Contact centre creates jobs

Northern Ireland's largest indigenous contact centre, Gem, is to create up to 100 new jobs after securing an agreement with leading Irish communications company Perlico, a subsidiary of Vodafone, the firm said yesterday, according to News Letter.

The new contract will see the company become Perlico's key partner with responsibility for growing its revenue and market share.

That will initially involve providing inbound sales services to the Irish market for the sale of fixed-line telephones, fixed-line broadband, mobile phones, mobile broadband and laptops.

Sydney-based software company PipeVines has launched its customer interaction management application as an in-house application or hosted service that integrates call centre voice services with BPM and workflow management tools, says Computerworld.

PipeVines CEO Peter Spoto said the company has been successfully trading for eight months after seeing an opportunity for a hosted call centre and workflow application.

The first PipeVines customers went live in July 2007 using infrastructure hosted at the Global Switch, in Sydney, which delivers both voice and software services.

Garlands, the call centre company that employs more than 3 000 staff at sites across Middlesbrough, Stockton and Hartlepool, recently announced its 2007 Employees of the Year, reports nebusiness.co.uk.

Claire Dobson, a company trainer, was named winner at the firm's Hartlepool Marina base.

Taking the top employee crown for the Middlesbrough site was customer service representative Paul Regan, who works on the Orange client account.