Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka on Tuesday, 13 May 2008, opened a global call centre that will service customers for the oil multinational, Royal Dutch Shell, and improve economic growth in the country. 14 May 2008 11:50

The Software as a Service (SaaS) trend is revolutionising the call centre industry, as companies of all sizes are now discovering the advantages of going with hosted versus on-premise solutions. With SaaS for the call centre, applications such as integrated voice recognition, automatic call dialing, predictive dialing, workforce management and CRM are hosted on a shared platform in a data centre and delivered to the agents via the Internet or dedicated network. 12 May 2008 12:51

E-commerce firms are turning to Web services to streamline operations. A web service, for instance, could carry out payment validation by taking details from one system and initiate a request for other information, such as a credit card account number or expiration date. 12 May 2008 12:40

US - Traditionally, the contact centre has been a cost centre. However, with the contact centre transforming into a profit centre, the selling of products and services has emerged as an opportunity for the contact centre to improve agent and customer interaction. Yet the challenge will be balancing customer satisfaction goals and driving profits. 9 May 2008 14:43

When the going gets rough, customer retention becomes even more important. By that logic, continued sluggishness in the overall economy could have little to no dampening effect on the CRM sector, which is on a roll. 30 Apr 2008 09:24

User-generated reviews and social navigation are examples of the Internet providing an experience unavailable offline: aggregating the wisdom of the crowds. A few retailers who are leading the way in these areas are Zagat, Petco and Newegg. 24 Apr 2008 07:50

When it comes to customer service, young consumers often get no respect. 22 Apr 2008 10:10