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Alex Noble

Alex Noble Account Director at McAfee

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 ...

/retail

Alex Noble

Alex Noble Account Director at McAfee

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...

/retail

Alex Noble

Alex Noble Account Director at McAfee

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...

/retail

Alex Noble

Alex Noble Account Director at McAfee

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...

/retail

Alex Noble

Alex Noble Account Director at McAfee

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...

/retail

Alex Noble

Alex Noble Account Director at McAfee

Phone Banking vs Facebook banking

I was very interested to see two good stories on Finextra today. The first was that around half of Facebook users want to be able to bank through Facebook. The second was that 91% of British adults had concerns about fraud on their phone accessible bank accounts. It seems to me a pretty bizarre set of contradictions. Facebook is a very nice appli...

/security /retail

Alex Noble

Alex Noble Account Director at McAfee

Banks criticised by BBC for automated calls

I'm working in San Diego this week, but over the weekend I was sent an interesting story. The BBC Radio Money Box program has been investigating the use of automated outbound calling by UK banks to chase bad debts. Some consumers claim that this had led to them receiving up to eight calls a day and Privacy International is arguing that this poten...

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Alex Noble

Alex Noble Account Director at McAfee

Software archaeology and financial contact centres

There's an interesting (and brief) post on Grady Booch's IBM blog that got me thinking. Grady Booch, for those unfamiliar with him, is an IBM's Chief Scientist for Software Research but perhaps more importantly developed UML (Unified Modelling Language) and was very influential in the development of Object Orientated programming. I've seen him th...

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Alex Noble

Alex Noble Account Director at McAfee

Further thoughts on calling outbound in the UK.....

I'm back from a week's holiday today and I'm catching up on all the news while I've been away. On article that caught my attention was from the Times on 17th May. The business columnist Sathnam Sanghera had a rather good full page article on outbound call centres. What I found interesting about it was that so much on call centres is written as ...

/retail

Alex Noble

Alex Noble Account Director at McAfee

Lloyds TSB offshores IT, not call centre

An interesting article on Finextra about Lloyds TSB offshoring 450 IT jobs. What it makes it interesting is that Lloyds TSB has opted not just to keep its contact centres onshore, but create new contact centre jobs onshore. I've covered this in past posts like "Onshore still growing - Lloyds TSB" but it makes clear that if customer ser...

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