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

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Alex's opinions

Axa to create 600 new UK contact centre jobs

A piece of good news reported on CCF, "AXA to create 600 jobs". I was particularly interested to see that these jobs are onshore in the UK. The blog has looked at Axa contact centres before, at least the Swiftcover bit of the business) in the post "Are call centres so bad they hinder business?", so it's good to see that anoth...

27 May 2009 /retail

FSA determines offshore call centres a risk - finally!

I seem to hear the sound of a stable door being shut, and long after the horse has bolted. The FSA seems finally to have realised that offshore call centres can constitute a risk in financial services. This is not to say all centres, but that offshore centres managed and compliant only to local standards may not protect consumer data that well. In...

08 May 2009 /security /retail

Sallie Mae - Customer service or protectionism?

An interesting story on Finextra that Sallie Mae is looking to bring back onshore around 2,000 jobs. It's a trend that so far in Europe has been primarily associated with customer service. I've covered some other business that have brought work back onshore in previous posts (see "Despite the credit crunch, still call centre growth at Barc...

08 April 2009 /retail

HSBC redundancies and their call centres

It's always sad to see bad news on jobs and HSBC's announcement last week was no exception. The BBC report is that while the bank says that 1,200 jobs are at risk, the unions are talking about up to 3,000 jobs potentially going. The jobs will go at an operation centre in Leamington Spa, (for about 280 positions), London will loose about 150 jobs ...

30 March 2009 /retail

BBC Moneybox on Speech Recognition for banking

I appreciate the BBC Radio's weekly personal finance program 'Moneybox' may not be something that all of my blog readers are aware of, but this week it's been looking at speech recognition and biometrics as a way of authenticating customers. The article on their website is here and the podcast/recording is here. The reason for the interest is t...

09 February 2009 /security /retail

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

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