By Jo Best, 19 March 2004 12:45
NEWS LogicaCMG announced on Thursday that it will be creating 750 new jobs in Wales.
The roles will be located in its service centre in Bridgend, in Glamorgan, handling LogicaCMG's onshore BPO work as well as providing a contact centre and data centre. The new jobs will chiefly employ skilled workers such as lawyers and technicians.
The onshore facilities will be integrated with LogicaCMG's facilities abroad, including its Indian, Malaysian and Czech arms, for 24-hour customer support, with clients dealing with a UK outsourcing and BPO hub that will coordinate and manage the overall service management.
Kirk Smith, a senior outsourcing strategist for LogicaCMG, said that the decision to locate the new facility in the UK rather than abroad came as part of the overall trend to keep 'middle office' functions more in the customer's control.
"With back-office processing, taking advantage of the lower costs makes a lot of sense, but when the processing is more complex, customers perceive that it might be more risky and they want greater control of their outsourcing," he told silicon.com.
While the Malaysian and Czech facilities employ relatively few people compared to the planned Welsh expansion, LogicaCMG's Indian workforce will also be enjoying a boost in the near future, with an almost tenfold increase in its staff numbers from the current level of 150 to about 1200 during the next two years, according to the Financial Express in India. The lion's share will be programmers but some of the new workers will be call centre agents, the report said.
Smith said that the company would be looking to expand globally but could not confirm any new hires in India.
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1. anonymous
I beleive this is Partial good news for the industry. Its good to see that LogicaCMG is aiming to establish call centre skills in the UK. On the surface it makes good sense to move CRM operations to India and Pakistan providing a definte financial return on investiment. However in the longer term this will make it difficult to maintain in country skills. These skills will eventually translate in increased opportunities for Indian and Pakistan companies to compete and eventually out perform UK and European companies. In effect we are throwing out the baby with the bath water. As the indian sector becomes a viable sector in its own right these skills will be sold back to europe at european costs and we will find it difficult to compete in both skills or costs.
The key to any CRM, contact centre solution is keep OPEX/CAPEX to its minimum whilst maximising customers experiance and increasing potential revenue from these same satisfied customers. Currently there is a back lash within the customer cummunity to Service Providers (sometimes) lack cultural of sensitvity and lack of real understanding of the cusotmers concept of service. This results in an increased level of churn;And we all known how expensive churn can be to the profitability of a service.