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 "Call centre leads to 500 new jobs" on the BBC. Amidst all the gloom (and persistent stories of offshoring), comes the news that an Indian telecommunications firm, Tech Mahindra, is opening a 500 seat call centre in the North East of England. Very good news for that part of England, as that is the region where the failed bank Northern Rock was located and so there are good contact centre staff to be had there. It's also an illustration that offshoring was only ever sensible when there was an effective labour arbitrage to make it worth while. I suspect also that it supports the views of Sramana Mitra and her controversial article "The Coming Death Of Indian Outsourcing" in Forbes (covered on this blog at: "Indian Outsourcing, is it in decline? "). In some ways a decline in outsourcing is probably a good thing for Indians as it means that the country is getting richer and adding more value than just competing on cost.

Another story I liked was in Finextra and was "Bank of Montreal plans move to green call centre". In its own quiet way it is a useful corrective to the popular/media view that all banks are in meltdown. I liked Bank of Montreal when I worked with them (as I also liked Scotiabank) and it's good to see that they're both being green and managing to keep their contact centre going.