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Shripad,

The idea that demographics' behaviour will change their future behaviour is a very good point. I would certainly agree that channel use will be very different in the near future and ten years out is very difficult to predict. 

Where I would be more cautious is the idea that generation Y will be the dominant market. By assets for example, current projections suggest the single wealthiest demographic may well be women over 50. That might require a very different channel strategy than generation Y.

The other suggestion I would have is that much of the discussion around generation Y is base on a US (or English speaking) look at generation Y. I would be very surprised if generation Y in the Nordics and Southern Europe approached channel in the same way, though I would agree that they will approach channel very differently from their parents.

Hi Steve,

I think that's a really intesting example and thank you for providing it. To me it highlights two things, firstly the importance of customer experience and secondly that labour cost is not the be all and end all of the contact centre business. A good experience means not only that you're likely to do business with them again (& they've saved on customer acquisition costs) but we're also writing about them and publicising it.

I think labour arbitrage is probably going to decline as a reason for offshore anyway. It's likely to be less atractive in dollar terms as the dollar weakens and India becomes more expensive but it also is now recognised as not addressing the problem in the first place. 

Interested to hear as well that Admiral are using a 'follow the sun' model for the contact centre, previously that's only been an option for the very largest firms.

Best wishes,

Alex 

Although I find the e-mail alerts from Finextra very useful, I find that I'm increasingly using RSS to keep up to date with news stories & blogs. My main access device is by laptop, but I do use a PDA when travelling for e-mail.

I've been also quite impressed with the potential of instant messaging integrated with a community or social network. Facebook has done instant messaging quite well from a user experience & connectivity point of view, but please don't follow their example on data privacy policies!

From feedback, I realise I probably didn't set out the two big problems with this form of outbound clearly enough.

The first problem was reasonably well stated, that multiple calls to an individual may construe harassment.

The second, slightly more subtle point, is that a phone number doesn't necessarily map to an individual. It's quite easy to think of scenario where two parents have children either living at home or using the home address while they are at university. In these circumstances, potentially informing whoever answers the phone that another family member has a credit problem strikes me as a significant breach of privacy.

Perhaps Web 2.0 won't make any money, but I'm sure some will and I suspect this is is just the natural dip after things are overhyped.

Afterall, it's not so long ago that people couldn't see how all the .com companies were going to make money. In many cases they were right but that was because these companies had bad business models, not because you couldn't make money out of a web based business....

I suspect, as with the last round of internet hype, there will be the web 2.0 equivalents of Amazon and Expedia and there will the equivalents of boo.com and many other nameless collapses.

Hi Dean,

I agree completely. It seems crazy to cut a (relatively) small cost around customer service and then incur huge costs around brand damage and lost business.

Best wishes,

Alex

Dean,

Thank you, I'm interested to hear of the Santander approach. They have a good reputation for operational efficency.

I think you're right that the contact centre function will always exist. However, I'm not sure whether there will always be a contact centre organisation. I suspect the function may become part of branch (during working hours) or of a larger 'remote customer care' organisation.

Hi Jarvis,

I think you've got some very good points about card fraud and fraud commited with stolen/ cloned cards at point of sale.

The challenge in Europe is that we see fraud migrating to channels without chip and pin, especially overseas transactions and 'card not present' fraud in the telephony and internet channels. At least, that's what the latest statistics from the UK payments body seem to show.

One trend I see in European financial services is biometrics as part of the counter to 'card not present' fraud and as a back up identity validation. Chip and pin doesn't work (as yet) online or in telephone transactions and in these areas biometrics might offer an additional line of defence. I'd would though never suggest biometrics as a sole authentication, as if they are compromised, they are a little difficult to reset!

You might also be interested in the recent experience of Barclays, where their chairman was subjected to identity theft and fraudulant card use. I've got more details on my blog in this article from January; "Security, Call Centres and Fraud" 

Thanks for an interesting article,

Alex