Indian inefficiency causes Apple to shut customer support call center in India

Apple Computer Inc. has decided not to open a customer support call center in India, a company official said Tuesday.

Earlier this year, Apple had announced plans to open a technology support center in Bangalore, India's technology hub, and had hired dozens of staff. The Cupertino, California-based, company had said the Indian center would eventually staff 600 employees.

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Dell owner inviting Filipinos to join contact center

First posted 00:01am (Mla time) Oct 15, 2005
By Abigail L. Ho
Inquirer News Service



MICHAEL Dell, chair of computer maker Dell Inc., is reaching out to Filipino talents to consider a career in the 700-seat contact center the company will be opening in the Philippines in February 2006.

Through a Webcast that will run on the company’s website from Oct. 14-21, Dell will be enticing Filipino customer service representatives to join the Dell contact center here.

“We’ve come to the Philippines for the very best technical and customer service professionals that we can find. We believe that we’ve got the best career opportunities that you can find. We hope you’ll join our team,” Dell said in his webcast.

Dell International Services Philippines, a wholly owned Dell subsidiary that will be in charge of the local contact center, will be embarking on an aggressive recruitment process starting this month.

Apart from the webcast, the company will also send out test-based broadcasts, print ads and banner ads through a partnership with short messaging service community www.chikka.com

The company’s Philippine contact center would be an integral part of its strategy to expand beyond personal computers and enter the world of consumer electronics, said Doy Roque, designated spokesperson for Dell.

“Dell is transforming from just a PC company into a total technology company. The company sells almost everything direct, through the web or through call centers. It only has resellers in areas where it doesn’t have actual offices that can sell directly to
customers,” he said in a briefing.

Roque said that under the company’s expansion strategy, Dell would be veering away from just PCs and would also be selling products such as high-definition television sets (HDTV) and MP3 players.

Although these products would not be sold in the Philippines, he said sales and technical inquiries for these would be handled by Dell’s contact center here.

Despite having its own contact center in the Philippines, Roque said existing deals with other call centers would be maintained.

“We can even grow our partner base here. We won’t compete with other call centers,” he said.

Since its inception in 1984, Dell has capitalized on direct relationships with customers -- in person, on the phone or over the Internet -- to grow its business. It is the first company to generate $1 million in daily online sales, operating one of the world’s
highest volume Internet sites.

Makati drafts investment code for contact center locators

First posted 09:33pm (Mla time) Oct 19, 2005
By Alexander Villafania
INQ7.net

WITH more IT companies relocating elsewhere due to real estate shortages, the city of Makati is drafting a new investment code that will include a revision of its original land use program to allow more construction developers to create higher buildings.

Makati City Mayor Jejomar Binay told reporters in a luncheon last Wednesday that he’s pushing for a new investment code to allow the construction of taller buildings.

The height restriction codes in Makati allows only for buildings in certain zones to be four-to-six floors high, supposedly to lessen human and vehicular traffic. The restrictions were also originally implemented due to the presence of an airstrip along Ayala Avenue.

“We’re already having problems with space because many of Makati’s spaces are being used to build contact centers. However, what I would want to propose is to make buildings taller so that locators can have more space to choose from,” Binay said.

He cited contact center operators Convergys and People Support that both constructed their own buildings in Makati City for their expansion.

With the expected influx in contact center locators into the country, Binay hopes that the draft, when implemented, will encourage developers to choose Makati City.

“This is the hub of many multinational companies and I want to ensure that they would have enough space to grow,” Binay said.

Another provision of the proposed investment code is to use a corporatized model of governance wherein the cost of constructing certain facilities will be paid for by Makati residences.

Under this provision, Makati residences will partially pay for the construction of a building in exchange for shares of stock. When these stocks mature, the dividends will either be given back to the residents or reused to build new buildings.

Binay said a corporatized model lessens the need for a belt-tightening local government unit to spend on constructing more buildings. He said the model is being implemented in Singapore where a large number of companies are partially owned by the government.

India faces staff quality crisis

Industry officials have slammed the standard of Indian graduates, saying the country's poor education system is threatening its call centre boom.

Indian and Australian media this week quoted industry experts as saying that only one in 10 graduates are employing. "It's only the cream of the cream who go to the excellent institutes of management and technology who have great potential. The rest are unemployable," Indian call centre and IT association, NASSCOM, president Kiran Karnik was quoted as saying.

Nasscom has said that it needs 9000 more workers right now, but has failed to find them. Statistics say that given its rapid growth, the industry will be short of 82,000 workers by 2007, which will spiral to 206,000 by 2009.

How to deliver levels of efficiency, customer and staff satisfaction that others admire

Managing Contact Centre performance is about using the right measures, throughout the organisation and then acting on them in a consistent way. Amazon.com and GE operate at levels of efficiency, customer and staff satisfaction that others admire. Their Achievement Management processes are at the heart of this success…. What are their secrets?

Everybody running a customer service operation knows that it’s essential to have a clear idea of how their team is performing in order to drive improvements in performance. Unfortunately, in many cases, the methods they choose to measure this are actually doing them more harm than good. Ask yourself:

* has my measurement process taken on a life of its own and are the reports I get creating work rather than identifying and prompting improvements?
* does my organisation record and store heaps of data without witnessing any changes in performance?
* are my team leaders and coaches spending more time collating data and preparing reports than coaching their people?
* do my staff welcome the performance measures or just see them as an irritation?

Amazon.com and GE Electric Insurance handled these issues by applying a process called Achievement Management which focuses on four things to manage the performance of their customer operations effectively:

* They have identified the things they really need to measure: those aspects of performance that are vital to their business and that include both the operational and customer perspectives. They didn’t ignore metrics just because they were hard to measure
* They created personal balanced ‘scorecards’ of simple measures so everyone could see their progress at a glance
* They focused on driving action from the performance measures not just on reporting them, because the real value of measurement is in the actions that result from it
* They engaged their staff in the whole process, and linked tangible rewards to improvements in performance that, for the first time, could be measured.

Download the complete "Learning from the Leaders" Article……

Nortel launches Expert Anywhere

Nortel has introduced its 'Expert Anywhere' contact solution, making it possible for companies to tap experts across an organisation, expanding the pool of customer service agents without the cost of maintaining centralised and regional contact centers or setting up expert knowledge workers as formal contact center agents. The Expert Anywhere solution allows businesses to direct customer calls to the most appropriate agent or knowledge worker, regardless of location or function - working in the main contact center, teleworking at home, in a branch office, or even in a retail store. Wherever specialised resources reside in a company, Expert Anywhere can link that expertise into the contact center enabling single call resolution and delivering a new level of customer service.

"Customers today have a broad spectrum of communication channels to choose from when they interact with a company," said Malcolm Collins (President, Enterprise Networks, Nortel). "To remain competitive, organisations are challenged to raise service levels by being more responsive, accessible, intuitive and adaptive to customer needs with the staff and resources they have available to them. Nortel is helping customers achieve this new level of customer service with innovative solutions that break down the barriers of distance and distributed work environments."

Information on Nortel is at: www.nortel.com

Genesys and IBM expand speech rec. offering

Global IT companies Genesys Telecommunications and IBM have joined to offer an expanded speech recognition solution to call centres.

The new technology and reseller agreement expands the Genesys Voice Platform (GVP) technology offering to include the addition of IBM WebSphere Voice Server (WVS) speech solutions. The IBM WebSphere Voice Server functionality provides automated speech recognition and text-to-speech resources that enable speech-based interaction.

"The Genesys Voice Platform is a complete voice processing solution that supports advanced network routing, self-service and intelligent queuing," said Genesys chief technology officer, Elliot Danziger. "This global agreement between Genesys and IBM brings self and assisted-speech service to companies, offering a lower total cost of ownership, improved customer service, improved operational efficiency and easy deployment options."

DHL Call Centre delivers the highest service standards

DHL, the world's leading express and logistics company, has shown that it delivers the highest standard of service to their customers in comparison to five other leading Australian express call centres.

With an average call pick up time of two seconds, which is up to 22 seconds faster than some of its key competitors, the DHL Express Customer Service Centre has been awarded by independent research group ACA Research an overall performance ranking of 91 per cent. This ranking cements DHL's position as the highest-achieving call centre in the express industry in terms of best possible service across a variety of performance indicators.

The research also revealed the DHL Express Customer Service Centre is the only call centre in the express industry that offers a 24 hour, 7 day a week, personalised service with a customer service officer answering every call. Each of the five competitors uses a telephone option menu to answer customer calls, and in some cases up to nine different telephone menu options are offered to the caller.

Indian outsourcers face multinational rivals

Indian outsourcers face a bigger threat from global call centre operators than from regional rivals, according to a new Forrester Research study.

The research tipped Indian outsourcers to eventually combine forces through mergers and acquisitions to meet mounting competition from global players like Accenture and IBM. "After Indian BPO suppliers with complementary capabilities struggle head-to-head, they will likely seek to combine their strengths against the steadily mounting threats from Accenture, IBM, and other global players," Forrester said. "High valuations for Indian BPO companies are slowing consolidation, but mergers between existing offshore BPO players, and transactions involving Indian offshore BPO players and global majors, are increasingly likely scenarios."

The report downplayed the threat of competition from other regions, saying, "truly competitive companies could take years to emerge from locations like China." "More imminent is the threat from global majors like Accenture and IBM, who are not only expanding their Indian footprint substantially but also boast substantial presence globally."

India's Call Center Industry Facing Some Problems

Sept. 19, 2005 -- A shortage of skilled labor in India's call center is causing a number of problems including cost, quality and security concerns. According to Gartner,a Stamford, Ct.-based research company, a lack of skilled workers over time will drive up labor costs as employees sell their skills to the highest bidder thus eliminating the cost advantages. Resorting to recruiting less-than-qualified personnel to run the many call centers can cause the quality of services delivered to suffer. Additionally the risk of fraud and theft of confidential data increases as under qualified employees perform jobs vital to security.

The Indian government estimates that the need for trained and qualified employees in call centers will reach 1 million by 2009, with an expected shortfall of more than 260,000 workers. Offshore business process outsourcing by multinational companies that chose India due to its educated and English-speaking workforce is fueling the call center demand. Although India has an annual graduating class of more than 2.5 million college students, it still won't be enough to populate the call center.

Earlier this week, Gartner advised organizations to carefully investigate a call center before signing on the dotted line. Companies should ensure that adequate mechanisms - such as service level agreements and resulting penalties, call monitoring and customer satisfaction surveys - are built into contracts. Gartner also urged companies to keep a watch on the centers over the next two years.

Philippines Catching up with India in the Outsourcing Industry

By Winston Pepito

India, the dominant player in outsourcing touted as the “back office of the world,” would soon have to contend with a third-world rival—the Philippines.

A highly skilled English-speaking labor force. A reliable telecommunications infrastructure. Low cost of qualified personnel. These are some significant reasons for choosing India or the Philippines for outsourcing support.

IT OUTSOURCING IN INDIA

India, a former colony of the British Empire for almost two centuries, has the second-largest IT talent pool in the world, a result of its Britain-influenced education system that places great emphasis on science and mathematics. With 120,000 trained IT professionals added to the Indian workforce yearly, India is gearing to be an IT giant in the third world and is ranked as the first choice of U.S. companies for software outsourcing. According to Nasscomm, a conglomerate of India-based software and services companies, Indian companies are software solution provider to more than half the Fortune 500 companies.

The launch of India’s first private undersea cable has tremendously improved the international bandwidth situation. In addition, considerable bandwidth is available with the state-owned Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited, partially owned by India’s largest business conglomerate. The privatization of telecom industry has also resulted in a significant drop in telecom rates. Observers predict that the entry of newer industry players will see a further drop in telecom prices. In the last ten years, telecom costs in India have dropped by 85 percent.

Over the years, India has built a strong brand equity as an attractive destination for software development and support. India is host to established IT companies such as IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, Sun, HP, and Alcatel.

OFFSHORE DESTINATION: PHILIPPINES

But the Philippines—one of the world’s second-largest English-speaking populations—is fast catching up to India.

With a literacy rate of 94%, the Philippines has a large pool of information technology professionals and a cost-competitive telecoms infrastructure. The country ranks third in Knowledge and Information-based jobs in the 2002 Global Technology Index research done by the META Group. Three million college graduates join the workforce each year, providing a tremendous source of talent.

An American colony for close to 50 years, the Philippines has a Western-influenced culture, a unique trait that clearly distinguishes the country from other offshore destinations. Although Asian in orientation, Filipinos watch American TV and are thus able to communicate effectively in American English.

PHILIPPINES: CALL CENTER HUB

In recent years, the Philippines has become the offshore destination of choice for call center outsourcing, specializing in customer support services. Because of the Filipinos’ high level of English proficiency and strong customer orientation, many leading multinationals have used the Philippines as a global center for customer service. American OnLine, the largest U.S. Internet service provider, maintains a staff of 600 at its call center in Clark, Pampanga. Caltex, Procter & Gamble, Barnes and Noble, among others, have built large-scale service centers in the Philippines.

One very promising industry that has sought outsourcing support in the Philippines is the medical transcription business. The Philippines boasts a large talent pool of medical professionals, including doctors, nurses, and medical technologists. The demand for medical transcription has risen as U.S. hospitals are now required by federal regulations to convert medical records into data format. Seventeen medical transcription companies are now in operation, employing 1,200 Filipinos.

GIVING INDIA A RUN FOR ITS MONEY

While the Philippines may not be as a huge an offshore provider of web and software services as India, it holds great promise in the customer service industry. Although India does charge lower than the Philippines—for data encoding work, India charges around $4 (U.S.) versus $10 in the Philippines—more multinationals are choosing the Philippines because of the high quality of work. Moreover, Filipinos make good customer service agents not only because they are fluent in American English but also because of their helpful and friendly nature.

More companies are choosing the Philippines for offshore support. Among the services offered in Philippine-based outsourcing companies are copyediting and indexing; web design and maintenance; data conversion, data warehousing, data capture and data entry; OCR and scanning services; proofreading; encoding and keyboarding; imaging services and graphics design; call center and customer service; abstracting and document conversion; typesetting; and tagging, among others.