Latest opinions that Alex Noble has shared on Finextra

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Alex Noble

Account Director

McAfee

Member since

10 Jan 2008

Location

London

View Alex Noble's full profile

Alex's opinions

Finding good news in contact centres

I know it's boring if I begin every post with a regret that I haven't had much time to blog, but it's true and it's why the posting frequency has dropped so much. The news these past few weeks has been particularly gloomy, so I thought I'd look for something more cheery than most of the economic reporting. The first story that caught my eye was &...

08 December 2008 /retail

Abbey- did an IVR survey lock out a customer's account?

This blog sometimes flirts with the idea of news, rather than just comment, and I couldn't resist this story. I saw it today in the Scotsman (though it's also more detail here in the Daily Mail). In brief a Mr. George Bates, a 23 year old Abbey National customer, phoned his bank to arrange an overdraft. He claims to have found that the operator...

30 October 2008 /retail

Are call centres so bad they hinder business?

I was struck today by an advertisement for Swiftcover.com that I saw from the train. I know customers often don't like call centres (especially offshore ones), but this advertisement seemed to be targeted at those allergic to the whole idea of talking. Now Swiftcover.com is part of Axa, so this is not an organization without call centre expertise....

22 October 2008 /retail

Despite the crunch, still call centre growth at Barclays

An interesting story on Finextra that Barclays are to create over 200 new call centre jobs in Liverpool. A lot of reasons why this is interesting. One is that with the credit crunch it's good to see that the world hasn't ended and that banks are still going about (some) of their usual business. The other aspect that I thought interesting is that...

14 October 2008 /retail

Barclays, silent calling and we've been here before...

So Barclays, or at least Barclaycard, have just been fined the maximum Ofcom (the UK communications regulator) can manage for making silent outbound calls. The story is well covered here on Finextra. What is perhaps more surprising is that the maximum fine is £50,000 and that even in a credit crunch this is not going to inconvenience Barclays hu...

27 September 2008 /retail

CRM, a way of banks gaining business in a recession?

I'm always suspicious of vendor surveys but this survey from SAP, reported on Finextra, rather caught my eye. It's entitled "European and Middle Eastern banks look to invest in CRM" and focuses on how banks are focusing on CRM to differentiate themselves from the competition. To a certain extent this is obvious. It's hard to compete on ...

05 September 2008 /retail

Channel in Financial Services

One blog I've been reading lately is Dr. Catriona Wallace's blog (Your Call) that covers the Asia-Pacific contact centre market. She had a good post on 24th June looking at the consumer use of channels in Australian and New Zealand banking. Her research suggests that at least for Australia and New Zealand: "... there are distinct differences...

02 July 2008 /retail

HSBC creates 250 UK call centre jobs as offshore declines

After a week off sick there's been a lot to blog on. I was interested in the Finextra story "HSBC creates 250 call centre jobs". The interesting thing for me is that these are onshore jobs. HSBC has always had onshore operations but has also been one of the firms that has pushed call centre jobs to India. The onshore operations have ten...

25 June 2008 /retail

Aviva, offshore and the threat of the web comparators

The decision of Aviva (Norwich Union) to cut 1,800 jobs is a story making most of the national press and Finextra this morning. This is on top of the restructuring announced in 2006, which would shed 4,000 UK jobs. Of these, 1,000 were call centre workers whose roles would be replaced by offshore call centres. Interestingly, this time it is not...

09 June 2008 /retail

Benchmarking call centres, CRM and Self-Service

One report that's of interest to managers of customer facing operations is the annual Merchants/ Dimension Data contact centre benchmarking report. This year's has just been released for download (link here) and the published version will be available at the end of June. There are two big points of interest to me. The first is that now 31% of a...