Resourcing industry.
Affiliate & Reseller Partners will be fully supported by a dedicated US or UK sales manager, a research team, marketing collateral, CRM access, web and e-mail leads and the commitment to make the partnership excel, OS2i officials promise.
The company was basically one of the first to run with the concept of offshore Recruitment Process Outsourcing, which after four years they've had some success with: the company is currently working with over 300 US & UK staffing companies and claims many of the top 100 within their client portfolio.
Operating a hybrid onshore-offshore business model, OS2i's offshore RRO facility is based in India -- surprise, surprise -- with onshore offices in both the UK and USA. This dual-shore model allows OS2i to deliver outsourced resourcing and recruitment administration services at offshore rates, with what company officials describe as "onshore quality and accountability."
What, you ask, are some typical outsourced oRPO services? Well, friend, we have candidate generation services such as job board resume database searching, advertising response, ATS searching, talent pool development, advanced online passive candidate identification, intelligent online advertising, candidate networking and referrals via e-mail & telephone. Not to mention candidate screening and recruitment administration.
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