Convergys Corp., an internationally recognized supplier of outsource customer support & customer care, intends to develop its business in the Indian domestic call center market. The company’s authorities explain such a decision by the current dollar position: “Growing [Indian] business is a natural hedge to tackle the volatile currency. We have done that in Canada and are doing it now in India,” commented Convergys CEO David F. Dougherty.

75% of Convergys’ revenue comes from banking, telecom and financial services, and the company plans to concentrate on the same sectors in India. Nowadays about 12,500 of Convergys’ agents are located in India.

IBM has announced the opening of its regional inbound call center in Cyberjaya – the future Silicon Valley of Malaysia. The new center is expected to support over 12,000 IBM-system users in the region, let alone customers from the Asia Pacific, the US, Europe and Africa. Now IBM already has 11 Malaysia-based contact centers, and the latest one is characterized by multilingual staff, serving customers in nine languages, including Thai, Japanese, Korean and Tagalog.

In his interview IBM Malaysia managing director Ou Shian Waei explains why such a center is indispensable: “The center highlights Malaysia’s role as an important location in delivering total customer satisfaction.”

Sutherland Global Services, a US provider of outsource customer support & customer care, is going to increase its Philippines staff up to 10,000 agents. Over 5,000 new agents will be hired within this year to expand Sutherland’s market share in the Philippines that constitute about 15% of the company’s overall business, 80% of which address the US and Canadian customers. “We intend to further expand our footprint here”, has recently commented Sutherland’s Craig Bauwens. “Despite reports that a number of BPO companies in the Philippines are closing down due to the US recession, we believe the slowdown is actually helping our business.”

International provider of user-friendly software for inbound call centers Envision Telephony, Inc. announced that its Chief Evangelist Connie Smith had managed to win the 2008 International Association of Reservation Executives Spirit Award. Basically this award is given to those who displayed outstanding skills and talents while working as a part of an IARE Committee. Connie Smith is happy to be one of the IARE Award recipients: “The ongoing commitment to networking and sharing of industry best practices has established IARE as a leader in advancing operational excellence for businesses involved in taking consumer reservations and I’m privileged to play an active role in the organization’s past and continued success.”

Christine Knott, managing director of Beyond The Box who provides quality training and promotional services has recently defined main factors of good customer support. Communicating with clients and supplying order taking services by phone may become difficult, that is why Christine recommends to stay focused and to master emotions. To further develop the art of listening she advises to avoid preempting and interrupting customers. A call center agent should ask questions to get more information, as well as to sum it up at the end of the conversation. It is also useful to have a notepad to make some quick references while talking to the customer.

CallMiner specializing in speech analytics solutions has introduced the latest version of its CallMiner Eureka which will allow call center service providers to optimize their working process and to ensure better customer support. Concentrated on supporting large scale implementations for enterprise customers, CallMiner Eureka ensures a higher level of functionality. As CallMiner’s CTO and co-founder Jeff Gallino commented: “With the latest version of Eureka, we are able to mine thousands of hours of conversations per day across multiple recording vendors and provide a single view of business intelligence to our customers. Enterprise customers are naturally excited about scale because it positively impacts their speed to intelligence.”

Allianz China Life (AZCL), which is known for providing competitive insurance services and is conjointly invested by CITIC Trust Company Ltd. of China and Allianz AG – the German financial service conglomerate, will develop its distribution channels in China and optimize its customer service. Thus, the insurer has introduced its first hotline to supply first-rate call center services to AZCL’s clients. In his interview George Tan, Head of Group Business, commented: “We want to provide our group customers not just products, but also with one-stop solutions including flexible choices and multi-services based on the various customer needs and requirements.”

Malaysia Airlines will add a new option to its reservation services: now the agents of its inbound call center will speak not only English and Malay, but also Mandarin. MAS’ authorities said that the current innovation would allow the company to position itself as five-star value carrier. Thus, Datuk Bernard Francis explained: “We introduced this enhancement in response to the increasing number of Mandarin-speaking customers who patronize our flights.”

Besides Mandarin, within the next three months MAS is planning to add the Tamil language option as well, in order to overcome language barrier while communicating with its customers.

Indian provider of outsource customer support & customer care Firstsource is going to expand its staff in Irish centers. Thus, the company will create hundreds of new workplaces which are meant to develop Firstsource’s operations in Northern Ireland.

The company already has 500 employees in its Londonderry offices and mainly addresses such sectors as banking, media, travel, telecom and health care.

According to Northern Ireland Economy Minister Nigel Dodds, Firstsource has great potential as a widely recognized supplier of quality outsource services. “Firstsource is well on its way to creating over 1,000 jobs at its Belfast and Londonderry centers,” admitted Dodds.

TelcoBridges Inc., that supplies top-notch telecom software and hardware to providers of call center services, has announced that its platform would be used by TI Square in order to develop a voice, MMS-based and 3G video application to Korea Telecom Freetel, a well-known mobile operator. The current application features not only call recording and video messaging, but also voice monitoring capabilities, enabling users to detect what impression their speech made on the interlocutor after the conversation. Gil Soo Lee, President & CEO of TI Square, remarked he was proud to create such a unique service using TelcoBridges technology. “We will also continue to have new video projects along the same lines of this successful deployment,” said Lee.

Garlands Call Centers joined YENE (Young Enterprise North East) in the context of its Touch program focused on the development of new businesses. By joint effort, Garlands trainers will teach 11 year students to successfully start their careers. To believe the company’s authorities, this opportunity will allow Garlands Call Center trainers to develop their communication and business skills even more. Besides, by taking part in the program, Garlands gets other benefits: “Forging links with our local community, particularly with schools where many of our future employees will come from, is extremely important to Garlands as a major employer in the North East,” said Operational Training Manager Andrew Drummond.

Talisma Corporation has just launched Talisma Click to Call which ensures the data escalation from the Internet to phone. The company specializing in Customer Interaction Management software is proud of its latest innovation: the unique Talisma Click to Call is expected to improve both customer experience and the efficiency of inbound call center services. Thus, Brad Birnbaum, CTO, Talisma Corporation admitted: “We are pleased to add Talisma Click to Call to our Customer Interaction Management product line. It will enable our customers to offer a new interaction channel that leverages both their website and existing contact center infrastructure and at the same time increase customer satisfaction.”

eGain, that specializes in multichannel customer service and data processing software, was selected by SSE (Scottish and Southern Energy Plc) to improve customer services of the company. eGain SelfService will allow SSE to support its over-growing client base, as well as to decrease support costs.

As Technical Architect at SSE John Evans admitted in his interview, SSE has known “a steady but relentless growth in email volume; from 2,500 four years ago to 42,000 today.” According to Evans, SSE intended to optimize its customer support by introducing a web self service technology. “With the eGain Mail solution a proven success, it made sense to work with eGain to implement the next stage of our customer service strategy,” believe Evans.

Transversal solutions, a supplier of eService software, has recently announced its partnership with Wipro Technologies. The current alliance is focused on the development of high-end web self-service solutions for such sectors as banking and call center services.

The agreement with Wipro Technologies, which can boast a client base of more than 180 Fortune 1000/Global 500 companies and over 72,000 IT agents, will allow Transversal to develop its positions at the global market. “This strategic partnership will therefore speed global adoption of web self-service in financial services by combining our advanced technology with Wipro’s proven innovation and track record,” believe Dee Roche, Director of Marketing of Transversal.

ADTRAN, Inc., known as a provider of IP-based networking solutions, has introduced a new line of IP phones. Thus, the ADTRAN IP 700 Series of business-class telephones features a unique design and a wide range of VoIP applications, such as Power over Ethernet, Telephony solutions and IP Business Gateways. Besides, the newly-launched phones are SIP-based and come in two models: the IP 712 12-button phone and the IP 706 six-button phone. Both models have dual switched Ethernet ports which allow to get access to voice and PC data simultaneously.

Experts admit that the ADTRAN innovation will be especially useful for agents of inbound call centers who will be able to improve communication with customers.