Unity4 Teleservices, Managing Director, Dan Turner, has just unveiled plans to open a new international office in San Francisco CA.

The opening, slated for second quarter of 2006, is part of Unity4's global expansion strategy, a plan that involves the establishment of three connected offices in the world's key markets of Asia Pacific, the Americas and Europe.

"This is a very exciting move for Unity4," says Turner, " Running a virtual call centre always opened the door to global expansion and its great to now be heading in that direction"

"We set about re-defining the contact centre industry by providing our clients with exceptionally skilled call centre staff and first class technology" All without the overheads, recruitment limitations and capacity issues of a traditional 'bricks and mortar' call centre.

Read Rest ...

Plan for casualty call centre

The federal government is looking at setting up a national health hotline to encourage people to receive an over-the-phone diagnosis before attending hospital, thereby relieving the pressure on overstretched emergency departments.

The free 24-hour service would be manned by triage nurses at a single, centralised call centre for approximately $40 million a year. If the caller's condition was considered minor, the nurse would discourage them from attending hospital, diverting them instead to a pharmacy or doctor which would lead to smaller emergency department queues.

A spokeswoman for Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott said nothing had been finalised because the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) has to decide whether or not to fund it. "The Government has been talking to the states about this for some time," she said. The Australian Medical Association talked down the effectiveness of the call centres, with president Dr Mukesh Haikerwal saying it was difficult to make a diagnosis over the phone. "This might give people a sense of comfort, but it's not going to provide additional services," Haikerwal said. "This won't be much more than window dressing - it's fairly hollow."

Net phone start-up takes on Google

An Adelaide software startup-company is reportedly preparing to launch technology that allows internet users to click on any phone number to set up an instant call.

Pep-Talk International has patented "on-the-fly" conversion of phone numbers into telephone calls, allowing it to sell the service to companies that want to instantly convert web-visits to call centre interactions. "Pep-Talk turns any phone number in an email, a directory, or even a search engine, into a clickable phone call," Pep-Talk marketing and sales director Bill Oborn said. "We don't need to integrate into anyone's back-end. You just click on the phone link, and two phones ring, yours and the company's."

Internet users do not need to download software to use Pep-Talk, they either visit the website of a company that subscribes or surf the web through the Pep-Talk portal. Pep-Talk is tipping a number of business models, ranging from a company subscribing to click-enable its phone numbers, to a revenue-sharing deal with a telecommunications carrier. "The company pays for the incoming call in the same way it would pay for an 1800 call," Oborn said.

BT to manage Microsoft global call centre routing

British Telecom (BT) has won a contract to manage Microsoft's global OneCall call centre routing initiative.

Under the deal, BT will design, build, deploy and manage a solution to unify and manage Microsoft's worldwide call centres into a single network-based call centre environment. The two-year contract, calls for an 18-month deployment schedule across 77 Microsoft call centres around the world, with potential to expand to more than a hundred facilities.

Microsoft's call centres support customer service and support, sales and marketing for Microsoft products and solutions throughout the world. The BT, OneCall solution will enable Microsoft's call centres to be centrally managed for call routing, resulting in improved customer service levels and better use of call centre agents.

US cruise call centre can't recruit

The employment policies of a Carnival Cruise Lines call centre in Florida has resulted in the facility filling just 32 of its 200 seats.

Starting pay is just US$16,500, but with a US$50 commission on each cruise sold, most agents make about US$40,000 a year. But then they have to; "If they don't make $40,000, I fire them," Carnival's Robert Becker told the Palm Beach Post. The company's best agent made US$99,000 last year.

Becker said he is only considering career-driven agents, not temporary employees. January through April is peak cruise booking season, and the Fort Pierce call centre expects to sell US$100 million in cruises this year.