£5m NEW LOOK

HSBC is to spend nearly £5m on upgrading its customer contact centre at Edinburgh Park.  It has been open for 12 years and houses 500-plus staff who mainly handle its Premier Account holders.

The bank said the project is part of its expansion in Scotland in response to growing customer demand for its products and services.

BIKE BOOST

Harley-Davidson has hired Arvato Loyalty Services to boost sales of motorcycle rentals, tours and training courses across EMEA, tasks formerly carried out by dealerships and tour operators.

Based in Twickenham, agents — who between them speak five languages — will take telephone and online bookings, aided by direct cross-sell campaigns.  And the online booking system will support dealerships.

Arvato also manages services the Harley-Davidson’s 100,000-strong Harley Owners Group (HOG).

NEW JOB

Geoff Boot has been appointed vice president human resources for EMEA by Sitel, the big outsourcer which has 17,000-plus staff at 53 sites in 13 EMEA countries.  Mr Boot, who will be based at Sitels’ head office in Watford, joins from Accenture, where he spent six years.  Previously he held senior human resources positions at Dell, Siemens and IBM.  Sitel employs about 3,500 people at seven UK sites and, as well as EMEA, has offices in north America, Australia, New Zealand and Latin America.

DOG DEAL

Guide Dogs for the Blind has signed Orbital Response and Fulfilment to handle responses for its Christmas catalogue, Dogalogue, available in print, online and Braille versions.  As well as handling orders at its call centre in Ashford, Kent, Orbital has started despatching about 260,000 catalogues from its site in Rushden, Northants.

TALK TIME

Autonomy has added a module to its range of speech analytics products which automatically identifies spoken language.  It says that, for example, it enables the routing of a call to an agent who speaks the caller’s language.