There's been an interesting case in Italy that might give some perspective to the issue of call recording in America.
According to legal resource Lexology, Italy's Minister of Labour recently said that "as long as certain conditions are observed," the recording of phone conversations between call center employees and customers "does not constitute a form of remote monitoring" as prohibited under law.
Confindustria, Italy's main trade association for manufacturing and services companies, wanted to monitor the quality of customer service being provided, and said the monitoring would be "carried out on a sample of calls and under several important privacy protection conditions," Lexology said, such as encrypting the voices of the call centre employees and customers during recording in order to conceal their identities.
Italy's Minister of Labour decided that yes, telephone conversations in the workplace can be recorded, Lexology says, "provided that the privacy of the employees in question is protected."
If there are two words open source CRM provider SugarCRM wants you to associate with its soon-to-be-released flagship CRM application, those two words would be "simple" and "speed."
"This is really focused on speed and simplicity," Clint Oram, SugarCRM co-founder and vice president of products said about Sugar 6, now in beta and scheduled for general availability in July, according to industry observer Rick Whiting.
It has an overhauled user interface - what Whiting calls "the first significant update to the UI since the product's initial release more than five years ago" -- and such tweaks as a shortcut bar at the top of the window "that makes it easier to navigate through the application in fewer clicks," Whiting reports Oram saying in a phone briefing.
It'll find a receptive market. "SugarCRM was one of the most heavily anticipated enterprise applications to arrive on the System i server when SugarCRM announced support for the platform three years ago," industry Alex Woodie notes.
Utah-based Bonneville Billing & Collections officials say the company uses a predictive dialer system to handle its medical and utility accounts for the Western region of the United States, for clients "in Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming," said Jim Eastwood, Dialer Manager for Bonneville.
Bonneville divides its accounts into three stages, using different features of CT Center for the first two stages. In stage one, Eastwood, who never gets called "Clint," says collectors work accounts with CT Center's predictive dialer.
"Our agents are on Predictive Dialing all day long, every day," said Eastwood.
Stage two is worked by more advanced collectors, who occasionally use the power dialer to work accounts, and if you get to stage three it's time for lawyers and legal action.
You don't want to get to Stage 3.
Industry observer Marius Oiaga reports that Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop and Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Business Solutions Kirill Tatarinov announced that, come H2 2010, "customers in no less than 32 markets around the world would be able to start taking advantage of Dynamics CRM Online."
Microsoft said some customers worldwide could start using it as of today.
The countries covered in the announcement are the standard laundry list - the U.S. and Canada, a litany of European countries, Israel, New Zealand, Japan, Malaysia, India, the usual suspects.
Customer service software provider Salesforce.com purchased Jigsaw recently for $142 million in "an acquisition that seems to have actual content," and not just a way for Salesforce.com "to spend some of that half billion they put together."
That's the opinion of CRM guru Paul Greenberg, one of the small handful of genuinely must-read CRM observers and a man to whom the New York Yankees' 2009 season was "oh, acceptable. But we'll do better this year."
Greenberg says to think "partnership with VMWare" about the Jigsaw deal: "The combination of the two tells me that Salesforce.com is making an effort to become not just a PaaS provider, born a CRM provider, but now a complete cloud offering."
[Editor's Note: We wish to thank Dave for manfully resisting the urge to write 'Jigsaw Big Piece of the Puzzle for Salesforce.com' as the headline.]
