Prisoners are to operate telephones for $35 a week at a call centre inside a Sydney jail.

About 30 female inmates will handle inquiries for government agencies within the next month before pitching for private sector campaigns in the future, according to The Daily Telegraph. Prisoners at the medium-security Dillwynia Correctional Centre have already begun training.

The inmates will soon begin marketing CSI products, such as recycled ink cartridges and refurbished furniture, to schools and businesses. They are then expected to take calls for government agencies, such as licence renewal inquiries normally handled by the Roads and Traffic Authority. The initiative has generated a fierce union response, warning the local industry would be damaged if cheap inmate labour was widely used.

Bisa berbahasa Inggeris? Bahasa Indonesia? Tagalog?
by Citrix Online

The IDC reports that “Web users are up to four times more likely to purchase from a site that communicates in the customer's language.” If you don’t provide international prospects and customers with multilingual information and support, your success in making headway abroad will be greatly challenged. Here’s another astonishing statistic: According to a recent WorldLingo survey, “Ninety-one percent of Fortune 500 and Forbes International 800 companies cannot respond correctly to a foreign-language email.” That 91 percent represents lost opportunities, failed business relationships and untold lost revenue.

Forging successful global business relationships is not just about selling your wares in a foreign land. What’s more, it’s a terribly outdated stereotype to assume that individuals in other countries will be able to communicate with you in English. That may occasionally be the case with B2B interactions (although one should never assume that it will be), but in B2C exchanges, it can be a dangerous assumption, costing your organization millions.

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 TelstraClear to open new call centre

Telstra’s NZ subsidiary TelstraClear is investing millions of dollars constructing a purpose-built 150-seat call centre in the coastal town of Paraparaumu to handle calls from its HomePlan customers.

NZ’s second largest telco already employs 64 call centre staff in nearby Wellington who work out of its office in the central city and from space leased from Unisys in Paraparaumu. They will move to the new call centre in Kapiti Commercial Park on Ihakara St later this year, according to the Dominion Post newspaper.

Head of consumer sales Steve Jackson told reporters that TelstraClear expects to hire about another 60 call centre staff by June next year, taking its staff numbers in Paraparaumu up to about 120. Jackson said TelstraClear opted to support HomePlan customers from Kapiti because of the good "talent pool" and because it is one of New Zealand's "fastest growing areas".

Bank of Queensland has extended and expanded its 10-year BPO and IT outsourcing agreement with EDS.

Bank of Queensland says it has extended the outsourcing agreement by two years due to the success of the contract to date. The two-year extension is worth an additional $140 million in revenue to EDS on top of the original $480 million agreed when the contract was signed in March 2002. The contract will now run until 2014.

Bank of Queensland Managing Director David Liddy said the two-year extension would continue the Bank's annual savings and benefits from the outsource agreement, which are estimated to achieve $100 million in prospective cost savings over the original 10-year contract. "In fact, we expect the annual benefits to exceed our original expectations by the end of the current contract," Mr. Liddy said. Under the agreement signed in 2002, the fulfillment of customer and sales service requests are managed by EDS across consumer and business banking from multiple channels.

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