Industry news

Research commissioned by Oracle, which surveyed 1,500 consumers and 250 contact centre managers across Europe, reveals a huge gap between consumers’ expectations of customer service and the way businesses are equipped to meet them. The findings reveal that ineffective information systems play a central role in the poor levels of customer service received by the European public.

Key findings include:

• Despite almost unanimous acknowledgement of the importance of keeping customers happy, more than half of European consumers do not judge customer service operations to be effective.

• Customers’ principal complaints include enduring long call queues, having to continually repeat their queries to different members of staff, and receiving inconsistent answers.

• More than half of businesses have no plans to introduce a self-service portal despite a clear preference among customers for using the internet to resolve queries.

• Contact centre managers view better quality of information and staff training as the two prime requirements for improving customer service.

• Consumers believe that financial services companies offer the best customer service, and telecommunications companies the worst.

• British consumers are the most critical in Europe of customer service operations, having suffered with more ineffective service than their European counterparts.

Loic le Guisquet, senior vice president, Oracle CRM, EMEA, commented on the findings: “The research show us that the majority of European customer service operations are failing to keep pace with the demands of today’s consumers. Businesses need to go beyond the simple retention of customer information, and start to apply intelligence to the vast amounts of data they hold in order to meet the public’s expectations. Turning information on customer behaviour and their life events into actionable intelligence enables the business to sense and respond to their needs. Systems need to be flexible and draw information from across the business to empower staff in their dealings with customers and their decision making.” The research questioned 1,500 consumers and 250 contact centre managers in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden and Denmark.

The research revealed that the key objectives for European customer service operations are very much focused on keeping the customer happy. Contact centre manages rated the importance to their organisation of a number of operational objectives:

• More than eight out of ten (83%) viewed dealing with customers to their satisfaction as highly important.

• Two thirds (66%) viewed keeping customers for as little time as possible in call queues as highly important.

• Objectives governing operational efficiency (such as the number of calls dealt with or minimising staff numbers) were low on the list of priorities.

However, although the contact centres may have the right focus in serving their customers, the research revealed that they come up very short in delivery.

More than half of European respondents did not judge customer service to be effective – a quarter viewed them as ineffective with a further 29% judging them to be neither effective nor ineffective. The British public was even more critical with four in ten British consumers (40%) rating contact centres as ineffective.

This is not surprising as the research revealed that British respondents are more likely to suffer with ineffective contact centres than their European counterparts.

Customers’ principal complaints are:

• Enduring long call queues (European average – 77%, UK – 88%).

• Having to explain their query anew each time they speak to another representative (European average – 75%, UK – 87%).

• Being passed between too many departments (European average – 55%, UK – 70%).

• Customer service agents not understanding their employer’s business (European average – 43%, UK – 53%).

• Receiving inconsistent answers each time (European average - 43%, UK – 62%).

Of particular concern was that forty-three percent of contact centre respondents maintained that customers never have to repeat queries, which serves to highlight the size of the gap between their aspirations and their actual delivery on customer expectations.

Loic le Guisquet said: “The technology exists to remedy each and every one of these failings. Along with the right business processes and systems, it’s a matter of gathering intelligent insight from across the business and placing it in the hands of customer service staff as and when they need it.

"Providing employees with accurate, relevant and timely information boosts their understanding, decision making and the quality of their responses. And effective call-routing systems can help to reduce queues and get customers quickly through to the right departments.”

When customers were asked what they considered to be the most likely cause of dissatisfactory service, the most popular answer was ineffective customer service staff, identified by 43% of respondents.

Yet responses from the contact centre managers revealed that staff are being let down by inadequate tools, training and processes.

When asked what would most improve levels of service, respondents identified the following measures:

• Almost six out of ten (58%) said providing better quality of information to customer service staff [UK – 70%].

• Over half (52%) said more staff training [UK – 68%].

• Forty-five percent selected improved customer service procedures [UK – 64%].

• Forty-four percent said effective call routing [UK – 56%].

• Thirty-eight percent said empowering staff with more responsibility to make decisions [UK – 44%].

• Thirty-five percent said advising callers ― while they are waiting ― of alternative ways of resolving their queries (for example, email, internet, etc) [UK – 56%].

Given that British consumers were the most critical in Europe of contact centres, it is interesting to note that contact centre managers in the UK were the most likely to acknowledge measures which would improve their level of service.

Loic le Guisquet said: “The findings illustrate the direction businesses should be taking with their customer management strategies. Things have moved on from simply modernising the back office to a stage now where the entire organisation, and the systems supporting it, needs to be connected in their focus on the customer.

"Yet again, we see a demand for getting the right information into the hands of the right people. And with modern systems, it is extremely simple to advise callers on steps they can take to address their queries. Effective service procedures, regular training sessions and quality customer information should run throughout the company.”

The survey revealed that businesses are also failing to capitalise on the internet as an efficient and cost-effective means of serving customers.

European consumers viewed the internet as by far the most popular means of dealing with a business. Just under half of respondents (47%) identified it as their preferred option and 71% placed it in their top two. Email was the second most popular channel with general favourability of 60%.

In comparison, 48% disliked call centres and 49% disliked visiting a local branch. The British were the exception to this, rating a branch visit as second to the internet in their preferred methods of dealing with business.

Despite a clear appetite among consumers for using the internet to resolve queries, more than half of contact centre operations said they had no plans to implement a self-service customer portal.

Loic le Guisquet said: “Businesses are not only missing a trick here, they could find themselves left behind by their competitors. At their most basic, self-service web portals are an extremely effective means of keeping customers happy and at the same time improving the business’s efficiency. However, firms at the forefront are way beyond this now – for instance, providing tools for customers to explore different scenarios and find the best tariff or minimise their carbon footprint. The wave of innovation that’s currently sweeping the web will raise customers’ expectations even higher.”

When asked which industries were getting customer service right and which were getting it wrong, four out of ten (37%) thought financial services companies provided the best level of service, with a similar number (39%) viewing telecommunications companies providing the worst.

Loic le Guisquet said: “With a wealth of options available to them at the click of a mouse, people are unforgiving if companies fail to deliver on their expectations of good service. What’s more, their expectations are the same across industries. Positive experiences in one sector – be that with airlines or retailers – become the benchmark by which they judge others. The success of price comparison websites is an indication that customers are voting with their feet if they’re not happy.”

Q: In an economic downturn, some people will undoubtedly come to view the offshoring industry as meaning, in essence, sourcing former UK jobs more cheaply from overseas to a cheaper labour force. Is this any merit in this view? – it is one being whipped up as an election issue in the US, for example. More importantly, how can this be handled internally within companies who seek to offshore parts of their operations?

A: This is not entirely fair. Offshoring does not necessarily mean that UK jobs are being directly replaced and domestic workers are being made redundant. It is true in some cases, but the IT skills shortage in this country has been well documented by the likes of the British Computer Society, and many UK organisations are using offshore resources to fill in the gaps in their labour requirements. These gaps are appearing around both high-end skills – around high demand areas such as SAP and SOA – and also around legacy programming and management positions, where some senior workers are being lost through retirement.

It is also worth noting that offshoring is not just something that UK companies turn to when the economy starts to bite. The country has enjoyed a strong period of economic growth during the last five years, during which time the leading Indian outsourcers have enjoyed annual growth of 40% or more from their UK operations.

The decision to source skills from an offshore location is something that must be communicated clearly as soon as possible to all interested parties: management, shareholders and most important of all, employees and relevant workers’ unions. Even if the move will not lead to internal redundancies, it is much better for the board to be up-front about the decision and engage directly with the relevant groups. Recent history tells us that news of the decision will leak out soon enough anyway, and this will have a potentially damaging effect on the morale and productivity of the existing internal IT team. Unions and the UK business press will be quick to criticize those companies that try and push offshore programs through under the radar. It is much better to be open and to explain the thinking behind the strategy.

Q: Can the UK still compete on skills, given that IT graduate numbers are apparently falling here, whereas destinations such as India, China, and Vietnam, are producing more and more skilled graduates with good English skills. Skills were a problem at the turn of the millennium in the UK. They are surely a greater problem now...

A: Yes, the UK can remain competitive, but it will have to pick its battles more carefully. For example, there is little point in UK colleges and universities churning out thousands of entry-level legacy programmers in the future as India and China have a big cost advantage in handling the maintenance of ageing systems, and the risk of managing this type of work offshore is relatively low.

Where the UK needs to concentrate is on producing the type of skills that cannot readily be offshored, such as project managers and vertical industry experts – people who really understand the requirements of SAP or Oracle for the UK banking or transport sectors, for example. To illustrate this point, many of the larger Indian services vendors are currently recruiting these skills locally in the UK.

Q: As technology costs fall, the relative cost of technically expert staff rises, is it inevitable that many types of companies will become more widely distributed globally, with smaller strategic teams located in the UK, and technical and production departments increasingly located offshore. Is remote infrastructure management a likely major growth area, for example? What are the risks of this?

A: Yes – most large UK organisations take a global approach to IT sourcing, and it is no longer about simply using a partner in India to handle some small projects.

Large UK organisations want to offset the risk of relying solely on the overheating Indian labour market by tapping into emerging offshore sourcing locations such as China, Latin America and Eastern Europe. The disruptions caused to some of the Indian services vendors last month by faulty undersea communications links in the Mediterranean also highlighted the potential risk of solely relying on India.

Remote infrastructure management is definitely going to be one of the big growth areas in the IT services space in the next five to 10 years. We are going to see a lot of UK companies that have realized cost savings in sourcing applications management and development work from places like India, look to apply the same delivery model to supporting their datacentre infrastructure.

Functions such as remote network and security monitoring and infrastructure helpdesk support can be readily offshored, but one of the challenges that customers will face is to make sure that these remote services are seamlessly integrated into the functions that need to be handled onshore such as onsite break/fix services.

Q: UK executives will gradually become extremely expensive relative to other parts of the organisation. What might the implications be of this? Surely if countries such as India will be able to supply good management as well as technology expertise, then offshore executive power is also likely to be sought from overseas?

A: The CIO at most UK-based multinational companies is already one of the best-traveled executives within the organisation, racking up a huge number of air miles to check on the status of offshore sourced projects and overseas partner relationships.

While we are unlikely to see the location of the UK CIO’s office shift to a permanent base in India or China, we will certainly see end users look to attract some of the best management talent from these locations – particularly as the successful management of global sourcing becomes an increasingly key component to the role of the CIO.

China, Morocco and Hungary are the new locations of choice for offshore centres

Of the 21 new facilities opened by the UK's 20 largest firms, four were set up in China, three in Eastern Europe and three in Morocco.

Outsourcers are now looking away from India – where only two centres were opened - because of the rising cost of the rupee and increasing staff wages.

BT Global Services, EDS, IBM and TCS have all opened sourcing facilities in China in the last 18 months due to lower costs and a growing market for IT outsourcing in the country.

Eastern Europe and Morocco are considered good locations for such centres because of high skill levels and low labour costs.

Insurance group Aviva has decommissioned 100 legacy systems as part of the One Aviva cost-cutting programme

Last year Aviva signed an outsourcing deal with Swiss Re, whereby the reinsurer would administrate three million life and pensions policies on its behalf.

As a result of the agreement, Aviva aims to decommission 330 systems from the 550 originally running; 100 of those 330 systems have been switched off so far.

Anglo-Dutch services company Logica (formerly LogicaCMG) is the latest victim of the credit crunch as it has revealed less than stellar results for its UK business, warning that some financial services clients had cut spending.

The UK, which represents nearly a quarter of the company's global business, saw an eight percent fall in sales to £662.5m in 2007, while operating profits were down 60 percent at £30.5 million.

The news was not entirely bad, however. Total revenues for 2007 rose three percent to £3.07 billion, but pre-tax profits fell by 28 percent to £84.1 million.

This is a testing time for new CEO Andy Green, who joined from BT in January, but it also gives him the chance to lead from the front and set out a new strategy in the Spring.

That said, Green has issued a cautious outlook for the year, saying revenue growth will be similar to 2007's three percent rate.

Green needs to steady investors' nerves and outline a positive strategy for his company. As reported last month on sourcingfocus, he recently announced the establishment of a new outsourcing services division under former acting CEO Jim McKenna, but McKenna will leave the company this year.

Logica is planning a new centre in India, and Green is at pains to play down talk of redundancies or disposals of any parts of its business, despite reports to the contrary at the end of last year. “Logica has always been acquiring and disposing of businesses every quarter. But I don't think people should expect the nice headlines of huge divestments or job cuts,” he said.

Two skills stories dominate the industry today. First, news that basic computing skills are on the rise among schoolchildren, and especially among girls.

Seventy-three percent of the 1,000 seven to 16 year-old respondents to a Tesco Computers for Schools programme survey were able to use a search engine and 62% were proficient at editing documents.

Only six percent of girls said they lacked confidence using computers, against 10% of boys. The figures are more impressive when set against the 57% of parents who said they relied on their children for computing advice, which is perhaps the most significant statistic – along with the 40% minority of parents who believed they were more proficient with a PC than their children.

The hidden lesson of the survey is that 70% of the young people surveyed were able to create a social networking profile on MySpace, Facebook, Bebo (the most popular site with young people), and so on – eight percent more than those able to edit documents, and twice the number who were able to manipulate photographs.

This is significant for several reasons: one, social networking sites are, above all, well-designed applications that encourage other application developers and entrepreneurs; two, because they are redefining social and business interaction and the media that surround us; three, because many of these sites, along with Linkedin and a dozen or so other portals, have become multimillion-dollar assets in the space of a handful of years; and four, because they have – along with companies such as Apple, Sony, Google and others – transformed a generation's perception of what technology is for. Children understand this, which is good news for the future.

The conclusion is that technology that is simple, attractive, does not lock you in, and connects people around viable communities of interest is good technology – something that people volunteer to use and spend up to two hours a day enjoying in their own time. That is surely a lesson for all of us who have any connection with customer interaction, service, and application development.

In other words, if you want to reach your customers and provide a service that works and is enjoyable, then design something that allows people to talk to each other.

More in part 2.

The immigration card

The other skills story today is that the Government has changed the rules for non-EU residents wanting to migrate into the UK. Essentially, the UK has adopted the Australian points system, whereby highly educated people with skills the country needs are given far greater preference over less skilled people.

While this will undoubtedly wring some positive headlines from the more arid and nationalistic tabloids (who seem unaware that the entire history of the UK is one of immigration), the legislation has some worrying elements in the long-term. Graduates with good English, on £40,000 or the local equivalent, will be able to seek work, while skilled workers in shortage occupations will need a job offer prior to arrival. For everyone else, the door is closing.

Put another way, your skills are no more important than your ability to support yourself in the short term – not the most progressive, positive, or enlightened message to send the world, and certainly not the hallmark of an economy as strong as ours.

This is worrying for a number of reasons: first, it excludes people from poorer countries who may be equally highly skilled – which would include workers from emerging outsourcing destinations; second, because we already have a very successful programme for attracting skilled graduates and overseas students – it ain't broke, so why fix it?; third, because the financial bar is far higher than the earnings of average UK residents; and fourth, because it ignores our own recent, very successful history.

Many of the most skilled people in the UK today in technology, engineering, medicine, law, pharmaceuticals, finance, design, business and the media are the second or third generation children of less skilled migrants from India, Pakistan, and many other parts of the world.

Those parents and grandparents might not have had degrees or a record of academic excellence (like many parents of similar age), but they nevertheless helped regenerate countless towns and cities with their ambition and innovation.

Proponents point to the success of the Australian model, but Australia is a very different place to the UK: aside from its many attractions, much of it is uninhabitable, and it lacks the UK's stronger record of cultural and multi-ethnic diversity, despite its Asian populations and the recent government apology to indigenous Australians.

Can we really afford to say to the world: come to the UK, but only if you are European – or already more successful, more highly educated and wealthier than the average citizen? That will store up problems for our future prosperity, and people with the ambition to succeed will begin to look elsewhere for a place to establish themselves.

For many in the sourcing industry, that may also begin to undo relations with those emerging countries with whom our future prosperity lies. Ambitious people are attracted to countries such as the UK and the US because they can make a name for themselves in a vibrant economy, and because those opportunities do not exist at home – not because they want to retire to the beach.

If you thwart ambition and diversity for the sake of importing wealth, then you are either a fool, or 18 months from an election.

Fears have arisen that foreign IT workers are taking mid-level IT roles in the UK over skilled UK professionals.

The Home Office has said that UK work permits issued to foreign IT staff rose 14% in 2007 from 2006 with Indian applications making up approximately 83% of all approved permits.

Indian IT workers filled roles including analyst programmers, software engineers and system analysts numbered 31,765 (83%) of all approved applications in 2007 and 26,835 (79%) in 2006.

Under Home Office rules, companies recruiting staff from abroad must prove that there are no suitably qualified or experienced resident workers available in the UK first to get a permit. However, critics argue that this system is open to abuse using a process called intra-company transfers.

Successful 21st century business is guerilla warfare, outsourcing is at the heart of it, and the old integrated 'dominate, control and beat your competitors' model is a thing of the past. This was the thesis of the most popular speaker at Vanco's AGM in Barcelona last week. The secret is to employ your competitors, outsource risk, and reap the benefits of a 'disintegrated' organisation.

Professor Michael G Jacobides is associate professor of strategic and international management at the London Business School, and he treated delegates to a fascinating, passionate and entertaining seminar on 21st century business models, prowling the conference floor on the lookout for anyone who might be doodling – or Googling (as indeed some were – though not for long).

Drawing apposite – if tasteless – comparisons with the West's big-budget, big-iron military campaigns of shock and awe in the East, which have been picked apart by the guerilla tactics of their opponents, Jacobides might have been offensive had he not been so amusing and gently iconoclastic.

Disintegration is happening across broad sectors of the economy, he said, and is reshaping products and services from finance to the automotive and pharmaceuticals sectors where the global division of labour is changing the competitive dynamics.

Once you start breaking organisations apart – actively 'disintegrating' the business – then new players enter the game and participate as sectors open up, bringing innovation and excellence in their wake. For Jacobides, outsourcing is at the core of the successful, disintegrated organisation.

The reason for breaking things up is that the separate parts of a large, 20th-century-style, integrated organisation – which might include its knowledge base, managerial culture, design teams, manufacturing capacity, financial structure, internal services, and so on – are not a natural fit within a large single entity, unless it is an inflexible and didactic monoculture.

The better approach is to place each task where there is the greatest cultural fit – design with a design company, services with a services company, and so on – and make the central organisation, essentially, the manager of the brand.

The impetus might be simple market dynamics, suggested Jacobides, or even regulatory pressure. “We need to shift our perception of competition from tactical to guerilla warfare,” said Jacobides. “As sectors disintegrate [by which he meant blurring the boundaries of a sector and bringing about a convergence of needs, services and products] forget niche distinctions between profit and suppliers; profit and power shifts to different parts of the value chain.”

Like many business analysts talking to an IT audience, Jacobides brought up the familiar subjects of Dell, IBM, and Apple. Dell succeeds in an unpromising sector by carrying no stock, outsourcing manufacture, and making each PC to order, he said. The old Apple, he said, was too closed, and the old IBM too open, which was why both hit the buffers of the Microsoft/Intel alliance.

The new Apple, Jacobides rightly explained, has learned the lessons of the past and created a third-party peripherals industry around the iPod and iTunes, and had outsourced all the risk of its business to companies who might previously have been its competitors. (I'd argue it still remains 'closed' via its DRM lock-in.)

This is all very well, and a solid and familiar argument, but IBM is a much more agile and nimble company than people give it credit for – today's services giant (Big Spectrum?) bears little comparison with the Big Blue of old – while Dell is not the success story it once was.

That said, Jacobides' appraisal of 21st century business remains largely on the money: it is no longer about margin but about strategic business model redesign: manage the value chain, rather than own it. A bullish message for outsourcing, indeed, and perhaps one with an implicit warning to the US: close your doors to global sourcing at your peril.

If Jacobides' thesis is correct, then outsourcing is the underlying support structure of many successful 21st century businesses. It is not a threat to jobs, but actively supporting them.

Virtual network operator Vanco celebrated twenty years as a managed services supplier at its AGM in a mild and foggy Barcelona this week, barely five hundred yards from tens of thousands of Catalan football supporters who cheered the home team to a famous draw at the 'New Camp' stadium.

The event was attended by most of the company over several days – at the same hotel as the Barcelona football team. The conference was also, perhaps, a score draw, with one major customer (Vesuvius) saying Vanco's invoicing was "a nightmare" (subsequently blamed by Vanco's CEO on an Oracle accounting system), but others praising the company's disintegrated managed service approach.

Vanco has undoubtedly built a business on its knowledge of the global telecoms market. Its knowledge base – accessible in a cutdown version via vanconetdirect.com, minus the company's value-add services – is a virtual map of the global telecoms network, and plugs Vanco into some 700 asset-based carriers (ABCs) and suppliers worldwide.

From those offerings Vanco picks and chooses technologies and services for its customers. In short, Vanco has positioned itself as the asset-light, technology-neutral sourcer for telecoms and networking expertise.

Wayne Churchill is MD of Vanco Direct (formerly the VNO division), and he claims that for any town or village in the world, his company can list available carriers and map their services, literally, onto customers' needs. They both work for, with, and compete against major carriers such as BT and AT&T, and reprice and rescope their offerings.

Surely with such a valuable intellectual asset at their disposal, for which a variety of front ends can be built (such as the company's global telecoms network map), Vanco must be tempted to move into consultancy? "We might provide a price to a client, but we don't give them the underlying data," said Churchill. "We have a unique resource, but consultancy is not a strategic direction or model for us."

But surely the company must be an obvious acquisition target for the major consultancies – particularly as the intellectual property aspect of their business is a solid hedge against the commoditisation of telecoms services? "We've been approached. I can't say [by] who at this time," said Churchill.

CEO Allen Timpany rejected the suggestion: "We've had that discussion," he said, "but we don't wish to monetise it [the database]. We would do a 'white label' service through the web portal [vanconetdirect.com], but minus the services and at a lower margin and a lower price.

"Our consulting team's value is in landing a multimillion-dollar contract, not in offering a consultancy service at a few thousand dollars a day."

Mark Thompson, CEO Vanco Solutions added: "It is an asset but you don't sell the crown jewels." Despite that, Thompson said he liked the idea of "Amazon thinking for the telco marketplace".

Multimillion-dollar deals are certainly the focus of Vanco's business, which is targeted at Fortune 1,000 companies, of which customer base they own a small, but growing, percentage – the largest in the VNO field.

That said, Frost & Sullivan analyst Sharifah Amirah, head of research ICT EMEA for the analyst firm, identified the SME market as being the source of 80% of telecoms growth in Europe over the next few years – surely a sign of the commoditisation of the supply. Does Vanco see the SME market as a viable option?

SMEs: Fool's Gold

CEO Timpany slammed the idea: "The SME market is a fools' gold thing. The numbers look impressive if you listen to the analysts, but doing it effectively and making money is almost impossible, as they can get a better service from local suppliers."

Vanco Direct's Wayne Churchill added: "The SME market is incredibly hard to address. Every major company has pulled out of that market. If you're selling into it, then the people time and design time and the costs are the same, but the return is much smaller. We haven't solved it yet, We need a salesforce to address that."

Like many companies both inside and outside their space, Vanco sees wireless technologies as sweeping away the monopoly of the fixed line providers. Although Vanco is neutral about the technology, as those decisions are based on customer needs and supplier portfolios, presentations from the conference floor suggested the company is betting on WiMAX winning out over 3G.

In conversation, Vanco UK MD Andy Sumner said: "It doesn't matter to us which ones win."

Vanco Direct's Wayne Churchill was more forthcoming about the technologies: "We think WiMAX will dominate access to core networks. It's inherently more flexible and robust. The problem is the investment. A lot of big players lost their shirts last time [Churchill is referring to the purchase of 3G licenses]. But WiMAX isn't reliable in the sense that you'd bet your company data on it. In the UK it's good. In California it's amazing."

"We don't need to understand how the carrier architects it, we just need to know what it can do," countered Sumner. "I just want to know what infrastructure I can buy, which carriers operate where, what their points of presence [PoPs] are, and what their quality of service [QoS] is."

For such a company as Vanco, QoS and service level agreements [SLAs] are everything. With such a complex supplier network of 700+ companies spread across the globe, surely each carrier's SLAs must impact on the quality of service that Vanco can promise customers with its own SLAs? "Every other part of the telecoms world is about the data asset," said Vanco Direct's Churchill. "For us, some of the service is a utility, the rest is a service. We buy it like a commodity.

Vanco slams suppliers

"SLAs don't tell you anything except how brave the marketing people are," continued Churchill, "they don't tell you about the strength of the [carrier's] infrastructure. Verizon's infrastructure is crap [sic], but they have a great SLA. T-System has a Rolls Royce of an infrastructure, but no SLA. We build our own SLA across actual data we know we can measure."

Vanco Solutions' Thompson added: "You can have a supplier whose service level deteriorates; they lose interest in a company, or their business model changes. We certificate our suppliers. We have short-term contracts.

"For example, when the WorldCom thing happened, our recommendation to our customers [at the time] was to move off WorldCom. We tailor our SLAs to the business aspects, not to the technical. It's about how you drive that through the company.

"It's easier to buy everything from one supplier, but we don't because it's not the right answer. It is harder."

One market that is driving Vanco's business with customers in the UK is corporate home users. The company revealed that most of its client base in the UK is now geared towards home corporate working, where employees are connected to the corporate network from within the home for heavy, rather than occasional, use.

Sumner explained that by far the prevalent trend in the UK is for companies to integrate their corporate networks with employees' home hubs and domestic broadband connections. This could have implications for the future of customer call centres, he said, such as the uptake of 'homeshoring' (the building of virtual call centres of home-based employees as a competitive, locally based alternative to offshore services).

“[Homeshoring] does make sense,” said Sumner. “An inhibitor to that would be the ability of DSL to deliver class of service. It would need to be of sufficient quality for call centre work. We've integrated voice and data across standard DSL and the results have been good. The barriers are falling away.”

Thompson of Vanco's Solutions division, added: “Corporate home users are a big uplift for us. A very big uplift. Most of our 200 global networks have a reasonable degree of home corporate users.

“It won't be long before the traditional call centre ACD will come together with IPT technology. That's maybe five years ahead. The impetus would be both cost and quality of service.”

However, Vanco founder and CEO Timpany poured cold water on the idea that the spread of wireless technologies will deliver free internet access in major cities. “I don't think it's going to happen. I believe it will go the other way,” he said.

“Chicago canned it because it didn't pay. It's a case of who pays and how do they pay. When the [telecoms] business became deregulated and more competitive companies had to start charging for the local loop. In Scandinavia they are looking at increasing the cost of internet access for high-bandwidth users.”