AirAsia to scale back contact centres

Aerospace business Pratt & Whitney Canada is expanding its Asian customer service capabilities from its operational hub in Singapore.

P&WC is growing its service team to enhance its customer service capabilities in the region with staff located in the same time zone as its customers. The Singapore operation includes 15 new team members, including customer managers and engineers, CFirst event managers providing front-line support, and accessories specialists who provide support on the full complement of P&WC engines in the region.

"The Asia Pacific region is of growing importance as our customer base continues to expand," said P&WC's Raffaele Virgili. "Serving customers in this region in a timely and efficient manner is a priority for us and we will continue to build critical mass in our capabilities to meet the growing demand."

Stellar, a leading contact centre and business process outsourcing provider, today announced they have been awarded the contact centre services contract with TransLink with work commencing July 1st 2012.

Acting TranLink CEO Matt Longland said "I'm pleased to welcome Stellar to the TransLink network as we continue to enhance our customer service response for up to 1.5 million calls a year".

"Stellar are specialists in providing contact centres for major brands in Australia and globally, with extensive experience across a wide range of industries including utilities, telecommunications, finance and travel information services. I believe they will be a great information channel for TransLink customers".

Stellar will manage varying call and transaction types including journey planner enquiries, customer feedback and complaints, 'go card' enquiries and transactions, on the 13 12 30 customer contact number.

Melissa Hamilton, Stellar CEO (Asia Pacific) recently said "We're thrilled to have been awarded this opportunity with TransLink. We have a comprehensive understanding of the transport industry in Australia and we look forward to building a strong relationship based on service excellence and innovation".

Ameyo a leading contact center solution enables Itronics Info Solutions, Bangalore to easily expand their business operations by adding another service location. The solution supported the BPO with a robust technology platform while providing flexibility of business models (both SaaS as well as premise). With Ameyo as the contact center technology, Itronics has doubled the size of their business.

Talking about the association with Ameyo and its benefits, Mustaque, Director, Itronics Info Solutions, says, "Ameyo has been powering our call center operations for more than three years now. The solution delivered the ROI within a few weeks of its deployment. It performs well, without any glitches and is recommended for critical processes as it is fully capable of delivering even in high demanding international dialing scenarios. With a trusted name like Ameyo handling our outbound campaigns, we have now extended our business operations."

Adding further, Girisha R, Sales Manager at Drishti-Soft says, "Ameyo has been at the core of Itronics' BPO processes and has delivered consistently. Besides enabling more efficient dialing and better customer connect ratios, Ameyo's quality monitoring and comprehensive reporting tools significantly enhanced the end business productivity."

Ameyo supports hosted, premise-based as well as hybrid deployment flexibilities. It is built on Service Oriented (SOA) and Model Driven Architecture (MDA) that enable easy scalability and extensibility. It gives you the flexibility to choose a premise-based set up, a hosted over the cloud offering or a hybrid deployment with some components in cloud and some on-premise. It provides powerful development tools that help build complex features and innovative business applications at a fraction of time and cost as compared to legacy systems.

"Market demand was strong and we executed well during the fourth quarter, a combination that provided a strong finish to a year with record revenues," said Interactive Intelligence founder and CEO, Dr. Donald Brown. "In 2011, we firmly established Interactive Intelligence as a vendor-of-choice at the high end of the contact centre market. We continue to consistently grow faster than the overall market with our on-premise solutions and are emerging as a leader with our cloud-based offering."

"We show ever-increasing momentum among customer cloud deployments, which is the highest growth segment of our market. In 2012, we plan to capitalize on this momentum and step up investments to further enhance our brand recognition, extend our product capabilities and gain additional market share".

"Our order mix is expected to continue shifting toward the cloud, which combined with strategic investments in sales, marketing and development is expected to reduce our reported profitability from a near-term perspective. However, we're confident in the long-term viability of our business model, and our ability to generate shareholder value. We're addressing a multi-billion dollar market opportunity, and we're taking focused action to grow the business for long-term financial success driven by increasing recurring revenue," concluded Brown.

Jabra ANZ has announced a comprehensive education and sales program that will benefit up to 300 partners across the region.

The Jabra WIN Partner Program will allow access to online training modules via the new Ecademy and offer lead generation opportunities and tools through the new PartnerNet portal, as well as give details on product roadmaps, pre-launch announcements and product demonstrations.

With Jabra's leading global position in the hands-free communications industry and the projected growth in Unified Communications (UC), Jabra is looking to offer valued local partners greater support in 2012.

According to Fulvio Toniotti, Managing Director - Jabra ANZ, the WIN Partner Program is designed to focus on the customer throughout the entire buying process to give them a superior experience with Jabra partners.

"Jabra is very proud to mark the beginning of 2012 with the launch of our WIN Partner Program, demonstrating our strong and ongoing commitment to our channel partners. We’ve developed this program to ensure that we continue to deliver real business benefits to our resellers, integrators and influencers," he said.

"With this Program, we wanted to make it easy for our customers to choose the right headset partners by segmenting our partners into categories as well as proving extra support to those partners who have expertise in the rapidly growing areas of UC and Contact Centre solutions," he added.

In addition to account management support, product demonstrations and sales and marketing tools, the new e-learning portal features modules such as sales-specialist certification for UC and Contact Centers. Benefits are based on a partner’s level of commitment to Jabra, with Gold being the highest level. Gold partners receive exclusive insights into new products, gain access to partner seminars and are offered co-branding opportunities.

The WIN Partner Program is consistent with the company’s philosophy of ‘partnering for success', having been developed in close collaboration with Jabra’s global partners and based on their insight into the needs and challenges of today's headset customers.