Essential Reading for Marketing & Business ProfessionalsTuesday July 1st 2008Insights in this issue:
* European adspend will hold up well in 2008 predicts ZenithOptimedia
* The decline and fall of the Call-Centre
* MDM - Is it yet another meaningless acronym - a response
* The 5th Annual Privacy & Data Protection UK 2008 Conference

The latest ZenithOptimedia survey
concludes that adspend in UK&Europe is still
growing faster than the economy as a whole.
Looks like doom & gloom is more than
mis-placed. We report on the latest
DimensionData Call-Centre survey which makes
grim reading if you work for a company that
has one!
Our last edition featured an
article on MDM which provioked considerable
response. So this week we have handed over
the newsletter to one of respondents - Mike
Hudgell of specialists, Evaxyx.

James Pearson - Editor

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European adspend will hold up well in 2008 predicts ZenithOptimedia

By comparison to the US where, according to
ZenithOptimedia's latest forecast, ad spend
growth will slow from 3.7% to 3.4%, Europe is
holding up extremely well with only a
marginal slowdown from 3.9% to 3.7%. This
bears out the recent results of the CIM study
reported in our last newsletter. In that
study marketers were remarkably positive
about the outlook, despite the doom and gloom
in certain sectors.

Not surprisingly the reduction in the rate of
growth is attributable to budgetary cuts in
the automotive, financial and housing sectors
- all of which have experienced cuts over the
past six months or so.
So, what does this mean for marketers. Well,
first and foremost, it is important to resist
pressure to cut budgets because you will be
outspent by your competitors unless you are
in the three "suffering" sectors. This is
because, once you have factored in the
slowdown from those three then growth
elsewhere is really very significant.

In fact, ZO's head of research, Bruce
Goerlich says "We are not seeing dramatic
cuts; marketers are just being cautious."
Caution is certainly no bad thing - now would
not be a good time to take large risks. Which
is perhaps why Direct Marketing, both in the
US and in the UK and Europe is doing so well
so far this year. Being measurable and
controllable means it has far fewer risks and
a much more provable ROI. And it is this
provability of ROI that, according to ZO is
behind the increasing drive onto the Web. In
fact they predict that this year will see
global Web spend eat up more than 10% of
budgets for the first time.

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The decline and fall of the Call-Centre

The 10th annual "Call Center Benchmarking
Report" from Dimension Data paints a dismal
picture. Based on a survey of 300 call
centers in 36 countries across five
continents, the research shows that from 1997
to 2007, key performance metrics indicate a
significant deterioration of quality of
service in contact centers.

Call abandon rates, due to long hold times,
increased during the 10-year period by nearly
127%, while the average time to answer a call
rose by around 70%, from 23 to 39 seconds.
In addition, the percentage of calls that
were answered in less than 10 secs fell by
nearly 12% from 72 percent of all calls to
64%. Interestingly it looks like callers are
losing patience - on average they abandon a
call after waiting for 45 secs in 2007,
compared to 53 secs in 1997.

Steve Loring, business development manager
for customer interactive solutions at
Dimension Data, attributes these performance
drops to changes in the market and customer
service dynamic over the past 10 years.
"There has also obviously been a move
toward more self-service. A customer faced
with being on hold may abandon the call and
try to solve the problem on his own."

The report also highlights the problem of
agent retention. During the 10-year period,
annual agent attrition rate rose by nearly
93% to 27% p.a.. Martha Rogers of Peppers and
Rogers says "At the heart of the problems
we see at call centers is that they're hiring
the wrong people or they're not doing the
right things to keep them," she says.
"They've created cultures that are
basically sweat shops, where people who can
do anything else, will. They view it as a
temporary place to make money until they can
get a 'real' job. So you're putting your
customer relations in the hands of people who
just want to get out."
The problems with retention experienced in UK
Call Centres are now being repeated in
overseas Call Centre hubs.
Ian Jacobs, senior analyst at Frost &
Sullivan, says"Ten years ago being a call
center rep was viewed as a career, but that's
no longer the case, countries with maturing
outsourcing operations are seeing an
explosion in turnover, and almost by
definition that has a negative impact on the
customer experience."

Of course the interesting thing for most
companies is that by having a poor call
centre they encourage "self-serve" which
dramatically reduces costs and, once someone
is in the habit of self-serving" it has no
impact on customer service satisfaction -
provided the website works. Which leads to an
interesting question: if we all vote with our
mice and stop using call centres, will they die?

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MDM - Is it yet another meaningless acronym - a response

In the last issue of Insight we reported on
MDM - Master Data Management. And that
article generated considerable interest. One
of our readers, Mike Hudgell, who is a
specialist in the field penned a particularly
thoughtful response and we have taken the
unusual step of reproducing it here for you.
If you have any thoughts on the debate, then
why not email us?

Here is Mike's response:

As with any novel acronym, myths abound
around MDM. It doesn't help that 'MDM' is
not exactly the most descriptive term. On
first glance, it is not obvious what master
data is, nor how the management of it
deserves any special attention over and above
normal good practice for data management.
The Wikipedia definition is as good as any,
but is in itself so wide ranging that those
new to the subject might be left with the
feeling 'so what?'

A little history of MDM can illustrate why
the adoption of the term is so confusing.
CDI (Customer Data Integration) and PIM
(Product Information Management), whilst
sharing the same enigmatic
three-letter-acronym mysticism, were an awful
lot more descriptive. Not only that, they
were also easy to trace back to business
need. For business-to-consumer or
business-to-business organisations, it was
easy to see why CDI was applicable, along the
lines of 'Hey, we have customer data, and
hey, it needs integrating, so CDI sounds like
a good idea.' Equally, organisations that
had demand chain issues, or were used to
product information mismatches could
immediately see the benefit of resolving
these ambiguities in an overall approach
driven by PIM. It is not a huge leap to join
the two together, given that both classes of
information, customer and product, will
require similar approaches to mastering,
distributing and standardisation. But in
joining them together, the industry faced a
huge task of explaining what this new 'master
data,' was, effectively abstracting customer
and product into the new definition.

To read the rest of this article, please click here

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The 5th Annual Privacy & Data Protection UK 2008 Conference

"Data Protection:
CRM, Web 2.0 & Social Networking "
3rd of September 2008 4th of September 2008
The Law Society, London

This year's event is spread over two days -
Day 1 being for the lawyers and compliance
officers with Day 2 being devoted to
marketers. It features a fascinating lineup
of speakers and if past years are anything to
go by, this really is a "must attend"
conference for anyone concerned with managing
CRM, Web 2.0 initiatives and social networking.

There is a discount of £50 for readers of
Insight making the event, at just £300
extremely good value. To download the full
Agenda and booking form, just click on the
link below.

Click here for the full Agenda