[OT] Industry news from Australia

This WebDNA talk-list message is from

2000

It keeps the original formatting. numero = 28283
interpreted = N
texte = A very interesting article about Web Site intergration with telephony call centres.Has anyone had any experience in this area?IN the next two to three years, Australia's call-centre industry will beturned on its head as businesses scramble to transform their telephonyfront ends into customer information fighting machines. The name of the game - to capture and keepcustomers and drag maximum dollars out of them - is being rushed alongby a strengthening tide of electronic commerce that demands linkagesbetween corporate Web sites, sales teams, IT infrastructure andcall-centre operations. A battery of customer-relationship managementtechnologies will be required to shepherd the market - estimated to beworth $6.5 billion in terms of recurring operating costs,and in excess of $230 million in annual revenues - into the 21stcentury. Computer telephony integration (CTI) systems,voice-recognition programs and systems that transfer Web customers tocall-centre agents at the click of an icon, are just a few of theexpensive whizz-bang items destined to have chief financial officerswriggling in their hair shirts by the end of this year. In Australia, massive customer-relationshipmanagement projects are already under way, concentrated in thetelecommunications, banking and finance, insurance and utilitiessectors. And the stakes are high. According to theresearch company Datamonitor, $US1.6 billion ($2.49 billion) ofe-commerce business-to-consumer transactions were abandoned by Webshoppers in 1998 due to the lack of integrated customer service. Merv Langby, senior analyst, professionalservices with IDC Australia, says revenues from the sale ofcustomer-relationship management (CRM) software alone will rocket from$36 million in 1998, to $220 million in 2003. When the cost of management and integrationservices is thrown in, the corporate bill will stack up considerablyhigher. In a recent IDC survey, 65 per cent of respondents said CRMwould be their first or second most important investment over the next12 months. It's going to be beautiful chaos, Langby chuckles. It'sgoing to be a motza for theservices people. But the big end of town does not seem fazed bythe impending expense. In some respects, they don't care, Langby says,explaining that in the brave new world of e-business,the advantages of being first in, best dressed outweigh the initialset-up costs. The organisation best armed to claim the largest slice ofthe territory will win. Spurred on by the deregulation of the domesticutilities market slated for January 1 next year, EnergyAustralia is oneplayer going in hard for its piece of the CRM action, recentlysigning a multi-million-dollar deal with Rockwell Electronic Commerceand Ericsson Australia for the supply of an integrated call-managementsystem. Geoff Lillis runs EnergyAustralia's customerservice subsidiary, which includes a 200-seat call centre fielding 2.5million calls each year. We are investing heavily in technologyto support it and continue to make productivity gains, he says. By theend of April, he hopes CTI and skills-based routing will be completed. The next step will be to route Web inquiriesdirectly to its call centre. Lillis expects the base technology for thisdevelopment will be in place by the middle of the year. At the moment,Web and e-mail inquiries are streamed to specially designatedcall-centre staff. The turnaround time on responding to these customermessages is running at 24 hours. We've seen month-on-month a 200 percent increase in inquiries either direct from our Web site or viae-mail, he says. Suncorp Metway is witnessing dramatic leaps ine-mail and Web inquiries, too. Suncorp's general manager of call-centreoperations, Bill Brooks, says that 12 months ago, less than 1 per cent of inquiries were made over the Net. Today, the rate is running at 20 per cent.Globally, Forrester Research has estimated that the volume of e-mail/Webinquiries will account for well over 80 per cent of customer inquiriesby 2003. Phone contact will be the customer's entry point to anorganisation in only 5 per cent of cases. In 1997, 97 per cent ofbusiness-consumer interaction tookplace over the phone. TeleTech Asia Pacific, a call-centre outsourcingvendor with 1,200 employees in the Asia-Pacific region and a revenuebase of about $100 million, is witnessing a slightly softercurve. TeleTech president Louis Carroll says the electronic wave is yetto crest. Our Web-driven stuff, and I'm pretty confidentwe'd be at the leading edge of this, is in low single-figure percentagesof our total volume. Nevertheless, Carroll is confident that percentagewill grow apace. The rise of the Web, while often hype and sharemarket evaluations get ahead of the reality, is inevitable andunstoppable and at the same time, voice over IP is becoming moreviable, higher quality, more cost effective, he says. This is notscience fiction - this is the near-term future. I expect to see a rapidexpansion literally over the next 12 months. We will be Web-enabling ourmajor customers in the next 12 months to varying degrees. The costs, though, could cause even the sturdiestcorporate customer to rock back on its heels. The managing director ofSydney-based ACA Research, Martin Conboy, sayscall-centre costs already average $65,000 a seat per year, plus $28,000in capital costs. Adding a so-called click to agent facility to acorporate Web site can drive this up by an additional $10,000. To fullyenable a call centre is a very expensive proposition, Carroll says. Itcan be up to $1 million of additional capital on top of all the normalswitchboardsand fit-out and everything else. The question of how an organisation recoups thesecosts and establishes a return on investment is fodder for muchspeculation. If you can find anyone who can answer it,Carroll jokes, I'll employ them immediately. On a more reassuringnote, he asserts that call-centre providers who see the trend as part ofthe future will be eager to price services so that they are notprohibitive for customers. The main reason for the corporate hunger for Weband e-mail response capacities is that they promise to be cheaper. ACAResearch, for instance, shows that phone interactionscost $2.50 to $6.50 each, while Internet transactions could run as lowas 20c to 50c each, but not everyone is convinced. Cisco Systems' contact centre solutions salesmanager Ray Trevisan says many businesses are just not ready to dealwith the liability issues surrounding e-mail responses,and generally low-paid call-centre staff are rarely equipped to dealwith written replies. The cut-price carrot dangling before businessesmay be more than offset by the costs of complexity at the call-centreend. It takes time to compose an e-mail; it takes time andmoney to hire and train staff to deal with e-mail. Trevisan says he recently came across a simplesolution to the dilemma when talking to a New Zealand company that haddecided to prompt customers on its Web site to sendtheir telephone numbers when shooting off their e-mail queries. With noadditional technology investment, the company calls the customer backwith the answer. This primitive but highly personal method sentcustomer satisfaction rates soaring. It did not, of course, deliver theholy grail of reducing call-centre costs, but it prevented an e-mailcost explosion and slashed e-mail response turnaround times. Anothercompelling reason to take up arms in the Internet customer battle is thevolume of additionalbusiness that can be driven through the channel. Conboy says that 90 per cent of companies runningcontact centres also have Web sites, but only 15 per cent have a Website that is interactive. The paradigm of the way that peoplecommunicate with business has shifted. In the old world it was all aboutmass marketing - In the new century, it's all about me.com, Conboysays. The exposure a company gains from being on theInternet is terrific but can be a double-edged sword if consumers getfrustrated, he says. Before, you would probably put up with a few ofthe idiosyncrasies of a particular company. Now, if they don't respond,you simply click away. Every business now is one clickaway from oblivion. Most companies treading the new customercontact-centre path are trying to deal with this fickle businessenvironment with huge data warehousing projects that will transformtheir call centres into knowledge hubs for the entire organisation. Tight integration between CRM platforms,knowledge management software and other business systems will allow - sothe theory goes - call-centre agents to grab, display and add to a customer's history while they're talking to them. Ultimately,the idea is that sales and marketing campaigns will be driven from theinformation derived from these dynamic information storehouses. At the Commonwealth Bank, data warehousingintegration efforts are moving the institution towards a single customerinterface. Peter Abbott, direct banking general manager,says the process is in various stages of evolution. We already have asingle customer view across a wide range of issues, he says. This is also happening at Energy-Australia.Fairly immediately, the [new] customer-care systems will give uscapabilities to do things we must do in meeting domestic deregulationthat we can't cover at the moment, Lillis says. There will be incremental productivity gains andwe expect those gains to be realised over the next 12 months butcertainly the main game is to give us functionality that currentlydoesn't exist. Top of this list for EnergyAustralia is enhanced billingfunctions, and the ability to track customers on an individual basis,viewing and analysing their entire range ofinteractions. Though reluctant to put a figure on it, Lillissays the outlay for its integration/customer service project iscertainly of the order of tens of millions of dollars. The tide has turned from call centres beingviewed as vehicles for slashing labour costs, to one where they arebecoming the focal point for driving value into each customercontact. At Suncorp Metway, for instance, the situation facing Brooks 18months ago was one where he needed to pull efficiencies from a callcentre where the costs of operation were far too expensive. Now, he says, the name of the game is buildingcustomer loyalty. Our growth strategy is increasing the number ofproducts per household, he says, not increasing the customer base. Andalthough 330,000 calls per month come through the centre, against750,000 through an interactive voice response system, he talks of thefact that most people want to talk to people. Sophisticated customer contact-centre projectsare still the exception rather than the rule. Gartner Group says that,in 1998, less than 2 per cent of enterprises had linked their Internetsite responses with customer-call processing, through either e-mail orvoice and CTI-supported fax-back. But the rise of electronic commercewill galvanise corporate resolve into massive expenditures in the near future. What's happened with ERP to date is verysimplistic by comparison, Langby says. Nevertheless, he maintains thatthe money will be spent, complexities or not. Call centres will growup. As they become more complex and as third-party operators get moreexperienced, those third-party outsourcers will be able to offer somevery good-looking arrangements.Sydney Morning Herald IT SECTION 29/02/00-- Stuart TremainDigital Imaging DivisionThe Ad-Libitum Group48 Victoria StreetNorth Sydney 2060 AustraliaPhone: +612 9959 5633 Fax: +612 9929 4146email: stuartt@adlib.com.auhttp://www.adlib.com.au-------------------------------------------------------------Brought to you by CommuniGate Pro - The Buzz Word Compliant Messaging Server.To end your Mail problems go to .This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list .To unsubscribe, E-mail to: To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to  Associated Messages, from the most recent to the oldest:

Re: [OT] Industry news from Australia (Kimberly D Ingram 2000) Re: [OT] Industry news from Australia (Glenn Busbin 2000) Re: [OT] Industry news from Australia (Kenneth Grome 2000) Re: [OT] Industry news from Australia (Marty Schmid 2000) [OT] Industry news from Australia (Stuart Tremain 2000)

A very interesting article about Web Site intergration with telephony call centres.Has anyone had any experience in this area?IN the next two to three years, Australia's call-centre industry will beturned on its head as businesses scramble to transform their telephonyfront ends into customer information fighting machines. The name of the game - to capture and keepcustomers and drag maximum dollars out of them - is being rushed alongby a strengthening tide of electronic commerce that demands linkagesbetween corporate Web sites, sales teams, IT infrastructure andcall-centre operations. A battery of customer-relationship managementtechnologies will be required to shepherd the market - estimated to beworth $6.5 billion in terms of recurring operating costs,and in excess of $230 million in annual revenues - into the 21stcentury. Computer telephony integration (CTI) systems,voice-recognition programs and systems that transfer Web customers tocall-centre agents at the click of an icon, are just a few of theexpensive whizz-bang items destined to have chief financial officerswriggling in their hair shirts by the end of this year. In Australia, massive customer-relationshipmanagement projects are already under way, concentrated in thetelecommunications, banking and finance, insurance and utilitiessectors. And the stakes are high. According to theresearch company Datamonitor, $US1.6 billion ($2.49 billion) ofe-commerce business-to-consumer transactions were abandoned by Webshoppers in 1998 due to the lack of integrated customer service. Merv Langby, senior analyst, professionalservices with IDC Australia, says revenues from the sale ofcustomer-relationship management (CRM) software alone will rocket from$36 million in 1998, to $220 million in 2003. When the cost of management and integrationservices is thrown in, the corporate bill will stack up considerablyhigher. In a recent IDC survey, 65 per cent of respondents said CRMwould be their first or second most important investment over the next12 months. It's going to be beautiful chaos, Langby chuckles. It'sgoing to be a motza for theservices people. But the big end of town does not seem fazed bythe impending expense. In some respects, they don't care, Langby says,explaining that in the brave new world of e-business,the advantages of being first in, best dressed outweigh the initialset-up costs. The organisation best armed to claim the largest slice ofthe territory will win. Spurred on by the deregulation of the domesticutilities market slated for January 1 next year, EnergyAustralia is oneplayer going in hard for its piece of the CRM action, recentlysigning a multi-million-dollar deal with Rockwell Electronic Commerceand Ericsson Australia for the supply of an integrated call-managementsystem. Geoff Lillis runs EnergyAustralia's customerservice subsidiary, which includes a 200-seat call centre fielding 2.5million calls each year. We are investing heavily in technologyto support it and continue to make productivity gains, he says. By theend of April, he hopes CTI and skills-based routing will be completed. The next step will be to route Web inquiriesdirectly to its call centre. Lillis expects the base technology for thisdevelopment will be in place by the middle of the year. At the moment,Web and e-mail inquiries are streamed to specially designatedcall-centre staff. The turnaround time on responding to these customermessages is running at 24 hours. We've seen month-on-month a 200 percent increase in inquiries either direct from our Web site or viae-mail, he says. Suncorp Metway is witnessing dramatic leaps ine-mail and Web inquiries, too. Suncorp's general manager of call-centreoperations, Bill Brooks, says that 12 months ago, less than 1 per cent of inquiries were made over the Net. Today, the rate is running at 20 per cent.Globally, Forrester Research has estimated that the volume of e-mail/Webinquiries will account for well over 80 per cent of customer inquiriesby 2003. Phone contact will be the customer's entry point to anorganisation in only 5 per cent of cases. In 1997, 97 per cent ofbusiness-consumer interaction tookplace over the phone. TeleTech Asia Pacific, a call-centre outsourcingvendor with 1,200 employees in the Asia-Pacific region and a revenuebase of about $100 million, is witnessing a slightly softercurve. TeleTech president Louis Carroll says the electronic wave is yetto crest. Our Web-driven stuff, and I'm pretty confidentwe'd be at the leading edge of this, is in low single-figure percentagesof our total volume. Nevertheless, Carroll is confident that percentagewill grow apace. The rise of the Web, while often hype and sharemarket evaluations get ahead of the reality, is inevitable andunstoppable and at the same time, voice over IP is becoming moreviable, higher quality, more cost effective, he says. This is notscience fiction - this is the near-term future. I expect to see a rapidexpansion literally over the next 12 months. We will be Web-enabling ourmajor customers in the next 12 months to varying degrees. The costs, though, could cause even the sturdiestcorporate customer to rock back on its heels. The managing director ofSydney-based ACA Research, Martin Conboy, sayscall-centre costs already average $65,000 a seat per year, plus $28,000in capital costs. Adding a so-called click to agent facility to acorporate Web site can drive this up by an additional $10,000. To fullyenable a call centre is a very expensive proposition, Carroll says. Itcan be up to $1 million of additional capital on top of all the normalswitchboardsand fit-out and everything else. The question of how an organisation recoups thesecosts and establishes a return on investment is fodder for muchspeculation. If you can find anyone who can answer it,Carroll jokes, I'll employ them immediately. On a more reassuringnote, he asserts that call-centre providers who see the trend as part ofthe future will be eager to price services so that they are notprohibitive for customers. The main reason for the corporate hunger for Weband e-mail response capacities is that they promise to be cheaper. ACAResearch, for instance, shows that phone interactionscost $2.50 to $6.50 each, while Internet transactions could run as lowas 20c to 50c each, but not everyone is convinced. Cisco Systems' contact centre solutions salesmanager Ray Trevisan says many businesses are just not ready to dealwith the liability issues surrounding e-mail responses,and generally low-paid call-centre staff are rarely equipped to dealwith written replies. The cut-price carrot dangling before businessesmay be more than offset by the costs of complexity at the call-centreend. It takes time to compose an e-mail; it takes time andmoney to hire and train staff to deal with e-mail. Trevisan says he recently came across a simplesolution to the dilemma when talking to a New Zealand company that haddecided to prompt customers on its Web site to sendtheir telephone numbers when shooting off their e-mail queries. With noadditional technology investment, the company calls the customer backwith the answer. This primitive but highly personal method sentcustomer satisfaction rates soaring. It did not, of course, deliver theholy grail of reducing call-centre costs, but it prevented an e-mailcost explosion and slashed e-mail response turnaround times. Anothercompelling reason to take up arms in the Internet customer battle is thevolume of additionalbusiness that can be driven through the channel. Conboy says that 90 per cent of companies runningcontact centres also have Web sites, but only 15 per cent have a Website that is interactive. The paradigm of the way that peoplecommunicate with business has shifted. In the old world it was all aboutmass marketing - In the new century, it's all about me.com, Conboysays. The exposure a company gains from being on theInternet is terrific but can be a double-edged sword if consumers getfrustrated, he says. Before, you would probably put up with a few ofthe idiosyncrasies of a particular company. Now, if they don't respond,you simply click away. Every business now is one clickaway from oblivion. Most companies treading the new customercontact-centre path are trying to deal with this fickle businessenvironment with huge data warehousing projects that will transformtheir call centres into knowledge hubs for the entire organisation. Tight integration between CRM platforms,knowledge management software and other business systems will allow - sothe theory goes - call-centre agents to grab, display and add to a customer's history while they're talking to them. Ultimately,the idea is that sales and marketing campaigns will be driven from theinformation derived from these dynamic information storehouses. At the Commonwealth Bank, data warehousingintegration efforts are moving the institution towards a single customerinterface. Peter Abbott, direct banking general manager,says the process is in various stages of evolution. We already have asingle customer view across a wide range of issues, he says. This is also happening at Energy-Australia.Fairly immediately, the [new] customer-care systems will give uscapabilities to do things we must do in meeting domestic deregulationthat we can't cover at the moment, Lillis says. There will be incremental productivity gains andwe expect those gains to be realised over the next 12 months butcertainly the main game is to give us functionality that currentlydoesn't exist. Top of this list for EnergyAustralia is enhanced billingfunctions, and the ability to track customers on an individual basis,viewing and analysing their entire range ofinteractions. Though reluctant to put a figure on it, Lillissays the outlay for its integration/customer service project iscertainly of the order of tens of millions of dollars. The tide has turned from call centres beingviewed as vehicles for slashing labour costs, to one where they arebecoming the focal point for driving value into each customercontact. At Suncorp Metway, for instance, the situation facing Brooks 18months ago was one where he needed to pull efficiencies from a callcentre where the costs of operation were far too expensive. Now, he says, the name of the game is buildingcustomer loyalty. Our growth strategy is increasing the number ofproducts per household, he says, not increasing the customer base. Andalthough 330,000 calls per month come through the centre, against750,000 through an interactive voice response system, he talks of thefact that most people want to talk to people. Sophisticated customer contact-centre projectsare still the exception rather than the rule. Gartner Group says that,in 1998, less than 2 per cent of enterprises had linked their Internetsite responses with customer-call processing, through either e-mail orvoice and CTI-supported fax-back. But the rise of electronic commercewill galvanise corporate resolve into massive expenditures in the near future. What's happened with ERP to date is verysimplistic by comparison, Langby says. Nevertheless, he maintains thatthe money will be spent, complexities or not. Call centres will growup. As they become more complex and as third-party operators get moreexperienced, those third-party outsourcers will be able to offer somevery good-looking arrangements.Sydney Morning Herald IT SECTION 29/02/00-- Stuart TremainDigital Imaging DivisionThe Ad-Libitum Group48 Victoria StreetNorth Sydney 2060 AustraliaPhone: +612 9959 5633 Fax: +612 9929 4146email: stuartt@adlib.com.auhttp://www.adlib.com.au-------------------------------------------------------------Brought to you by CommuniGate Pro - The Buzz Word Compliant Messaging Server.To end your Mail problems go to .This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list .To unsubscribe, E-mail to: To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to  Stuart Tremain

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