JEANETTE’S NEW JOB

Jeanette Hawdon has been appointed as contact centre manager at Scottish Water Business Stream, a wholly owned subsidiary of Scottish Water, which specialises in business customers.
In nearly a decade, Ms Hawdon has held senior management positions with Sainsbury's, Barclays Bank and Reg Vardy.
The company said that her appointment is part of plan to appoint a strong new team ahead of the deregulation of the market to supply business customers with water, which starts in April next year.


SEE WHAT’S HAPPENING

Storacall Voice Systems has launched a new call logging software package, Blue's Enterprise Pro, designed for large companies, or those with several sites, which have 500-25,000 extensions and call volumes of 300,000-plus a year.
It runs on servers using MS-SQL and provides statistics on each site, department and cost centre, together with grouped information or details about a single call.  Details include monthly costs, incoming and outgoing calls, the number of unanswered calls and cost comparisons between individual departments.  In addition, alarms can be set up to notify managers about undesirable events, such as going over budget, calls to prohibited numbers, lines out of order or too many unanswered calls.  And it can identify the most cost effective telecoms carrier.
Prices start at £1,475, plus VAT.  For further information, and a 30-day downloadable trial version, see www.bluescm.co.uk or call 01932 710710.


VoIP ACTION

Ofcom has ruled that VoIP services that allow calls to normal national phone numbers must also allow users to call dial 999 and 112.
It says that if, in an emergency, customers had to find another phone the delay could be critical.
The new rules, which start on September 8th, 2008, follow research where Ofcom says it found that nearly eight in 10 of VoIP users who could not call 999 or 112 either it was possible or did not know.
Ofcom said it has decided to act because of increasing use of VoIP and a trend for these services to look and feel more like traditional phone services.


ACCOUNT CHECK

Experian has introduced Bank Wizard Absolute which, it says, is the only system that can confirm the existence of a UK bank account and its status, and match it to the correct owner.
It combines information from Experian with Bank Wizard software from Eiger Systems, an Experian subsidiary.
Experian says the new system ensures that validation takes place in one operation and in real time.
It would aid the fight against direct debit fraud and, by avoiding errors, avoid the response of some customers to switch to other methods of payment which were more expensive to administer.