Snags in Telstra revamp

Telstra will suffer more delays to its multi-billion-dollar technology transformation, this time with its enterprise and government customers, states Australian IT.

The telco was due to start the migration of its customers to its new CRM system (based on Oracle's Siebel software) by mid-year, but sources now say that will not begin until 2011.

The transformation project's costs have blown out by more than $2 billion because of missed deadlines and problems that plagued last year's migration of retail and business customers to the new system.

A total of 610 contact centre jobs are to be created by a Teleperformance centre in Newry, County Down, says BBC News.

The announcement was made by enterprise minister Arlene Foster during a visit to Newry, in which she said positions will range from customer service advisor level to operations management and that new jobs will bring total employment at the Newry site to 1 060 by 2011.

Teleperformance contact centres handle e-mail, Web, telephone and postal enquiries and the expansion has been supported by Invest Northern Ireland, which gave more than £3 million (R42 million) towards the investment.

Dimension Data has opened participation for its 11th annual benchmarking survey of contact centres around the globe, says IT Wire.

Martin Dove, Dimension Data's MD of customer interactive solutions, says: "Organisations that participate in the 2009 study will be able to easily benchmark the performance of their operations in a world of intense competition and tough targets”.

The 2009 report is expected to summarise responses from more than 500 contact centres in 36 countries across five continents and submissions will be accepted until 31 March this year.