By Chris Johnson

Australia’s Prime Minister Gillard to enable more to join the workforce

In a speech delivered via video link at a telework conference, Julia Gillard will demonstrate the government’s commitment to enabling 12 per cent of federal public servants to work from home by 2020.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard will use additional data in the Deloitte research today to support her commitment to have 12 per cent of the Australian Public Service regularly working from home using high-speed broadband by 2020.

The current level of the APS involved in what is known as ”teleworking” is about 4 per cent.

Teleworking is underpinned by the rollout of the national broadband network and involves working at home one or more days a week using such technology to connect with colleagues and clients.

”Harnessing the benefits of new technology and work patterns will be important for Australia if we are to embrace the opportunities of the Asian century,” Ms. Gillard said.

”That’s why the government is building the NBN and why we want to engage with employers and employees to inform them of the possibilities of telework.

”To drive this, the government will show leadership and commit to a goal of having 12 per cent of the APS regularly teleworking by 2020.

”This will be informed by trials of some government agencies, which will commence next year.”

The Prime Minister will make the announcement via video link from Parliament House into the Telework Congress being held at Melbourne University.

She will launch National Telework Week, and after her presentation will take part in a video link question and answer session.

The Deloitte research suggests teleworking will deliver nationally an extra $3.2 billion a year to the gross domestic product by 2020-21, which will be the equivalent of 25,000 full-time jobs.

Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/it-pro/government-it/public-service-teleworking-target-of-12-20121111-296sb.html#ixzz2ByjltIpj

By Patrick Botz

We saw it first in 2001 A space Odyssey with HAL the thinking mans computer, well now we have VIRTUAL CALL Centre agents ——

VPI, a provider of customer experience and workforce optimization solutions, announced the launch of the VPI VirtualSource Challenge.

Qualifying organizations can now take advantage of a free 30-day trial of VPI’s conversational virtual call agents powered by Artificial Intelligence.

The VPI VirtualSource virtual call agent service effectively automates a wider variety of inbound and outbound call types and off-loads the mundane and repetitive tasks from human agents that drive up costs and negatively impact agent satisfaction.

Hailed as the perfect supplement to traditional insourced and outsourced contact center agents, this cost-effective, scalable virtual workforce in the cloud enables organizations to gain a competitive service advantage while maintaining the highest levels of customer satisfaction. 

”Organizations have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain,” said Mike Mercadante, VPI’s chief technology officer. “With so many delighted VPI VirtualSource customers, we have complete confidence in the effectiveness of our conversational virtual call agents and will take care of everything to get you successfully automating calls.

From design, implementation, integration, quality monitoring and tuning, we will do all the work and absorb all of the services costs. We will even provide 30 days of free usage.”

Prior to implementation, VPI works with participants to establish a self-service success rate goal that is mutually acceptable, and if VPI doesn’t meet or exceed that goal, participants can stop using the service – and pay nothing.

Participants simply agree up front, that when the goal is achieved within 30 days, to pay just 25 cents per minute or less for usage at the same or larger capacity for one more year.

Request a trial at http://www.VPI-corp.com/Free-Trial 

VPI’s intelligent virtual agents provide a conversational experience that was previously impossible with traditional touchtone or speech IVR.

Virtual agents dynamically adapt to conversation flow in real time for expedited, personalized call resolution – they use their short-term memory to keep track of prior conversation flow and long-term memory to recognize callers and remember their actions and preferences from previous calls.

80% percent less expensive than human agents, VPI VirtualSource automates a much broader range of call types at a significantly lower cost per call. Virtual agents also achieve much higher rates of call completion than traditional and speech IVRs. They can handle an inbound or outbound transaction end-to-end, or they can handle the routine parts of calls and then seamlessly transfer the caller to live agents along with the information already collected, for the resolution of more complex customer needs.

Many organizations are already reaping the major benefits of virtual call agents. For example, after a successful five week implementation, a member-driven automobile club that offers roadside assistance, travel and insurance services was able to use virtual call agents to reduce agent call time by 60 percent – down from three minutes with an outsourced live agent to just 75 seconds. They also decreased overall costs of call service delivery by more than 60 percent and significantly improved customer satisfaction scores.

Freelancer.com, the world’s largest outsourcing and crowdsourcing marketplace, today announced its 50 fastest growing online job categories for the first quarter of 2012 with the release of the Freelancer Fast 50.

Chief Executive, Matt Barrie, said the Freelancer.com Fast 50 pulls data from over 3.3 million users and 1.5 million projects creating the most comprehensive insight into online job trends. “We have seen a huge increase in outsourcing on the whole, with businesses rethinking their strategies moving into the New Year,” Barrie said.

TOP TRENDS FOR Q1 2012:

• Outsourcing surges with a rise in business process outsourcing: Outsourcing of back office and non-core functionality has seen a dramatic rise in the last quarter with Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) showing the highest growth of any job category in Q1 of 2012.
• Huge increase in VA jobs as businesses focus on core activities: Virtual Assistant jobs (up by 144% to 3205 jobs) have seen a surge in this quarter. SMEs, who traditionally do office administration in-house, are outsourcing these tasks as a result of the comparatively low cost of offshore labour.
• Mobile app development grows as smart phones show no sign of slowing: Android (up by 26% to 2,863 jobs), iPhone (up by 27% to 4,318 jobs) and iPad (up by 19% to 1,828 jobs), with “post-PC device” sales outstripping that of PCs and a slew of new models hitting the market, the number of jobs in these areas has seen a steady increase.
• Open Standards will own the Web: HTML5 (up 48% to 2,160 jobs) continues its ascent as the de-facto Web 2.0 standard. The continued growth of “post-PC” devices and their support of next generation open web standards.
• Losers: SEO (up by 8% to 10,152 jobs) has remained comparatively stagnant. Despite a stronger recovery for SEO in late 2011, Google’s constant fight against low quality link building has had a major impact on the SEO industry.

Source: Business Review Australia

By Shelia McGee-Smith

A hosted solution leverages conversational virtual agents powered by artificial intelligence to automate a variety of inbound and outbound call types.

VPI announced today what they describe in the press release as “game-changing” virtual call agent technology. VirtualSource is a pay-as-you-go, hosted solution that leverages conversational virtual agents powered by artificial intelligence to automate a variety of inbound and outbound call types. VPI’s website lists about 30 different interaction types that are already available, from taking orders to processing returns and customer surveys. I was intrigued enough listening to the demo calls to request a briefing.

I doff my hat to VPI’s VP-Marketing Patrick Botz. In the course of a 30 minute call, he attached this announcement to just about every hot button in the contact center and customer experience space today…and then some.

Cloud: VPI has launched VirtualSource as a hosted solution. Similar to other cloud-based solutions, this shortens deployment time and provides companies with an OPEX versus CAPEX solution. Companies can deploy VirtualSource in a hybrid model, allowing the existing premises-based IVR to handle some interactions while specifying those that are sent to VirtualSource.

Virtual: Admittedly, this is not the trendy “virtual” of data center deployment of servers or desktops. Virtual here refers to an automated agent persona, part of the reason for the comparison in the title to Siri and Watson. Asked how VirtualSource is different from virtual agent solutions that have been around for years and not really succeeded, Botz highlights the embedded artificial intelligence that is layered on top of the Nuance-based speech technology. Instead of using decision trees, which must have rules and branching created for every possible response, VirtualSource learns on its own.

Mobile: Mobile is hot, with companies spinning like tops trying to better meet the needs of their mobile customers. Just like Siri can simplify the execution of simple tasks for a consumer with a smart phone, Botz contends that VirtualSource can simplify the completion of routine tasks for businesses. Without requiring a special app be downloaded from an app store, companies can improve service to customers on mobile devices.

Minimal Professional Services: One of the problems with sophisticated solutions is the time and expense of the professional services that must be applied to get an acceptable result. Think CTI and its lack of market traction in the 1990s. When I asked about professional services costs, I was completely taken aback by the response. Initially, there are no professional services charges. Customers pay 25 cents per minute and sign a one year contract with a monthly minimum. Because VirtualSource learns as it goes instead of requiring that rules be written, Botz says that with as few as 10-20 sample calls and the scripts used to train agents, an application can be up and running.

Ms. McGee-Smith has spent thirty years in the communications industry, including 12 years with The PELORUS Group. Earlier in her career, Ms. McGee-Smith held sales management, market research and product management positions at AT&T, Timeplex and Dun & Bradstreet. Her views on the market can also be found on Twitter @mcgeesmith.

Source: No Jitter