La perspective Francais et la performance au service du centre de contacts

Je lis mon blog ce matin et je découvre que le dernier post que j'ai ecrie sur la situtaion en France "Calabrio expanding in France" et mon dernier post en fracais "Pour le weekend - un site tres intéressant" n'étainent pas tres récent. C'est trop long et je suis désolé pour mes lecteurs francais que je n'écris pas en français. Le problème est maintenant que j'ai oublié beaucoup de mon vocabulaire français et maintenant je le trouve très difficile d’écrire en français.

Je a eu une discussion sur le sujet de reporting dans mes posts "Reporting - some thoughts" et "Reporting - Having your cake & eating it". Je voudrais introduire le travail de mon collègue Philippe, qui travaille pour Cisco France. Philippe a écrit une très bonne dissertation "La gestion de la performance au service du centre de contacts" dans l'édition du Ciscomag pour janvier. (Le Ciscomag est le bulletin de Cisco France, et il y a un lien ici).

Il donne beaucoup de détailsparce que les centres de contacts francophones ne sont pas seulement un sujet qui intéressera la France, mais aussi la Belgique, le Canada et l'Afrique du Nord.

Calabrio expanding in France

I'm not a regular reader of CRM Today, but I was interested to see the announcement that Activeo will become a reseller of Calabrio Workforce Management for the French market.

I suspect it's a good move, especially as Activeo will be selling it as part of its Cisco Unified Contact Centre Enterprise offering. I've posted previously on Workforce Management in Europe ("Workforce Management - Part 2 Vendor Selection") and I suspect the Calabrio offering is well timed. Holy-Dis are strong in the French market, but they are strongest for a more general workforce management for branch offices or small contact centre rather than the more specialised high-end contact centre where Cisco Unified Contact Centre Enterprise is usually implemented.

You can get a decent overview of Activeo's approach to Cisco Contact Centre here (mais seulement en Francais!).

Offshoring and mainland Europe

I have to admit that most of my discussion of offshoring has been around the UK and Ireland experience, in posts such as: "Offshore - why I would go for South Africa over India".

Today I saw some research in TelecomPaper, "Spanish call centre staff numbers to fall 4% in 2007" that looked at the impact offshoring to Latin America was having on the Spanish market. This might seem a startling percentage drop for a single year, but there's some good insight on this at TMCnet giving figures from ACE, the Spanish call centre trade association. Part of the reason for the percentage shift is that compared to the UK or Ireland there are not that many call centres in Spain. In 2006, the number of call centers outside of Spain serving the Spanish market rose from 9 to 20, but more than 225 call centers remained in Spain. As TMC comments, and the UK's experience confirms, Latin America might win business initially on price and cost of labour, but they will have to meet quality expectations if they want to keep that business.

Of course, like India for UK companies, the physical distance between Spain and Latin America creates management difficulties. These aren't technology difficulties (an IP network can let you route calls anywhere in the world) but rather relate to the challenge of flying managers out and keeping expats overseas to manage the offshore operations. Interestingly, here the French have a distinct advantage. With much of North Africa having some French, many French companies have located in Morocco. This has the huge advantage of only being a few hours flight from France and in the same timezone. As long ago as 2005, Africa Investor had identified Morocco has having 55 French call centres with 6,500 employees. Today, numbers are harder to come by, but with major companies like France Telecom and SNCF having Moroccan operations and a dedicated annual trade show (SICCAM), the local industry looks fairly robust.

In other parts of Europe language will probably prevent widespread offshoring for voice (even in eastern Europe, German is not that widely spoken, for example), but I think e-mail may be another story. Without the need for a high standard of both accent and fluency, the non-time sensitive aspect of e-mail may lend itself to offshore management, but that is probably another post.

Pour le weekend - un site tres interessant

You'll have spotted that, so far, the blog has been in English.

There's also a bit more spoken in Europe than English and as it's the weeked and I'm working in Paris on Monday, let me point you towards a very good French site. I admit it's not contact centre specific, but I still find it useful so I've added a button to it on the blog. If you need the web link then you can access Cisco diaLog here.

My view of the site?
Je l'aime beaucoup. C'est un site interessant et j'aime le podcast parce que c'est plus interactive. Jerome et Francois discute les actualite high tech avec un grand perspective.

That's probably enough of my French, but it will improve and when it does there may be more.