Sitel Named “Top Call Center and Customer Management Vendor”

Global Services 100 Survey Results are in; For the Sixth Year Sitel is on the Top List

Nashville, Tenn. — August 19, 2010— Sitel, a leading global business process outsourcing (BPO) provider, today announced it was ranked as one of the “Top Call Center and Customer Management Vendors” as well as one of the “Top BPO Vendors” in the sixth annual Global Services 100 survey. According to Global Services magazine, which published the Global Services 100 list, these rankings were based on an analysis of the company’s management excellence, customer service, global reach and breadth of services offered. This is Sitel’s fifth year as a category winner and sixth year included among the Global Services 100 list.

“Sitel is proud to be recognised as one of the top call center and customer management vendors,” said Bert Quintana, president and COO of Sitel. “This award speaks to our dedication to meet every customer’s individual needs to improve delivery of day-to-day operations, drive technology innovation and offer business flexibility.”

“It truly is an honor to be named one of the Top BPO Vendors,” said Amit Shankardass, chief global marketing officer. “Sitel must continue to exceed clients’ expectations by winning their hearts and minds, innovating to add greater value, and delivering service that makes us number one for every client we serve.”

A panel of experts from the Global Services magazine and consulting firm Neo Advisory conducted the survey by using a scientific research methodology based on over 200 data points and several qualitative parameters.

ABOUT SITEL
Sitel is the leading business process outsourcing (BPO) call center provider; as ranked by the Black Book of Outsourcing, a Datamonitor company. Sitel’s 60,000 associates provide clients with predictable and measurable return on their customer investment by building customer loyalty, increasing sales and improving efficiency. Sitel’s customer interaction outsourcing solutions span 140+ domestic, nearshore, and offshore call centers in 26 countries across North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia Pacific. The company is privately held and majority owned by Canadian diversified company, Onex Corporation. For more information, please visit www.sitel.com

About Global Services
Global Services, a media platform by CyberMedia, facilitates the global service delivery for customers and service providers of IT and business-process outsourcing services, and provides cost-effective marketing solutions to the service providers in this industry. A multishore team spanning the U.S.A. and India drives the Global Services brand. The Global Services brand is an integrated media platform that includes the website globalservicesmedia.com and global seminars.

10-seat contact centers emerging in RP

New sectors are coming out, experts say

By Ronnel Domingo

MANILA, Philippines – THE CALL center industry is already making its presence felt in the Philippines, but the best is yet to come, according to Davao-based businesswoman Joji Ilagan-Bian.
The call center industry has been touted as the country’s sunrise industry, and Bian says new facets of the business process outsourcing sector are still emerging, such as the small to medium-sized centers.
“Small- and medium-scale call centers (SMCCs) are flourishing and they can prove to be as strong a support sector as the big operators we are cheering today,” she said.

Bian explains that SMCCs are those that operate with a capacity of 200 seats or less, and preferably at least 10 seats to ensure viability.
“The CICT [Commission on Information and Communication Technology] refer to these as Smites or small- and medium-scale IT enterprises,” Bian says.

“Whatever they may be called, they are becoming a strong presence in the coming years,” she adds. “In fact, they are dispersed in the regions unlike the big call centers, and the average SMCC has 10 seats.”

Bian herself owns the nascent Six Eleven Inc. which has two sites–one in Davao City with 158 seats and another in Eastwood City in Libis, Quezon City with 174 seats.

Six Eleven started in Davao last May 2006, mainly offering outbound sales services such as marketing travel plans.
Business was so promising that the firm opened the second site in Quezon City last August and would start operations on Sept. 28.
“But despite the evident strong potential of SMCCs, they face greater odds compared with the big players,” Bian says. “With less resources, it is hard for us to launch campaigns and promote ourselves to clients because most SMCCs rely on brokers who may turn out to be unreliable.”

For this reason, Bian’s firm joined forces with similarly situated SMCCs and formed the Philippine Call Center Alliance Inc. or PhilCall in October 2006.

So far, PhilCall has 25 members–with an average of 40 seats each–including 999 Inc., Synergia Cybercare Inc., VirCommServe Inc., Right Technicomm Inc., Sysgen Outsource Inc., Tech1 Internet and Farmout Central Intouch Inc.

Bian, who is PhilCall interim president, explains that the association was meant to advance SMCCs interest mainly by curbing the problem of dealing with brokers.

“At this early, PhilCall has been able to undertake initial efforts in representing members when making campaigns,” she says. “This move saves our members from the prospect of not getting paid by clients because of unreliable brokers.”

To strengthen PhilCall and make it more effective, the group has also embarked on a campaign to enlist more members with the goal of being able to represent a total of 10,000 seats.

“Our aim is also to professionalize SMCC operation so that we can establish a good reputation that is based on high standards of services as well as of ethics,” Bian says. “We want to flesh out SMCCs from the underground, so to speak.”

She adds that aside from the current 25 members, there was “a larger number” of SMCCs that have registered with PhilCall for eventual membership.

She says SMCC are spread across the country’s so-called regional IT hubs like the cities of Cebu, Davao, Dagupan, Naga, Baguio, Iloilo and Cagayan de Oro.

A large majority of SMCCs are involved in outbound sales calls, but Bian said opportunities were vast because technical support, data management, accounting, banking transactions and “anything under the sun” could be outsourced.
Moreover, SMCCs do not have to struggle to compete with the big players for clients. “Big clients naturally go for big players, so SMCCs have small clients that are emerging in parallel.”

According to PhilCall’s profile, it also accepts associate members for companies whose business activities support those of the regular members–VoIP and software providers, training and recruitment centers, etc.
“Small and medium home grown contact centers nationwide have come into play serving as conduits for ICT growth in the locality as it creates a ripple effect in the local economy with its increasing demand for technology, infrastructure and manpower,” the profile says.

The Top 5 Customer Service Predictions of 2011

By Brian Jameson – Customer Management IQ

The predictions are in. Top analysts and thought leaders in the CRM and Customer Service space have made their predictions for what’s going to be hot in 2011. Rather than create my own list of (ill fated) predictions, I’ve composed a set of five, shared by a handful of experts. Here they are:

1. The Customer Experience will continue to redefine CRM
   Relatively new in comparison to CRM, Customer Experience gained ground as a cornerstone for companies aiming to provide better customer service in 2010. With products and services becoming more commoditized, companies are turning to the Customer Experience to differentiate offerings and increase profits. CRM as a strategy and a technology platform accounts for the transactional and operational needs of an organization to manage customer interactions, but that alone is not enough to keep customers happy.
   Positive (or negative) experiences are commonplace on consumers’ social media sites, which has placed increased emphasis on developing Customer Experience strategies in addition to CRM strategies. In 2011, companies will map customer touch points, improve customer processes, get sales and marketing more involved with customer service teams, and deploy customer feedback programs to improve customer attraction and retention.
   • In Bruce Temkin’s post on 8 Customer Experience Trends for 2011, he says, “I expect to see more contact centers drop average handle time (AHT) as a core metric and revamp quality measures based on customer feedback.”
   • Paul Greenberg posted his 2011 CRM Forecast – What’s Up Wit’ Dat – Part II and says, “In 2011, not only will the focus of companies move in the direction of improved customer experiences through provision of products, services, tools, and consumable experiences, but the vendors’ messaging will both continue to align toward that end and the products that they provide will reflect that message.”
2. Social CRM will grow up, with merger and acquisition activity heating up
   2010 was the year that Social Media Monitoring, Community Platforms, Social Rankings, and Engagement, became all the rage for Customer Service and Marketing pros. In 2011, Social CRM applications will reach adolescence by bringing enhanced social bells and whistles. Expect to see much more analytics and reporting coming to these tools from the truckloads of data being collected from the social data footprint. It’s likely that you will see more case studies, best practices, and use cases on Social CRM and how it fits into the larger CRM/Customer Service picture. Integration with other systems, like CRM and Agent Desktop software has the potential to give companies a fuller view of customer needs and wants within the same tools that customer service teams use to interact with customers in real time. The bigger Social CRM vendors and maybe some CRM heavyweights will likely acquire some of the smaller SCRM players to gain new functionality and/or portfolios of new customers.
   • Michael Moaz blogged about The Social CRM Market Consolidation Ahead, saying, “It’s likely that 45% of today’s Social CRM vendors will change ownership inside of 36 months. We’re in for some exciting times.”
   • Ray “R” Wang replied to my tweet on Moaz’s post, @river_star, “More like 75% of today’s #scrm vendors will change hands in 36 months. 45% may be too low.”
3. Analytics and Customer Insights set to explode
   As hinted at in the social prediction, there is a ton of data sitting out there on social sites. This data will provide companies will loads of insights into customer behaviour. In 2011, expect more robust analytics and reporting packages for agent desktop software, customer feedback, and social CRM. Key stakeholders are hungry for new data sources to make decisions; companies will feed them by collecting this data, synthesizing it, analyzing, and reporting.
   • In his first post on CRM 2011 – What’s Up Wit’ Dat? Paul Greenberg articulates, “This is the big Kahuna. As is self-evident, there is an EXPLOSION of social data that’s now available via the web for companies to mine.”
   • Bruce Temkin talks about Customer Feedback to garner customer insights in 2011. He says, “Companies will increasingly recognise that they need to integrate a deeper understanding of their customers throughout their company. That’s why Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs represents one of the most popular customer experience efforts.”
4. Integration across channels and platforms
   This is one of the highest requested needs we hear from RiverStar customers. Companies want a single view of the customer, regardless of the channel they are using. The single view of the customer should be able to access and pull data from various systems and be vendor neutral.
   The days of “rip and replace” are dying because more applications are being delivered in the cloud and companies do not want to go through the headache of replacing legacy systems. In 2011, companies are looking to glue it all together to have better insights into customer information and link up processes between systems.
   • Denis Pombriant gave CRM Buyer 2011 his list of Strategic Opportunities and said this concerning integration: “There are now so many applications and application types on the market that we can safely give up any pretense that a single vendor could deliver all of a company’s CRM needs. APIs and cloud computing make integration more important and feasible.”
   • Mark Tamis said in his Customer Insights, Collaboration, and Cloud 2011 post, “… I believe that this year (2011) we will see more integrated platforms that link customer behavior gleaned through cross-channel engagement to transactional data.
5. Cloud, Cloud, and some more Cloud
   One of the biggest economic impacts for customer service and call center teams is to migrate to the cloud or acquire platforms that reside in the cloud. Accessing applications in the cloud drives down upfront acquisition costs and eliminates costly infrastructure modifications and maintenance. Security of cloud application has always been a concern, but look to see more companies adopting the cloud as an equal alternative to premises based software.
   • Denis Pombriant – “After several years of debate about what cloud computing is or is not, customers are in a great position with lots of choices for solutions. It doesn’t matter whether you prefer single tenant or multitenant solutions; the economics of running software in the cloud are so compelling that you can find a vendor that speaks your cloud dialect.
   • Mark Tamis – “The Cloud is slowly turning applications such as CRM into a commodity that is ubiquitously accessible (on-demand through whatever means we choose). The promise of Utility Computing is coming ever nearer…”