The difference between NZ and US - Zeacom

New Zealand is far behind the United States when it comes toautomating customer service, but given how each country has fared in therecession, there's time to catch up.

Zeacom is a technology company exporting unifiedcommunications solutions that it develops in New Zealand. Its chief executiveMiles Valentine (pictured) says that compared with businesses here, the USmarket is ahead in the adoption of Process Automation; that is the automationof workflows or qualification flows that can be automated to save labour time –and cost.

“In the US there is a lot more use of Auto Attendants,especially speech-enabled ones, more use of recording and evaluationapplications and multi-media enablement (email queuing being the main one),” hesays.

Zeacom's second annual user group conference,'Zeacommunity', will take place 21-22 April at the Heritage Hotel in Auckland. Thecompany ran similar conferences in the US in 2007 and 2008, but isn’t runninganother in America until 2011, because their customers' travel budgets were cut due to the recession.“The US market has been hit much harder than NewZealand and we expect 2010 to be similar (to 2009),” says Valentine.

While Zeacom is an international business, he says theR&D continues to be done in New Zealand and local customers providecritical feedback for ongoing product development. The audience will be CIOs,COOs, contact centre and customer service managers from Zeacom sites across NewZealand, as well as local resellers.

Among the user case studies featured at Zeacommunity areEnvironment Canterbury, Tauranga City Council, Te Wananga o Aotearoa, YellowPages, Auckland University of Technology.