Australia resists call centre trend

An international survey shows Australian companies are more sensitive about exposing their customers to call centre operators from other cultures than businesses in other markets, reports Australian IT.

The annual survey, conducted by technology services giant, Dimension Data, shows cultural clashes between staff and customers are the biggest issue facing 11.1% of Australian companies using offshore contact centres this year.

"What it comes down to is that people want a cheap service but there is a section of society that doesn't want to see Australian jobs moving offshore and they don't want a reduced customer experience," Dimension Data customer interaction MD, Martin Dove, says.

Businesses could take advantage of the rise in online shopping in the build-up to Christmas by using customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, says Outsourcery.

According to figures from Kelkoo, nearly £9 billion (R111.5 billion) could be spent on Internet shopping in the UK this year, giving businesses across the country a chance to collect e-mail addresses and organise them using CRM solutions.

Online spending is growing rapidly every year as consumers seek cheaper prices than what they can normally find on the high street and half of Christmas shopping is expected to be done on the Internet in 2015, according to a survey for Kelkoo from the Centre for Retail Research.

Spending on CRM and collaboration tools is growing, according to Gartner, but office tools aren't attracting the same revenues, reports eWeek Europe.

Businesses appear to be happy to adopt the so-called software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, especially when it comes to crucial applications such as enterprise resource planning or CRM, but less data-intensive office applications are failing to attract the same levels of spending.

These are the findings of a study by analyst group Gartner, released this week, which also forecasts that revenues from the SaaS market are set to reach $7.5 billion in 2009, a 17.7% increase from 2008.