State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Good development. PTA has proposed a few actions for dealing with spam. This includes spams SMS, emails and unwanted calls. See the proposal here or get it from PTA website. I doubt that a fine of 300 Rs will discourage professional spammers. Legitimate companies should start working on their opt-in lists.

It is proposed that a do not call register (DNC) may be maintained by telecom operators. The DNC Register will be a database having the list of all telephone numbers of the subscribers who do not want to receive unsolicited calls. After the establishment of DNC register a subscriber who does not wish to receive Unsolicited calls, can register their telephone number with their telecom service provider to be included in the DNC.

Operator shall upload the number to the DNC within 45 days of receipt. The Telemarketer will have to verify their calling mobile numbers list with the DNC register before making a call. An amount of Rs 300/- per call/message should be prescribed to discourage telemarketers who make calls to numbers registered in Do Not Call list. The defaulter telemarketer will face legal action.The impact of imposing a higher charge for calls and messages which have a commercial purpose attached to them will to some extent ensure that only legitimate calls are made i.e calls to recipients who do not have any problem with attending commercial calls.

Awareness is the key to fighting the spam problem. There are a number of channels listed by PTA but surprisingly blogs and other new media is not mentioned.

The Authority puts forward a media campaign check list which shall be followed by the Authority in collaboration with operators to create spam awareness:
  a) Public awareness activities to target users first and foremost, but also large corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises, direct marketers and online operators.
  b) General awareness activities to be posted on the Web or other media such as television, newspapers and magazines. Brochures may be distributed in schools, made available on all operators’ websites, and also distributed as a leaflet in IT magazines. Educational cartoons about spam, unsolicited and obnoxious calls controlling and reporting and online security broadcast.

Telecenters have been a major source for telecom activity and for bridging the digital divide in developing countries. I came across a group called Telecentre.org which is focussed on helping communities and telecenters.  

In their own words Telecentre.org is a community of people and organizations committed increasing the social and economic impact of telecentres around the world. I ran a search on Pakistan and saw some interesting articles from the past couple of years. I’ll mention one story here about Pakistan Telecenter Initiative or PTI. As it is described on the site, PTI is a Civil Society Group carrying forward dialogues and actions in support of Pakistan’s upcoming massive rural Telecenter movement. This is interesting information which I was not aware of

Read on to learn a bit more about Telecenter.org, taken from the ‘About’ section of their site.

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A reader of the blog shared a very interesting article about dealing with telemarketers. Also see previous post on the topic of unwanted calls.

The article gives you ideas on what to say and do when you get these annoying marketing callas. For those of you who have been a victim this will make a lot of sense. These tips are mainly for the US market but the general theme can be used in Pakistan and anywhere else!

Here’s some guidance and suggestions from InsideCRM. See the full article on InsideCRM site.

1. Counterpitching: This Web designer suggests that you offer your services to the telemarketer on the other end of the line. Alternatively, you can also pretend to be in the business that they’re selling from and make them feel silly for calling.
2. Time to Fight Back: This article details ways to get back at telemarketers. You can waste their time, attempt conversational techniques and more.
3. Do Not Call: Check out this list for ideas to use when called by a telemarketer. You’ll find toilet humor as well as guilt tactics.
4. How to Deal With Those Damn Telemarketers: Follow these tips when you get a telemarketing call. Some of the most important are: Don’t just hang up, and make sure you say both “no” and “take me off of your list.”
5. Having Fun With Telemarketers: Here, you’ll find 20 fun ideas for making telemarketers wish they’d never called you. Highlights include a marriage proposal and a few ways to waste their time.
6. Anti-Telemarketing Action Kit: This guide from UCAN (Utility Consumers’ Action Network) details ideas for keeping telemarketers at bay. You’ll learn how to hurt them financially, waste their time and get payback.

Here’s one more company claiming to fix the yet unsolved problem of speech recognition on mobile phones. I’d like to see their speech-to-text solution in action or hear from someone who has tried it out. Read the complete article about Vlingo’s voice-recognition interface at Tech Review site. The key differentiators are a) that it uses Hierarchical Language Models and Adaptation techniques and b) you can train this software easily by fixing the text it gives you. And by the way, this article is available in audio as well (registration required). Here are some excerpts:

Vlingo, a startup in Cambridge, MA, is coming to market with a ­simple user interface that provides speech recognition across mobile-phone applications. “We are not developing the core speech-recognition engine,” says cofounder Michael ­Phillips, a former MIT research scientist and founder of SpeechWorks, which developed call-center speech interfaces. “We don’t need to do that again.” Instead, Vlingo takes speech, turns it into text, and provides a simple way to correct errors using the phone’s navigation keys, helping the system “learn.” The user’s spoken words travel over a mobile Internet connection for analysis on Vlingo’s server, sparing the phone the heavy computational work; the transcription appears less than two seconds later.

“Small platforms need speech, and search is a powerful way to find information,” says James Glass, head of the spoken-language systems group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “The combination of the two is very powerful,” he says, adding that Vlingo is working at that frontier.

Mazin Gilbert, executive director of natural­-language processing at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, NJ, says others, including AT&T, are also developing speech interfaces for mobile phones; he thinks one problem will be “providing the right user experience in a cost-­effective, scalable way.”

As communication technologies improve and number of mobile phone subscribers grow in Pakistan, unwanted telemarketing and sales calls and text messages are fast becoming a concern. We have talked about the lack of identity protection measures and almost no regard about one’s personal information in Pakistan before. The recent PTA warning about unwanted and fraudulent SMS was also discussed here. Other bloggers have also written about the marketers who invade people’s privacy and waste time.

Many developed countries have taken steps such as “Do Not Call” databases which prohibits telemarketers to call those people who are on the Do Not Call list. Facing pressure from public, India’s telecom regulator has set up a Do Not Call system to fight against unsolicited telemarketers (See this article for details). It will be interesting to see if it can make a difference there. Usually such Do Not Call systems require significant effort to regulate and punish the offenders, which can make it difficult to work in Pakistan.

Another related problem is that South Asia is the home to a large number of outbound call centers. Many of these unsolicited calls in US or Euorpe originate from abroad … often the accent of the callers provides a hint about the location of the caller. I have personally received unwanted calls and text messages from South Asia, and that too at odd hours.

With mobile advertising on its way, this situation will get a lot worse - so brace yourself and take precautionary measures to safeguard your information. First awareness is the key: Pakistani bloggers need to continue to spread the word. Next, take charge of your information. Ask banks, phone companies and other financial institutions about their data privacy policies and demand that they should not sell your data or else you will take your business elsewhere. It MAY work!

The recent issue of FLARE has a good article about the pain of spam sms and unsolicited calls. Excerpts:

With 63 million subscribers currently and growing rapidly every month, telephony in Pakistan is witnessing an unimaginable boom but carries one terrible downside “Unsolicited calls”. Banks are the biggest offenders. Car loans, home loans, personal loans, even loans to pay off other loans, and an unending list of unsolicited calls subscribers receive daily. More terribly, the tele-sales persons have complete personal and private information about subscribers, including name, business and personal contact details, the bank where you have maintained your account, your company name and even balance of your account and the transactions you have made recently.

“Once your cellular number is exposed to tele-marketers, you will find that there are more calls you get each day, furthermore. A notable increase in the ratio of marketing calls will be seen once you have posted a positive response to any package. This gives a clear feeling that these telemarketing companies share their data with-in their departments or even with other telemarketing companies likely to be based on barter system” said Ali Hassan, Senior Professor at a local university. Banks also arrange data from other sources as well; hotels, restaurants, online communities, directories and yellow pages are the big sources.

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This guest post was originally published by Osama Hashmi in his Green & White blog, and it is being cross-posted here.

Companies in Pakistan are beginning to recognize the strategic importance of curbing customer churn. As a result, some of the leading companies are implementing interesting and new ways of getting Customer Feedback to get some data on customer experiences.While this discussion should generally be a market research conducted over hundreds of companies, lets analyze three approaches.

Disclaimer: This may not be the apples to apples comparison you expect, because I am not counting traditional approaches such as help lines, ticketing systems, etc. What I am analyzing are “innovative” new ways of getting customer insight that the three firms are using.

UFone’s Approach to Customer Feedback

You walk into their store to pay the bill or get something done — that transaction is entered into their POS / CRM / Billing / ERP system.

One day later Ufone sends you an SMS hoping your experience was well, and asking a simple question: “Was your experience satisfactory? Send reply ‘yes’ or ‘no’ “.

Simple, and to the point.

Ufone Analysis
UFone’s approach is good in that it is a dead-simple feedback form — a Yes / No vote is easy enough that people might reply, and is also enough to form a very simplistic model of using that feedback to improve operations.

The costs of this approach, however, is that Ufone will not know why people
are not satisfied, and for this they will have to work closely with the
Line or Business Center managers as well as sort through reports of
customer service staff. Even then, they will skewed data — in today’s
customer experience world, skewed data can be hazardous to a company’s
health.

The other major issue with UFone’s approach is that it is an
interruption based approach. If I get an SMS at an odd time, I wouldn’t
care if the SMS says “thank you for visiting our store”, it interrupted
me and hence has a chance to put me off.

Especially because UFone keeps sending an SMS every day until you give
up and reply! (It does that to me anyway — maybe they wanted me to
write about them).

Read more »

This post is a brief overview of the contact /call center industry in Pakistan. The contact center is an increasingly important part of today’s globalized economy. With outsourcing growing with full speed, more and more companies are relying on oustourced contact centers to provide service and more importantly, building customer relationship. Riding on this wave, Pakistan’s call center industry has been steadily growing. In recent news ZRG announced its deal with U-fone for the automated implementation of U-circle package.

According to Farrukh Aslam, president Call Centres Association of Pakistan (CCAoP), the call center industry crossed $20 million figure during 2005. However, the Pakistan industry is hampered by a lack of skilled manpower. “We can do much better,” said Nasir Lone, country manager, The Resource Group - a US-based private investment firm with a focus on the business of call centres and outsourcing. Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) has published a report: Setting up Call Centers in Pakistan. The objective of this report is to create awareness among existing and potential investors and venture capital companies to explore Pakistan’s IT sector for the growth of their business.

A BusinessWeek report from May 2005 titled “Better Late Than Never In Outsourcing” also points out some of the challenges and opportunities of outsourcing to Pakistan. According to this article:

Pakistan is trying to copy India’s success in luring IT work, but it’s slow going. “As a natural course, American companies would not look at Pakistan,” acknowledges Jehan Ara, president of the 250-member Pakistan Software Houses Assn. “So we have to get them to look at us, and once they do business with us and credibility is established, they come back for more.”

Some 120 centers have opened in Pakistan in the past two years. Today they employ 3,500 people, and that number is expected to grow by 60% a year. Arwen Tech, a Karachi company that runs a 600-seat center, saw its sales double last year, to $10 million, serving clients such as Pakistan International Airlines and the local franchisee for KFC Corp. Now the company is building a 1,500-seat facility and hopes to boost revenues tenfold, to $100 million, in the next five years as it attracts more international clients.

Pakistan may face a shortage of IT workers. About 75,000 people work in the sector today, and the government believes a further 7,000 will be needed each year to keep the industry growing at current rates. But the country’s tech schools produce just 5,500 graduates a year — and only about a fifth of those are competitive and well trained, the Software Export Board says.

To fill in the skill gaps, Indian companies are training Pakistani companies on business process outsourcing (BPO) and call center setup as reported here and here.

The industry faces many other challenges: there is the security issue and political environment is shaky. Then there was a raid on call centers which created tension. Read more about it here.

And last but not least let us not forget the Internet and communication outage of 2005. The cable outage caused widespread economic damage and disruption in Pakistan, with 3,000 staffers reportedly laid off among the roughly 30 call centers that did not have backup capacity. Nine call centers in Pakistan reportedly had backup satellite connections provided at no cost by the government. In 2007 the situation is much better with redundancy and fallback options - but still a long way to go before Pakistan becomes an established hub of contact centers.

The overall prospects for the contact center industry in Pakistan are pretty good. Solution providers like ZRG, TRG and Arwen Tech need to keep delivering and evolve to the next level of expertise to ensure continued success.

Resources:

• PTCL Tariffs for Call Centers
• Call Center Conference 2005
• Pakistan Call Centers
• News about Touchstone’s Cotnact Center Operations