Posts Tagged ‘china’

Avaya and NICE end partnership in China? [Updated]

Update: According to both Avaya and NICE Systems representatives, there is no change to the existing global partnership between the two companies. From Avaya: “Avaya has not terminated its partnership with NICE in China or anywhere else in APAC, and both companies continue to cooperate in the contact center space.” From NICE: “Particularly for China region, NICE and Avaya management in China have the mutual commitment of continuous cooperation. The joint success throughout the years and strong relationship will continue to drive this cooperation moving forward.”

I am hearing from a China-based source that Avaya has ended its alliance with NICE Systems in the China (perhaps all of Asia?) market. No official word yet from the press contacts at respective companies. I will keep you updated once I hear back.

Avaya has been successful in the Chinese market, but as in elsewhere it faces stiff competition with behemoth Cisco. Because of the name brand Avaya has won the hearts of many major corporations in China, but in that market it also has to fend off the likes of NEC and Panasonic which have a strong presence in Asia and are more well received by smaller businesses — a growing sector of the Chinese economy.

NICE Systems first opened its APAC office in Hong Kong in 2001 and has since scored some high-profile wins in the region, but mainly in its video products. The (only?) publicized voice/contact center related contract came from Chinese e-commerce site, Alibaba.com, in 2008.

Perhaps that is the reason why Avaya and NICE ended their partnership in the region. It appears NICE is having difficulties making inroads in the call recording and quality management areas of contact centers in China.

Onshoring a trend in Asia too

Remember when offshoring contact centers was all the rage? Well, most of the time the rage turned out to be from callers as customer satisfaction indexes corresponded to the cheaper hourly rate of the agent.

The technology has been around many years to seamlessly (except the heavy foreign accents) establish an offshore contact center, but the way companies were taking that route in droves for the sake of the bottom line sort of made it an abuse of the technology. Companies started losing customers for the reason that their service representatives couldn’t really provide any service, or sometimes had difficulty understanding callers (and vice versa). That period of time was the Dark Ages of Customer Service.

Finally some company executives saw the light and started reversing the offshoring trend which was coined “onshoring.” Big corporations like Dell, HP, Monster.com, and AT&T started relocating their centers in India, the Phillippines, Latin America, and elsewhere, back to the United States. Gone are the days when callers would hear “MaryJo” with a heavy Indian accent handle calls. Onshoring proved to be a good move not only in customer service, but also general goodwill as these companies helped create domestic jobs.

And it turns out that onshoring is a trend in Asia, too — at least for Taiwanese companies like Canon Taiwan and BenQ Corp.:

Canon Taiwan has seen a rise in the level of customer satisfaction since it relocated customer service to Taiwan from Hong Kong in September last year, Su said.

This also helped the Japanese company sell more high-end cameras in Taiwan last year, Su noted.

BenQ Corp., a Taiwanese consumer electronics maker, also saw greater levels of customer satisfaction after relocating their customer service line from China to Taiwan, the report said.

Cultural difference is a major factor that hurts customer satisfaction when a company outsources its service calls from Taiwan to China, said Jerry Peng, the general manager of BenQ’s customer service in Taiwan.

The lesson? In order to service your customers, you want your agents to have similar backgrounds as the callers!

Casualty of an acquisition: ‘Australian Bell Labs’ to be shut down

After a merger or acquisition it’s usually headcount reduction time. The axe cometh now that Avaya has absorbed Nortel. One of the first high-profile casualties — the Avaya Australian R&D staff:

Networking vendor Avaya appears set to shut down its research and development lab in North Ryde, Sydney – remembered affectionately as the Australian arm of Bell Labs.

Multiple sources told iTnews that the majority of R&D staff at the lab were informed that their positions would no longer be available.

After repeated attempts to contact Avaya, the company confirmed that it was “consolidating some of its R&D functions” in Australia as part of a “global realignment”, but refused to divulge how many researchers were laid off.

Hmmm, “global realignment”? My guess is that the realignment is likely to be lopsided with China getting a lot of attention.

Convergys recognized as ‘Best Call Center Technology Provider’ in China

Convergys further cements its global reputation as a contact center leader with this award from the China Call Center and CRM Association:

(Cincinnati and Beijing; January 28, 2010) – Convergys Corporation (NYSE: CVG), a global leader in relationship management, announced today that the China Call Center & CRM Association (CNCCA) has named Convergys the “Best Call Center Technology Provider of 2009 in China.”

Voted on by experts throughout the contact center industry, Convergys received the prestigious award based on its expertise in relationship management and holistic approach to customer solutions, its rich experience implementing global technology innovations, as well as its continued commitment to the development of the Chinese contact center market.

Convergys is a key player in the Chinese financial services industry, where its Edify Voice Interaction Platform powers millions of instances of customer self-service.

“To be recognized by our industry peers with this prestigious award is a great honor,” said Benjamin Hart, Convergys Managing Director of Relationship Technology Management, Asia Pacific.  “Because customer service is directly linked with the benefits and profits of an enterprise, Convergys provides its clients with a 360-degree, well-rounded customer management solution. We construct a complete and integrated solution based on the understanding and analysis of the strategy, needs, and desired goals of our clients, thereby helping them achieve their overall goals of high customer satisfaction and revenue growth.”

The China Call Center & CRM Association’s award ceremony is the industry’s annual event and it has the aim of promoting the concept of customer care in order to improve call center operations, to establish international call center standards, and to drive further growth of the call center industry in China.

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This is significant considering the size of the Chinese market. Who doesn’t want a piece of the action there these days?

Although the press release touts its Edify platform, my question is, What ever happened to its Intervoice acquisition? In 2008 it paid $335 million in cash for the acquisition — hardly pocket change. It already had Edify (bought in 2005), but obviously the company still saw an opportunity with adding another voice platform to its product portfolio. Right now there doesn’t seem to be any plans to consolidate the two voice platforms, either. If the Intervoice acquisition was merely to increase customer base, then there’s the risk of product fragmentation and all the headaches that goes along with it. Convergys is clearly going the opposite way of what Avaya-Nortel decided to do.

Google vs. China is more about cloud vs. premise

The recent brouhaha between Internet behemoth Google and communist China isn’t quite about Google’s “Don’t be evil” corporate motto, even though Google is spinning it that way. According to Google’s analysis of the cyber attacks, they originated from within China and aimed at accessing the Gmail accounts of human rights activists:

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

The cyber attacks are a perfect opportunity to further Google’s reputation as a corporate darling. China is an easy target — after all, who can forget the Tiananmen Massacre, beaten Tibetan monks, and detained Falun Gong followers? But by removing the geopolitical filter in all of this, it’s really about the ongoing debate between the Cloud vs. Premise application paradigms. And Big G has a lot at stake here.

Google has been the poster boy of cloud computing. Its massive data centers and network infrastructure are of mythical and legendary proportions, needed to support all of its cloud applications: search, Gmail, Google Voice, Google Apps, etc. It has maintained that using these cloud-based apps are secure.

In fact, soon after President Obama and his staff moved into the White House, they discovered inadequate hardware and software to do their jobs — even basic email operations. Google was able to provide Gmail as a temporary solution.

And in September 2009, the White House announced a partnership with Google to build Apps.gov to offer cloud-based applications to federal agencies:

This dedicated cloud will feature the regular Google Apps suite, which includes Gmail, Docs, Talk and a number of other productivity and collaboration products. The applications suite is delivered as an alternative to traditional offerings from Microsoft and IBM, the big players in business software of this kind, and should provide significant cost savings upfront but also because there is no need for additional infrastructure.

At the center of the cloud vs. premise debate has been security. Obviously with hardware and software off-premise, a company has less control over the security aspects. The success (albeit limited) of the cyber attacks on Google further underscores the skepticism of cloud computing opponents.

Take note when you are choosing a cloud or premised based IVR platform. You have just as much at stake as Google.