From the TMCnet Blogs

Do Not Call AMEX Unless You Want a Call Back
In his Communications and Technology Blog, Rich Tehrani writes:

American Express is about to change its terms of service agreement allowing them to call or SMS you on ANY number you call them from. What this means is if you borrow a friend’s phone, use a pay phone or a hotel phone to call the company, they can call that number back in reference to your account for any reason. This is not to imply AMEX would divulge your confidential information but the problem here is the lack of respect for customers American Express is displaying with this move.
Moreover the utter stupidity of this change from a CRM perspective makes you wonder as an investor or customer whether you want to be associated with the company at all. BTW I am a very satisfied customer of AMEX myself and these rules won't make me cancel (yet) but they will make me wary of where I call them from.

Visit Rich’s blog at http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/

Security Concerns And BPO/Contact Center Locations
In his Readerboard blog, Customer Interaction Solutions’ Brendan B (News - Alert). Read writes:

In his Readerboard blog, Customer Interaction Solutions’ Brendan B. Read writes: Research firm Datamonitor recently came out with a report about Sri Lanka as a potential business process outsourcing (BPO)/offshore contact center hub. It points out that Sri Lanka shares many of the attributes that has made India such an attractive location including an affordable and a plentiful pool of educated English-speaking workers, high literacy, and a legal system that is based on a Western model. The country is wisely is focusing on a few key strengths, such as accounting and finance rather than trying to be 'all things to all firms' that India's huge population can afford that nation to be.

Yet only farther down does the paper touch upon Sri Lanka's 20+ year old civil war, one like many such conflicts based on longstanding and deep-rooted issues between dominant and minority populations...after a discussion about costly telecom, doubts about cities outside its capital to support BPO/IT, and competition from other nations.

This is the wrong focus. Civil conflicts are top of media and top of mind. Because these are issues that must be addressed head on and up front in this post-9-11-01 world. For a country or region to be truly successful in drawing easily transferable BPO/IT business there must be a commitment to stability including creating and maintaining a functional society. And that means taking steps including compromises with the sides involved to resolve the issues that had led to or exacerbated to the point of violence the civil conflicts in the first place.

Visit Brendan’s blog at http://blog.tmcnet.com/call-center-crm/

Convergys
In his VoIP & Gadgets” blog TMC (News - Alert) CTO Tom Keating writes:

Convergys Corporation has announced enhancements to its Real-Time Convergent Charging product in an effort, company officials say, to "improve scalability, reliability, and speed-to-market for communications service providers in their delivery of real-time services."

The enhanced version has pre-integrated network control capability, supports 3GPP standard network interfaces such as WIN, CAMEL, and DIAMETER and offers pre-integrated payment processing and Self-Care capability. It also uses performance improvements within Convergys (News - Alert) Infinys Rating and Billing Manager to “improve both application scalability and total cost of ownership,” company officials say.

Visit David’s blog at http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/