Convergys Corporation announced a definitive agreement under which Convergys will acquire New Zealand-based Datacom’s contact center operations in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Manila, Philippines.

Datacom and Convergys expect to close the transaction as soon as practicable. The acquisition will be accretive to Convergys’ 2013 earnings.

Datacom will add 15 Asian languages to Convergys’ language capabilities and approximately 1,000 employees, working in three Southeast Asia contact centers, to Convergys’s global operations. The integration of the two organizations is expected to take between six and nine months.

“The addition of Datacom’s contact center operations is in line with our acquisition strategy, allowing us to expand our language capabilities and global footprint. It enables us to forge new relationships with the prominent technology companies that Datacom now represents, and provides additional opportunities for growth,” said Andrea Ayers, Convergys President and CEO. “We remain disciplined in our pursuit of growth opportunities that add value for clients and shareholders.”

Jonathan Ladd, Datacom Group CEO said, “Datacom has built a world-class multi-site, multilingual Asia BPO business servicing a suite of long-term blue chip clients. We’re proud to sell this asset to Convergys, in full confidence that our contact center staff will be joining a strong organization that is solely focused on providing exceptional services to a world-class portfolio of customers and will support outstanding growth opportunities for our staff.”

By Larissa Ham

(In photo: Jodi Ettenberg, centre)

For many people it’s the ultimate dream – ditching cubicle life for the freedom of the open road, without worrying about running out of money.

For a growing number of tech-savvy entrepreneurs, or ‘digital nomads’, making a decent living wherever there’s Wi-Fi has become a happy reality.

We speak to three enterprising types who have managed to create a work/life balance with a difference.

(In photo: James Clark, website builder)

Clark, who still calls Melbourne home when asked, describes himself as a “location independent entrepreneur”.

First bitten by the travel bug when he moved to the UK on a two-year working visa in 1999, Clark found his wanderlust impossible to shake. Luckily, it was around the time the internet started showing great promise.

“That’s when I kind of realised that I really loved the internet and I loved to travel and decided to put the two of them together,” says the now 41-year-old, speaking via Skype from Singapore.

After his UK visa expired, Clark moved to Dublin and vowed to set up a business that would let him continue his globetrotting life. Working temp jobs, he learnt web design at night.

In 2001, he began making travel websites and by 2003, his business, Urban Nomad, had become a full-time proposition.

For many years he lived half the year in St Kilda and spent the rest travelling, but has had no fixed address since 2010.

His main venture is based in Australia and offers web design, e-marketing and search engine optimisation. Clark says his work comes via word-of-mouth or his website, Nomadic Notes, which he created to boost his profile and document his adventures. That’s also led to perks such as a press trip to Jordan.

Clark gets some interesting reactions to his lifestyle.

“I went home once and I ran into a friend and they’re like ‘I heard you’ve become a bum’,” he says.

“It’s a business. I’m pretty sure I work more hours than half my friends.”

TIPS

• Do easier work in cafes, but save new projects for a quieter space such as your hotel room.
• Meet up with other digital nomads through forums such as the Dynamite Circle.

Jodi Ettenberg, food blogger

Canadian-born Ettenberg, 33, originally planned to take a year of leave from her job as a lawyer in New York to travel.

But somehow one year morphed into five, as her travel blog Legal Nomads gained a following and spun off into freelance writing and photography, a self-published book, speaking engagements and social media consulting.

“For the first two years I was working off my savings. I was on a blogger site and not on WordPress,” says Ettenberg.

Now her website gets about 150,000 page views a month.

She’s travelled to destinations including South America, Russia and Mongolia and is now spending four months eating and working in Ho Chi Minh City.

“There’s a fallacy that because I’m posting photos of soup all the time I must not be working at all,” she says. “I’m building a business that I’m really invested in and I’m really proud of.”

Ettenberg says she rarely gets lonely as she hangs out with other digital nomads, arranges meet-ups on the way and regularly returns home.

“I didn’t set out to be a digital nomad. I just kind of followed each rabbit hole,” she says.

“It’s not like I quit my job because I was disenchanted with the corporate world, but now I’ve left it, I’ve loved building something new.”

TIPS

• Develop a routine to avoid sensory overload.
• Use Evernote, WhatsApp, Skype and Boingo.

Colin Burns, web developer

Surviving on your nomadic wits as a single person is one thing, but what about doing it with two kids in tow?

Ask Burns and his wife Tracy, who left Brisbane with Noah, now 7, and Hayley, 5, in January 2010.

Burns had sold a web design business to another company, which he then worked for – but quickly realised he hated being an employee. The day after quitting he won $25,000 in web design contracts.

“That was kind of the catalyst. We realised we really didn’t have to be in Australia to do this kind of work,” says Burns, who wanted to spend more time with his young children.

“We just figured raising kids was difficult anyway, whether we were at home or travelling.”

Giving themselves six weeks to take off, the young family was hit for six when Tracy was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Three months later she was OK and they were away.

“That first year we did a fair bit of travel, backpacker-style travel,” says Burns.

Tracy home-schools the children while her husband does the back-end work for Australian websites.

Much of their time has been spent in Asia, where life is cheap and Wi-Fi is plentiful.

“You pretty much know that most places in Asia have Wi-Fi. Unless you’re on a tiny deserted island in Thailand you’re going to be fine,” says Burns.

In July, Burns and his family will ditch the backpacks indefinitely, as the children start school in Queenstown, New Zealand.

“We’re at that point now where I’ve had enough and the kids have had enough and Tracy’s had enough,” says Burns. “You can have too much of a good thing.”

Burns plans to continue his business from Queenstown and is also involved in a soon-to-be-launched New Zealand start-up Scrattch.com that aims to be a Pinterest for content. (A content sharing service that allows members to “pin” images, videos and other objects to their pinboard) Ed.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/small-business/exotic-life-for-aussie-digital-nomads-20130322-2gjju.html#ixzz2OKUKxVdv

Employees’ buy-in crucial to successful unified communications implementation

Companies that embrace Unified Communications (UC) tools to enable increased mobility will be the clear winners when it comes to increases in efficiency and retaining and attracting top talent, a survey by Jabra and Frost and Sullivan has found.

The survey found workers are increasingly requesting to use mobile devices to aid their work performance and duties, with nearly 67 per cent of Australian workers currently using smartphones for business purposes. However, over 30 per cent of them continue to use their personal devices for business purposes.

This trend towards increased employee use of mobility-enabling devices can also be seen in the rapid proliferation of tablets with currently 55 per cent of employees already using tablets in the workplace. .

According to Fulvio Toniotti, Managing Director, Jabra ANZ, nearly seven out of 10 organisations expect the use of smartphones and tablets to increase over the next few years.

“Given the expected increase in the use of mobile technology as a business tool over the new few years, companies that want to separate themselves from the pack would be well-served to begin deploying UC tools that enable employees to maximise their mobility and efficiency while at work.

“It is also a great way for employers to demonstrate their commitment to supporting mobility in the workplace creating not only a better work-life balance but also helping attract and retain top talent that are looking for increased flexibility from their organisation.”

Providing a positive user experience and a safe and steady rollout will be key to effective UC implementation and enabling mobility. Of the companies surveyed, some did nothing to assist users, other companies commenced several support activities where the most effective was a ‘dedicated IT helpdesk’ (48 per cent), training sessions (42 per cent) followed by self-help literature (32 per cent).

Some of the lessons learned by the respondents from their overall Unified Communications implementation were the importance of communicating and educating the staff before roll-out on the benefits of UC (52 per cent) to prepare for the impending changes in their ways of working and make employees take ownership to the successful adoption of UC. In fact, buy-in from employees was considered significantly more important (49 per cent) than buy-in from management (29 per cent).

A key part of enabling mobility is the headsets. More than six out of 10 of companies agreed that headsets play an important role in employee adoption of UC technologies, yet only about 40 per cent are supporting them as part of their Unified Communications strategy. Those who installed headsets cited many benefits associated with them, the biggest of which included hands-free communication and improved audio quality.

Specialist Australian intellectual property law firm Griffith Hack improved productivity by moving to a Unified Communications platform. “Implementing a UC system has enabled our staff to work more collaboratively and efficiently, no matter where they are,” says Andrew Pritchett, Chief Information Officer, and Griffith Hack. “Now we have the opportunity to deliver technical services that were previously beyond our capability together with an enhanced ability to respond positively to business requests.”

China offers a lot of potential for New Zealand-based technology services provider Datacom, says Group chief executive Jonathan Ladd.

Ladd says the company entered the Chinese market in April, providing technical support services in Mandarin for a United States-based multi-national firm, which he was unable to name.

Datacom already provided services for that customer in other languages from Malaysia, but found it could more effectively obtain Mandarin-speaking support staff through setting up shop in China.

Datacom, part-owned by New Zealand Post with more than 4000 staff in Australasia and Asia, reported a 9 per cent increase in revenue to $788 million for the year to March 31.

Profit after tax of $25 million was 13.6 per cent up on the prior year, the company said. New Zealand revenue rose 8.3 per cent to $375 million.

Greg Davidson, Datacom’s New Zealand chief executive, said trans Tasman services were another growth area.

“There are a large number of quite sizable organisations that operate both in New Zealand and Australia and a small number of providers capable of giving quality IT management and software development to both locations,” Davidson said.

Datacom said a significant development for the firm had been the signing of a lead agency agreement, for an initial term of 10 years, to supply services to multiple New Zealand government agencies.

“Securing the Government contract in part fuelled a Datacom Group decision to further expand current data centre facilities and build new cloud infrastructure capabilities in New Zealand and Australia,” the company said.

By Madeleine Heffernan
with Ruth Williams

HUNDREDS of Australian jobs have been shifted to New Zealand as local producers try to avoid the impact of high wages, a soaring Australian dollar, and restrictive labour laws.

Woolworths is the latest to transfer jobs across the Tasman. It transferred 40 contact centre jobs to Auckland this week. Imperial Tobacco has also announced it will move cigarette manufacturing from Sydney to New Zealand.

The companies are following in the footsteps of the food production industry, which has been shifting jobs out of Australia to take advantage of New Zealand’s lower wages.

Heinz Australia recently scrapped more than 300 jobs across three states in favour of its large plant in Hastings, New Zealand’s largest food processing and food producing centre.

The International Labour Organisation says Australian manufacturing workers earned more than $US35 an hour in 2008. In New Zealand the rate is under $US20 an hour.

Average weekly earnings for manufacturing workers in Australia are higher than those in Canada, Britain, New Zealand and the United States, says a study which put Australian earnings at more than $1000 a week, versus about $700 in NZ.

Simplot Australia is the last remaining vegetable processor in Tasmania after its rival McCain shifted production to New Zealand in 2010, citing a better return on investment.

Callum Elder, the executive general manager of quality and innovation at Simplot, said penalty rates and wage inflation make Australian processing much more expensive.

”Penalty rates are a significant cost difference to manufacturers, particularly in the agricultural game where you’re unable to properly plan,” Mr Elder said.

This has combined with wage rises that are not matched with productivity improvements, and instead stoked by high salaries in the mining sector and infrastructure projects, he said.

”Our productivity hasn’t increased in the past three to four years, as an industry, but yet we’ve been paying 3 to 4 per cent increases [in wages], which is a large part of the cost. It’s very expensive to put people into Australian factories.”

Mr Elder said base pay of $60,000 a year can leap to $100,000 when overtime, payroll and other costs are included. ”The average base salary is probably around $60,000 and there’s probably another $20,000 in penalty rates, and the rest comes from surcharges and taxes.”

High wages, penalty rates and productivity of Australian workers has come under attack in recent months. Toyota Australia’s chief executive, Max Yasuda, has criticised the culture of his workforce at Altona, Melbourne, where he said absenteeism can be as high as 30 per cent.

Earlier this year the New Zealand Finance Minister, Bill English, told Business Day his country was benefiting from a more flexible industrial relations environment, a lack of infrastructure bottlenecks and stable energy prices.

”The IR environment is pretty flexible and has enabled quite a lot of flexibility to our manufacturing sector, which has in the last while been growing, despite the high dollar,” he said.

The mayor of Hastings, Lawrence Yule, believed New Zealand’s ”more holistic view on employment” appeals to Australian companies.

He cited New Zealand’s lower levels of unionisation, ability to operate outside traditional daytime hours, and greater use of seasonal employees. ”Our labour laws are more relaxed, as I’m told,” he said. ”I’ve been advised that’s part of the mix.”

Peter Burn, director of public policy at the Australian Industry Group, said New Zealand has not followed Australia in ”tightening” industrial relations settings, and labour laws could prove to be ”the straw that breaks the camel’s back” for some firms. ”Labour laws in themselves aren’t going to be the ‘knock them down’ difference, but could make a difference at the margins.”

Agrifood consultant David McKinna said penalty rates during peak times were putting pressure on the sector.
”If you take the cost of labour, it can run anything up to $50 an hour, whereas in New Zealand it’s probably $20,” said Dr McKinna, principal at strategic business consultancy McKinna et al.

Jessica Ramsden, spokeswoman for HJ Heinz Co Australia, said the now-closed plant in Girgarre, Victoria, was small by global standards, and the investment to make it competitive was too great. Differences in labour conditions between the two countries did not affect the company’s decision.

Jason Hefford, from the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, said shifts to New Zealand were a concern, but pointed to the high dollar and health and safety obligations over the high wages.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/australian-jobs-on-the-move-to-nz-20120417-1x5jv.html#ixzz1sKfhCVJm

• BPO company Aegis opens a 900-seat call center in Costa Rica. The new facility is located in the Rohrmoser section of San Jose and it will be a blend of additional capacity and reduced costs, the statement said.
• CSC announced it signed a three-year business process services contract with AMERISAFE, Inc. Under the agreement, CSC will provide business process outsourcing (BPO) services to manage and automate legal expenditures for AMERISAFE using Legal Bill Analyzer, a component of CSC’s Legal Solutions Suite, strengthening transparency in legal matter planning and communication with outside counsel.CSC’s customized BPO offering for AMERISAFE includes a range of services, such as bill review, resolution, reporting, invoice management and Web hosting support. The agreement provides a low-risk approach to transforming operations and controlling costs, and encourages constructive collaboration between AMERISAFE and law firms.
• Information Services Group (ISG) (NASDAQ: III), a technology insights, market intelligence and advisory services company, today announced winners of the 2012 Australia New Zealand (ANZ) Paragon Awards, which recognise leadership and best practices in sourcing and service management. The ANZ Paragon Awards celebrate and promote organisations and relationships within the sourcing community that have demonstrated high performance leadership and best practices in the sourcing and service management fields.

  The 2012 ANZ Paragon Award winners are:
  Best Sourcing Relationship in Business Process Outsourcing Award: Russell Investments and Mahindra Satyam

  Best Sourcing Relationship in IT Outsourcing Award: Westpac and IBM
  Service Provider Innovation Excellence Award: Wipro, for the introduction and implementation of innovative services for the University of Canberra

• Global Legal Solutions Provider Earns Top 100 Call Center Contest for Second Consecutive Year. ARAG®, a global provider of legal solutions, announced today it has been named to the Top 20 in the Top 100 Call Center Contest by BenchMark Portal. This is the second consecutive year ARAG has made the list. BenchmarkPortal is internationally recognized as the premier research and education organization for customer contact best practices. Each year the organization features a Top 100 Call Centers Contest for centers located in North America.

After twenty two years of customer service experience a resume spanning the Financial Services and IT sectors and including companies such as AMP , Macquarie Investment and most recently nine years at Microsoft Sarah Staveley founded Culture Class ITO offer specialist services in the areas of quality, cultural and language alignment for offshore contact centres that service Australian and New Zealand customers.

Launched in February, Culture Class has designed ‘ANZ Rapport’, a five-day face-to-face course for adult learners working with Australasian customers from offshore locations. The course provides a solid foundation for agents, managers and trainers to understand Australian and New Zealand attitudes and approaches and how these can best be catered for in the context of both verbal and written service delivery.

Sarah explains, “Product and standard soft skill training only represent a part of the training puzzle for offshore contact centres working in the ANZ market. And a good working knowledge of English is not enough to ensure excellence and satisfied customers because Australian and New Zealand English present distinct varieties of the English language.”

With so much negative press lately in the Australian and New Zealand media around offshore contact centre training techniques, ‘ANZ Rapport’ offers the real deal – an approach that avoids the well worn cultural clichés of the ‘gidday mates’, dingoes and meat pies, instead using precious training time to develop a mature overview of Australia and New Zealand, in terms of modern day culture and language and the flow on implications for customer service.

More information: http://www.cultureclass.com.au

By Cara Waters

AS ANZ Bank announced job cuts in Australia it was hosting open days in Manila to attract workers to take over many of the positions.

The five-day recruitment open house, in addition to more than 70 mid-level banking jobs advertised on its Philippines website, reveals that ANZ is heavily engaged in moving Australian jobs overseas.

The jobs range from analysts and ”collections associates” (debt collectors) to a health and wellbeing consultant.

The advertisement for the open house, which finished yesterday, says collections associates will call ANZ customers in Australia and will need to work Australian business hours.

Candidates for the roles are required to have excellent English, two years of college education and at least a year’s experience in the “business process outsourcing industry” – preferably in collections or finance.

Applicants will “need to understand and adapt to cultural differences to ensure great customer experience is maintained”, according to the advertisement.

ANZ has announced cuts of 1000 jobs to its Australian workforce, 492 roles initially and 508 in the pipeline.

“Obviously there would be a difference between what someone in a back-office role gets paid in Australia and what they would be paid for the same role in Manila,” said ANZ spokesman Stephen Ries.

Mr. Ries defended ANZ’s overseas recruitment drive when it is cutting jobs in Australia.

“We are a regional bank, we have a substantial presence in Asia so it makes sense that we advertise overseas,” he said.

“The majority of the roles cut are being made redundant so they are not being replaced but a small number of roles are going to our regional hubs.

“We have had a hub in Bangalore for over 20 years and we also have one in Manila.”

Mr. Ries said the “small number” of roles going offshore amounted to 100 of the 492 initial job cuts announced.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/anz-recruiting-in-philippines-as-local-jobs-axed-20120218-1tg3l.html#ixzz1mo5n9kGi

Aegis announced today that it has been selected as one of 16 global outsourcing companies to be evaluated in Gartner Inc.’s 2011 Magic Quadrant for Customer Management Contact Centre BPO Worldwide, in a report published on 19 December 2011 by TJ Singh and Johan Jacobs.

The report evaluates service providers on their Customer Management Contact Centre BPO capabilities in Asia/Pacific, the Americas and EMEA. The companies selected have been chosen for their blend of business, organizational, industry, multi-CM vendor/product, technical, program and project management expertise and their abilities to innovate through onshore, near-shore and offshore service delivery models.

Chris Luxford, Aegis President for Australia and New Zealand, said: “Everyone at Aegis is delighted to be selected by Gartner. When it comes to customer management our aim is to handle every client interaction consistently to ensure we provide the optimum end user customer experience as cost effectively as possible for our clients. Being positioned in the Magic Quadrant is testament to our success.”

According to Gartner: “In the past, buyers were focused more on their business goals and needs but going forward, the focus is shifting to technology and process improvements, value-added services such as multichannel and analytics services, scalability, quality of service and more innovative ways of addressing the increasing levels of complexity in their business and customers.”

Special Advisory Services, Trade division of the Commonwealth Secretariat organized a regional workshop in late January in Sydney to enhance competitiveness of Pacific countries in services export. The workshop aimed to provide a platform for participants in the region to take stock of developments in services trade; share experiences in promoting IT enabled services and together chart a way forward to improve their competitiveness and performance.

Trade sections of the Commonwealth Secretariat have earlier organized regional events of a similar nature in the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Europe. This was the first time an event of such scale was organized in the Pacific region to promote IT Enabled services. Officials from Trade Department of eleven Commonwealth Countries represented the workshop viz. Australia; Cook Islands; Kiribati; Nauru; New Zealand; Papua New Guinea; Samoa; Solomon Island; Tonga; Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

The discussions mainly concentrated on the promotion of IT services and its export by understanding the existing opportunities in the market and draft a roadmap to gain market share of the growing world trade in IT Enabled Services/BPO. The workshop stressed a greater focus on trade in services in regional trade policy through expansion of the Pacific Island Trade Agreement (PICTA) to include trade in services, ongoing Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) to incorporate trade in services and the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations (PACER+), combined with rising value of Australian dollar opens up the possibility of enhancing services trade within the region.

The key takeaways from the workshop were:

• Review of developments in international and regional trade in IT enabled services and develop a viable strategic response
• Analysis of current issues and priorities in promoting export of services.
• Development of future prospects and strengthen partnerships

Jobs might be available for some 30,000 Filipinos in New Zealand as Christchurch recovers from a devastating magnitude-6.3 earthquake in February last year.

In a news release, the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said officials of Canterbury Development Corporation (CDC) mentioned the possible the job openings during a meeting with Ambassador to New Zealand Virginia Benavidez and Minister Marcos Punsalang last January.

“CDC informed Benavidez the rebuilding of Christchurch in the near future would need 30,000 workers and that the Philippines could be among the sources of much needed talent and work force for this endeavor,” the DFA said.

CDC officials are also reportedly interested in Philippine companies teaming up with Christchurch companies.

The CDC said interested individuals and companies may visit its website for updates.

The key functions of CDC include planning, implementing, and overseeing development in Christchurch and the Canterbury Region.

CDC is focused on information technology (IT), manufacturing and agribusiness sectors.

Benavidez and Punsalang also met with officials of Ballantynes Department Store, and the Chairman of Prime Foods New Zealand to pursue business linkages last January.

Offshore farming, BPOs

Meanwhile, Benavidez discussed with CDC representatives the interest of the Philippines in New Zealand’s offshore farming arrangements.

She also told its representatives of developments on the Philippine IT/business process outsourcing (BPO) industry.

“From a $9-billion industry in 2010, the Philippine IT /BPO is expected to reach its goal to become a $25-billion industry by 2016,” the DFA said.

The Embassy will link up CDC with the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) to explore possible partnerships for the Philippine IT/BPO industry.

Benavidez also informed CDC about the incentives being offered by the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) to foreign investors who wish to locate their operations in the Philippines.

These include:

• tax-free operations for the first five years,
• a flat five-percent gross income tax after the first five years of operations,
• duty free importation of capital equipment like computers, and
• the granting of permanent residency visa to expatriates and their families.

“Subsequent discussions focused on possible trade opportunities in the areas of healthcare, the export of kiwi fruit to the Philippines, production of Philippine rubber, machining of tools and parts, interest of Philippine companies in investing in Canterbury’s R&D sector and possible exchange of trade mission between the two countries,” the DFA said.

As more and more Australian banks and accounting firms announce plans for job cuts, the Finance Sector Union has warned that the four largest banks may be poised to send as many as 1,000 finance sector jobs overseas to India and elsewhere in an effort to cut labour costs, according to a report by the Australian Financial Review.

Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), Westpac Banking Corp and Ernst & Young’s Australia office all this week announced job cuts, with more expected.

“A whole raft of the jobs will disappear but a number of the jobs will be sent overseas,” FSU national secretary Leon Carter said, according to the AFR.

The Minister for Workplace Relations and Acting Treasurer Bill Shorten commented on the situation, but said it was unlikely the government would intervene. “I’m not going to second guess every banking management discussion,” Mr. Shorten said, according to the AFR. “In my experience, there’s always a cost when you lay someone off, there’s always a cost to retain someone. I think the medium-term prospects for financial services in Australia in the next five years are solid. In the medium term, prospects are good, in the short term, times are tough.”

One analysis suggested the financial sector could see as many as 7,000 jobs disappear as banks cut costs in response to global uncertainty, according to the AFR.