CC Expo 2010

It’s that time of year again and the UK Contact Centre industry is once again in Birmingham at the NEC for Call Centre Expo. This year feels a bit different from previous years (as covered by the blog at: "Contact Centre Expo 2009 - Day Two" and here for 2008), and I think there are signs both of economic recovery and a fundamental shift in the way customer service is provided.

The blog’s view of top trends this year:

• Cloud is real & here to stay – Last year this was an emerging trend. This year the number of cloud based vendors had, if anything, increased. Interestingly, this was both the cloud based contact centre and the CRM vendors. I was particularly impressed by the Salesforce.com stand (and loved the squeezy cloud giveaways!). For me it was interesting to see how far ahead CRM is over voice and that where CRM leads, voice is likely to follow. For the moment there is still seems a customer preference for deployments of voice kit on premises (perhaps driven by some lingering concerns over QoS) whereas the same customer will happily consider cloud based CRM. Among the voice vendors, the most credible seemed to be New Voice Media, with a large stand next to Cisco by the entrance with a host of smaller vendors (such as Virtual-Call-Centre.eu ) further inside the show. The difference between Cloud and Hosted is perhaps worth a separate post, but the trend is clear.

• Where were the traditional vendors? – For me this was one of the big surprises. Cisco had a brilliantly located stand right in front of the entrance. Genesys also had a good, well designed stand further in with some excellent hard copies of white papers & case studies (though I can't find them on their website). I found Aspect with a smaller stand in a quieter section (& no mention of all the Microsoft advertising they had last year), but where was Avaya/Nortel? There were signs of the odd Avaya partner, but this was a real surprise given that last year the show was plastered with Avaya/ BT partnership advertising. I was also surprised not to see any sign of Mitel, especially as NEC was present (and who are traditionally only a small player in the UK market).

• Overseas destinations have really shifted – Over the last few years nearly every English speaking emerging market has taken a stand and pitched for offshore contact centre business. This year I was pleased to see that only the serious seemed to have stayed the course and Bangladesh were there with an impressive stand for the third year running. BACC (the Bangladesh Association of Call Centre & Outsourcing) has significant support from the Bangladesh government and I was impressed how well they understood that for outsourcing to work they had to provide more than just a proposition based on cheap labour.
More curious (and completely unexpected) was the French Pavilion. I have to admit that France with a 35hr working weak and strong unions has never struck me as a natural destination for outsouring work. Indeed, from my experience of working there, French companies have been very enthusiastic (if discrete) about building offshore contact centers in French speaking North Africa (see my blog post: "Offshoring and mainland Europe" for example). Still, there was a charming chap from Invest in Champagne-Ardenne and he stressed the benefits of Chalons-en-Champagne. things such as rents 25% cheaper than Greater Paris and a high quality working environment. All nice things to be sure, but I’m not sure that these would lead to much business at the UK Contact Centre Expo. I was even less convinced by Team Cote d’Azur, as while it’s a lovely place it’s not somewhere that I think of as low cost. I would agree with them that it is very high tech and multi-lingual, as Sophia Antipolis houses outposts many of the world’s top tech firms and I would agree that they have an existing contact centre base, with the very substantial American Express Travel contact centre operation base there, but I still struggle to see it as a destination for investment. More likely to be successful were the French IT firms on the stand. I was impressed with digitaleo (who offer a rather nice SMS application) and A2iA who already have a reference list of deployments at blue chip UK companies and some very interesting document recognition & processing applications.

• CC Marketing seems to be having a “Life on Mars moment” – A real surprise was that as the economy has improved, some contact centre marketing seems to have regressed to the 1970s or some other pre-feminist “Mad Men” era. The RoCom stand with its pretty nurses was of debatable taste, but could perhaps claim some justification around a marketing message of “heal your contact centre”. The guiltier stands should perhaps remain nameless. I’m not sure the use of hotpants, models in very tight t-shirts or ‘ironic’ marketing messages/ innuendos across the models chests really deserves a link or much recognition. I do find it disappointing that marketers should be so unimaginative in a industry such as contact centre which has so many women in senior business positions.

• Analytics, analytics, analytics – The final trend that I found very interesting was the focus on analytics. Some of this was from familiar vendors such as Nice, who have long done very interesting analysis on the data in voice and video recordings. The less expected was from IBM, who were back at the show sponsoring a series of seminars on analytics. To a certain extent this illustrates the transition IBM has made away from hardware (most contact centre vendors offer an IBM server on Unix or Linux somewhere in their product) and away from the applications like IBM Call Path and IBM Direct Talk (for those old enough) and the more recent IBM Websphere Voice applications. Here was IBM positioning innovative high-end, high value services rather than their traditional approach of pushing product. Equally interesting, but somewhat different, was Autonomy. This is the first time I’ve seen their focus on contact centre and it was impressive. Autonomy has always had enormous strength when it comes to analyzing unstructured data and contact centre looks a very suitable environment for them as contact centre generates structured and unstructured, multi-source, multi-channel data in a way that only the web channel can rival. I was impressed with the very chunky ‘Autonomy Promote’ brochure I was given (a mere 210 or so pages!) and felt that Autonomy could soon be a major challenger to the more traditional voice recoding analytics vendors and workforce management tools.

• Social Media- Definitely one of the hot topics. Genesys had Social Media as a hot topic and did a very good presentation on it, as well as some good case studies and white papers on their stand. Cisco and a number of Cisco partners also had some very good things to say on the subject.

What was also interesting was what was absent. I saw very little of IVR or Speech Self-Service, and comfortably the best of what there was, was the pitch Mark Pritchard from JAMIP. I was very taken with the JAMIP approach to self-service, especially their flexibility around enterprise or cloud based delivery and their very innovative approach to win/win pricing. The pricing in particular struck me as something that made them stand out and was supported by the reference from their work with the NHS (UK National Health Service). Overall, I thought they provided one of the more innovative propositions on display. Another notable absence was that of Eastern European companies. Last year I was impressed by several of them, but this year there seemed to be hardly any.

That’s my take, I’d be delighted to hear what you think or of any trends that I may have missed.

VoiceCon 2009 - Now that the dust has settled, and IBM and Microsoft

So what to make of VoiceCon 2009 Orlando?

There didn't seem to be the major announcements that we got in 2008 (see: "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect ") but in some ways I think we saw events of more significance.

The first thing is that Microsoft are in this business and are in it seriously. Last year's announcements, while significant, suggested that partnering was the key to Microsoft getting into the voice business. This year the revolutionary aspects of Microsoft's arguments were much more explicit. I rather liked their key-note session. It made one or two very key points that as voice moves from a hardware based solution to a software centric solution, it changes dramatically and that this is the logical evolution of VoIP. I also liked the fact that their demo used a Mac running Safari to Microsoft compatibility. I'm not normally a fan of Microsoft, but I felt they did make the more insightful points. I remain dubious about their ability to execute, but then so were the TDM vendors about IP Telephony! The video is worth checking out:



IBM also did a good pitch, around their UC2 solution from Louts. I liked the blue screen of death April Fool's hoax, but otherwise I felt that they were showing an evolution of Lotus Sametime rather than the more radical changes that Microsoft had in their vision.

In short, I think this software-centric approach to voice is the vision of the future. Whether or not it will be delivered by Microsoft is open to debate, but this was a far more visionary view than the alliances of last year.

VoiceCon Orlando 2009 - Day 1 & Day 2

The blog is not at VoiceCon this year (travel restrictions as part of the global downturn), but I'm taking a keen interest at long range. Fortunately for those of us not able to travel, the VoiceCon 2009 site is running a good series of videos of all the key note speakers.

Last year saw some big announcements (covered in my blog post "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect ") but so far these haven't translated into much market change. To be sure Microsoft continues to push with OCS and has a developing Unified Communications story but I have yet to see them get significant traction in Europe. Microsoft and IBM go today, so it will be interesting to see if there are any major announcements from them.

Yesterday it Cisco and Avaya (among others) doing the key note speeches.

Avaya announced the launch of their new solution architecture 'Avaya Aura'. I have to say that at the end of it I was slightly underwhelmed. It seemed good but not as radical as some of their previous SOA type of messaging. There's a very good summary of Avaya Aura on the nojitter.com site from Shelia McGee-Smith.

Cisco's key note was by the CTO, Padmasree Warrior, and focused on the interaction between collaboration, social networks and video. This was illustrated with a (fairly lighthearted) scenario showing how these could be applied to health care. It also showcased real-time translation which is rather gee-whiz stuff, though probably going to be necessary in the future if conversations between different language speakers are to take place.

In short, so far all very interesting, but nothing terribly radical. We'll see if any of that changes with today's presentations. Even if there aren't major changes, it's clear that VoiceCon remains the main event for most of the world's voice industry.

Presence, Agent Availability and the practicalities of Contact Centre

I was very glad that my last post ("BBC Moneybox on Speech Recognition for banking ") was so interesting to so many readers. Thank you for the feedback and comments. It's very good to see so much happening in the speech market and I certainly wasn't aware of all the projects readers mentioned, especially those in Asia/ Pacific.

One of the other areas that has had a lot of interest lately is presence. Traditionally, presence has been a concept for intstant messaging and the contact centre has focused on agent state from the ACD. This distinction is now blurring and the big instant messaging vendors like IBM with Sametime and Microsoft with OCS are getting very interested in presence in the contact centre. It was something we saw at VoiceCon last year (see post: "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect ") and I'm sure will develop further.

Aside from the technology, there are a lot of practical issues around how presence might be manged in a contact centre environment. There is a very good article on CRMxchange by Ross Daniels from the Cisco Contact Centre Business Unit setting some of the practical considerations and how you might look to use presence as practical function, not just a neat technology:

"For many people, "presence" means the little colored icons next to colleagues’ names on the buddy list of their Instant Messaging client. Is someone available? Do they prefer to not be disturbed? This is useful, and many modern business users would be at a loss without IM and its straightforward application of presence technology.
Since presence has proved its worth in facilitating communication between business users, how can it help improve interactions between businesses and customers? One obvious answer is to provide contact center agents with an IM client that allows them to chat with fellow agents or subject matter experts outside the contact center; this gives agents an opportunity to get answers to caller questions that are outside their areas of expertise.
There are a number of potential problems with this approach, however. Who should populate the agents' IM buddy lists? If agents do it, how do they know who the best experts are for answering specialized questions? What if five hundred agents add Bill from Engineering to their buddy lists, and then twelve of them try to IM poor Bill with questions simultaneously?

Consider also the usage challenges facing an agent armed with an IM client and a buddy list. When the agent is on the phone, do they really want to have to scroll through buddy lists to find the right expert to consult with? Presuming they find one or more available experts, how will they enlist their aid? IM them sequentially, or scatter ten IM’s to ten experts and go with whoever answers first? What if the best way to address the caller's problem is to have the expert join the live call? Finally, consider that a number of contact center administrators prefer that their agents don't use IM clients at all, since internal chat can be a distraction.

While it's true that there are ways to mitigate these kinds of issues, it's also true that presence technology can do much more for customer interactions ... if we broaden our thinking...."

You can read the rest of the article on here on CRMxchange, and I do recommend it.

System Integrators write interesting things about contact centre for the downturn!

The title says it all, but I was pleasantly surprised in the past week to see that both Accenture and IBM had written some interesting white papers on contact centre. I'm often deluged by vendor whitepapers but these are usually from the smaller niche product vendors. It's quite nice instead to see something from the big boys.

I was sent the IBM whitepaper via the Call Centres.net website. Call Centres.net is an Australian and APAC focused site, but the content is good and often worth comparing with what we see in the European market. The site is run by Dr. Catriona Wallace, one of APAC's leading authorities on call centres and she has a very good blog that's well worth reading.

What I found interesting about the IBM whitepaper was that it focuses on the customer service process. You can download the whitepaper here , as I thought that a focus on the end to end processes was one of the things that too many contact centres don't worry about. To be sure there's always a focus on the applications, but less often is there a good understanding of how the customer process flows between those applications. This is important, as process is often a greater determinant of customer experience than the capabilities of any application. I appreciate that a system integrator with a portfolio of SOA offerings might be have a vested interest here, but it's still a good study and applicable outside of the sample of Australian contact centres it studied.

The Accenture study looks at the impact of poor customer service. The idea that poor customer service leads to loss of customers and loss of revenue makes sense but has been challenging to prove. Their findings are that,

"...Service again ranked above price as a global driver of customer churn, according to Accenture’s fourth annual study on customer service satisfaction, titled “High Performance in the Age of Customer Centricity.”

The study is based on a survey of more than 4,100 consumers in eight countries across five continents. Through the survey, consumers provided feedback about customer service across the full range of customer service channels, including use of the telephone, e-mail, corporate websites, mail, online chat and on-premise services.

In total, two-thirds (67 percent) of respondents reported moving their business to other companies as a result of poor service in a variety of industry sectors, up from 59 percent of respondents in last year’s survey. Underscoring the sharp increase in consumers switching business providers is an overall erosion of customer loyalty. Half (50 percent) of respondents in this year’s survey reported that they switched providers in multiple industry sectors during the year, taking an average of $4,000 worth of business with them, by their own estimate, each time they took business elsewhere."

That service is more important than price for customer retention should come as no surprise, but it is nice to have experience supported by research.

The challenge is what this means for business. It seems to me that there is a strong case being made here that investing in customer service in the downturn is likely to be more profitable than an across the board cost cutting program. I found it interesting that outsourcing was (at least in the IBM study) only one way of fixing service issues and that approaching outsourcing from a purely cost reduction point of view was likely to fail. Outsourcing to fix process problems (either BPO or BTO) seemed more likely to succeed and the Accenture study provides the evidence for how that might show up on the balance sheet.

A little more on Onstate and contact centre over the web...

I got quite a response to the article on Onstate.

One of the interesting things was a case study of Onstate being used at B4 Consulting. I found it quite interesting, as to me it illustrates the similarities with how organisations have bought Webex for web conferencing and in future they might buy contact centre.

B4 Consulting (an SAP implementation partner) used skype already for internal use and extending it to the support centre was a relatively logical next step. What I thought was very interesting was that the support users want is primarily chat with a voice capability and hence agents with both capabilities. The convergence is a natural one in a Voice over IP (VoIP) environment. Crucially for the call centre instant messaging is all about states (use ready/ user not ready) which is exactly what the call centre has long managed with the agent ready/ not ready state being a critical requirement for voice traffic.

Skype may or may not be the voice platform of the future as there are other options, for instance Yahoo's recent deal with JaJah for the voice element of instant messaging, and IBM's Sametime telephony announcment at VoiceCon present individual users and Enterprises with interesting options.

The one thing that is clear is that voice and instant messaging are going to get much, much closer together in the contact centre.

VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect

I was interested to hear a number of the announcements at Voice Con 2008. I'm not in Orlando this year but a number of friends were at the announcement and I was interested to compare their comments with the press announcements.

The Microsoft and Aspect alliance announced yesterday is on, CCF magazine: "Microsoft Corp. and Aspect Software Inc. have announced a multi-year strategic alliance to help deliver unified communications to contact centres globally".

Of the press coverage, the most positive I've seen was nojitter.com, who described it as "Microsoft's One-two punch" and complimented Aspect on their marketing strategy. More typical was infoworld with "Microsoft buys its way into Call Centres".

In my view is that this is an announcement similar to the Microsoft and Nortel alliance. Anything that two major players do has to be of interest, but new entrants to a market don't mean that they are necessarily breaking new ground. My suspicion is that this is good for Microsoft as it gives them access to the Aspect install base and moderately good for Aspect as it lets them defend their install base with a strong partner. In terms of reaching contact centre functionality further into the enterprise, I'm not sure it delivers as much as Avaya, Cisco, Genesys and Nortel can already offer with the various forms of 'expert advisor'.

More interesting to me were the announcements from IBM. The first was the alliance announcements with ShoreTel, VBrick Systems, NEC and Ericsson. This completes IBM's alliances, as IBM Sametime already integrates with Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and Siemens and Sametime has long looked at Voice over IP capabilities. Compared to Microsoft, this makes IBM are much more open environment for Unified Communications than Microsoft. This was reinforced by the (expected) announcement of Sametime Unified Telephony, as a type of middleware for the Unified Communications telephone environment.

In short, I think Jan Dawson writing on his blog, twinloops , summed it up nicely:

"The IBM keynote was very dry, shorn of the visionary stuff from the Avaya and Microsoft keynotes from yesterday. It focused largely on new features and capabilities IBM is adding to its Sametime portfolio. And if anything, the key message was a slightly resentful, “we’ve been doing all this for 10 years, guys - how about giving us some credit?” The lack of vision stuff was probably helpful in reinforcing the perception that IBM is perhaps the most serious about UC, and just boring enough to pull it all off."

It will be very interesting to Microsoft and IBM once again competing head to head.

Indian Outsourcing, is it in decline?

Following up Monday's post, can I recommend a good article challenging commonly held assumptions. It's by Sramana Mitra and is called the, "The Coming Death Of Indian Outsourcing" and is available either on Forbes or on her blog.

Very similarly to my post on Monday she looks at whether it is sustainable to compete on cost in the longer term. She makes the good point that if India continues to experience wage inflation for skilled labour at current rates, it won't be able to compete on cost and it is debatable if it can compete on value. She writes generally about the Indian IT industry, but I think her points apply equally to the Indian call centre industry. Her point on innovation (or the absence of it in many offshoring propositions) is particularly valid.

My view is that some of the larger Indian companies (Wipro, Tata, etc...) probably will adapt and remain competitive, as will the the wholly owned Indian subsidiaries of multi-nationals like IBM and Accenture. These firms, though, offer a much greater value proposition than just cost reduction.

In contact centres, I suspect there will be a similar trend. Indian wage inflation will push work back to Europe (especially Eastern Europe) and to newer destination like South Africa (see my post from last year "Offshore - why I would go for South Africa over India" and "Offshoring and mainland Europe").

Security, Call Centres and Fraud

Fraud, especially around identity theft, is one of the hot topics in the UK at the moment.

Obviously, the UK government department HM Revenue & Customs losing the data of 25 million people has made it a more commonly discussed topic than it was before. Then this week, anyone in the UK who still didn't think loss of personal data was serious now has the example of Jeremy Clarkson to consider. Clarkson (a television show host & newspaper columnist) was so sure that the impact of lost data was over-exaggerated that he published his bank account number and bank sort code in his weekly national newspaper column, claiming that there was nothing to fear. As is now reported, he did have something to worry about. One of the readers of his column used his details to set up a monthly £500 direct debit from his account, as the charity the British Diabetic association is one of the many organisations that does not require a signature when setting up a direct debit.

All of which is jolly good knockabout fun, but risks obscuring a more interesting and more serious story (and one more relevant to the European Contact Centre blog).

Also this week, in a less reported story, an identity fraudster managed to persuade Barclays call centre to issue a credit card to an existing customer called Marcus Agius. This identity fraudster then used the credit card to withdraw £10,000 pounds from a Barclays branch. The more startling point of this is that Marcus Agius is not any customer of Barclays but is the chairman of the bank and has been on the board since September 2006.

I'm not surprised that a call centre agent didn't recognise the chairman by name (though alarm bells should perhaps have rung when he found at the employer during the application process!), as new or junior staff may not be very interested in executives at that level. The two things that do stand out for me in the Barclays case are that firstly the card could be applied for and sent out to an address that was (at best) open to interception and (at worst) totally different from that used normally by an existing customer of the bank. The second is that security measures like passwords failed completely to verify the applicant.

Now you may assume that in a call centre environment verification will always be a problem when a physical signature can't be presented and you can't see the face of the applicant. This is not the case.

I've written previously about Natural Language and Automated Speech Recognition (for example "Speech market share - the role of non-European languages"), and identity verification by voice is a natural extension of this technology. The problem with passwords is that they verify what you know, not who you are. Should what you know not be only known to you, then that knowledge ceases to become verification as to who you are.

Voice prints, or similar techniques of deriving a unique identifier from a voice, offer a much better way of verifying identity. I've mostly had experience with IBM and Nuance in this field but lately I've been very taken with the approach of VoiceVault. VoiceVault do seem to have taken a purer security approach to the problem of voice verification and I rather like that. There do seem to be significant variations in how each vendor approaches the verification problem and so far (though this is early days), I've been very interested in how the different approaches produce results. All of these potentially work with voice portal technology (though I'm primarily interested in applying them with CVP, the Cisco Voice Portal).

The big advantage of voice portals is that they provide an environment where applications can be combined and hence you can have layers of security. So for example, it's unlikely that speaker verification alone would be adopted, even if it could achieve 99%+ rates of verification. Instead, a combination of password, speaker verification and other measures could be deployed relatively easily in a portal environment to provide layers of security. That way even if one security measure is defeated others are likely still to work.

Would speaker verification alone have been enough to prevent the Barclays situation? I doubt that it would have prevented the situation by itself, but it could have highlighted the anomaly of the situation to the agent, and could have triggered further security checks and processes. In the end good processes will provide the security, what technology can do is enhance them and make it harder for them to be defeated.

Speech Market Share

A few days ago I wrote a post entitled "Technology Firms, Europe and Speech Recognition" that was really rather well received. In it I made the rather obvious point (to me anyway) that if you don't offer speech recognition in local languages, you are going to stuggle to get it adopted.

One thing I should have mentioned (and didn't) was that despite their limited languages both IBM and Microsoft had gained significant market share in overall speech shipments, at least according to Gartner's figures for 2006. The highest growth was from Telisma with over 200% growth. Worldwide IBM was looking at around 50% growth and Microsoft had growth respectably in the teens.

Of course, worldwide is not so useful when no languages is truly worldwide. More relevant for this blog is EMEA, where Gartner see Nuance, Talisma and Locquendo as the big players. Interestingly, EMEA is the only region (out of North America and AP) where IBM was not one of the top three vendors. I think this still proves my original point that language support is critical to getting market share, but perhaps I'm underestimating the power of brand and salesforce.

Offshore - why I would go for South Africa over India

From previous posts you might have concluded that I'm against offshoring.

I'm not.

What I am very against is the offshoring school of thought that is 'your mess for less' or just aims to reduce all service levels to an absolute minimum. To me this misses the point that offshoring provides many opportunities to do far more than reduce cost.

My feeling (and it's only an impression) is that at least for the UK market, India sold itself very successfully on cost. That was a successful strategy to win business, but ignoring service quality (or being too low cost to deliver it) has been bad for keeping the business. A YouGov survey earlier this year found that over half of UK respondents' biggest gripe was dealing with overseas call centres. It wasn't just xenophobia or an objection to offshore, it was that only 4% of respondents reported getting good service.

UK companies have begun to realise that while contact centre operating cost can be cut dramatically by going to India, that cost saving is nothing compared to the news cost to your brand reputation and the cost of increased customer churn. It also can allow your competitors to gain market share at your expense (see Nat West bank's advertisements stressing their UK call centres) and the examples of companies like Powergen which last year closed its Indian operations and brought them back to the UK specifically because of customer service.

By contrast, South Africa (from what I have seen) has approached the market very differently. I was impressed with what I saw at the UK's Call Centre Expo a few weeks ago where the focus was on stressing South Africa's better service levels, native English, shared timezone to the UK and developed infrastructure. The infrastructure is an important point, particularly the IT infrastructure. Large South African firms like Old Mutual, Anglo-American and Telecom SA have all run sizeable IT operations and although skills are not in oversupply most technology skills are available. The local economy is also sufficiently advanced for there to be significant call centres serving the local market. Crucially this means that South Africa can look at providing more than just first line customer support and take on technical support, internal IT support and elements of back-office processes. Cost reduction is a key part of the value proposition to UK organisations (have a look at Cape Province's figures and references) but it is cost in relation to the higher value of the work that can be taken on. Similarly in Gauteng, IBM have grown substantially providing these type of service to European clients and Dimension Data also run substantial operations under the banner of their Merchants subsidiary.

Encouragingly, I don't think South Africa represents a large threat to UK call centre market and may well ending up complimenting it. I suspect we're likely to see processes split between countries with parts of work being handled onshore and parts going to South Africa.

Of course that requires companies to be able to manage data and voice traffic seemlessly across continents, and that's where Cisco has some very good technology. We have a number of customers using technology like our ICM product to deliver virtualised call centres across national borders and this seems to be a trend that is increasing. You can also get a good graphic of ICM in action here. There is a clear trend in multinational companies that if you are going to manage customer service properly, you should do it with all parts of your enterprise, regardless of where they are located and do it well. The capability exists to do it anywhere, but that decision should not be driven by cost alone.

Technology firms, Europe and speech recognition

One of the fascinating things for me is the gap between the US and Europe.

I don't mean hostility, but rather the cultural gap relating to how business is done and what is required. Cultural issues, selling techniques and so on are probably for another post, as are labour laws, but this cultural difference tends to be most apparent in technology.

I've worked with a lot of technologies and in call centre it can be a major problem if it doesn't fit local requirements. Obvious examples are data privacy requirements, out oubound dialling and do not call lists and so on.

Yet what I find bizarre is that one of the most obvious areas (speech recognition technology) is one where there is often very little localisation from major vendors. Microsoft Speech Server is a good case in point - only available in US English. IBM similarly offer Websphere Voice Server in fourteen languages, five of them European . That's better, but most of the European languages are only on the older platform (v4.2 on AIX) and doesn't cover many common European situations (e.g. Belgium, where you need French and Dutch or ideally Flemish). It's no wonder then that Nuance have such a large market share by comparison when they offer 44 languages & dialects, and 24 of them are European. Even more importantly, localisation extends (for example) to three types of German and so cover Swiss and Austrian German as well as the accent of the Federal Republic.

Now I don't wish to suggest that Nuance are masters of this, in my work with them, I've found there are things they could improve, but they have got one simple idea built into their strategy. If you don't do customer service in the local language you haven't a hope of even attempting to solve the softer cultural issues.

Put it another way - would you try to sell to major US firms in any langauge other than US English and expect to be successful?