Voice of the Customer

TMCnet - The World's Largest Communications and Technology Community
New Coverage :  Asterisk  |  Call Center Outsourcing  |  Call Recording  |  SIP Trunking  |  Hosted Exchange  |  PBX
Webinars
Channels by Topic
Share
 
| More
RSS-XML alerts
Print this page
E-mail this page to a friend
Voice of the Customer Featured Article Archive

[March 20, 2006]

When national interest matters more than size

(The Birmingham Post Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Europe created a common currency but seems unwilling to accept one of the logical consequences - industrial consolidation and cross-border takeovers where size and reach count, not national interests.

Government hostility to German and Italian bids for France's Suez and Spain's Endesa groups suggests the birth of Europe Inc will be harder than that of the euro and the surrender of national control over monetary policy in 1999.

Jean Pisani-Ferry, director of the Bruegel economic think-tank in Brussels said: "One could have expected this giant step forward to play the role of the mother of all structural reform. In fact, the opposite has happened."

On top of the French and Spanish controversies, the Warsaw government attacked an Italian takeover of a Polish bank, part of a larger and long-agreed takeover of Germany's HVB group by Italy's UniCredito.

Mr Pisani-Ferry argues that Europe's leaders took their foot off the accelerator once the euro was born and that this lack of purpose, combined with years of poor economic growth, has undermined Europe's legitimacy.

"All in all, the economic implications of the euro have been underestimated and the same can be said of the degree of political commitment it requires," he said. That raises the question of how an economic project can work without a political structure to foster it.

European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso would like to think the reactions of France, Spain, Poland and others to foreign takeovers are what he calls the EU's growing pains.

The issue is arguably bigger nowadays than the limitations of the euro zone or 25-nation EU at a political level, however.

With popular concern over globalisation and security, there is fertile ground for nationalism, patriotism or protectionism.

Katinka Barysch, an economist at the think-tank Centre for European Reform, said: "As economic competition increases and the pace of change accelerates, governments are trying to tighten their grip on what levers they have."

Companies increasingly think globally when it comes to opening a factory or where they hire labour. Transport and freight are much cheaper.

China and India, the world's most populous economies, are opening and expanding at breakneck speed.

That is triggering big shifts in the location of labour and production, stretching the gap between governments who answer to national constituencies and businesses that fight it out on an international scale.

Hand-in-hand with concern over economic globalisation is the US war on terror, and heightened security fears in the world.

Dubai has decided to sell US port management operations which a state-owned Dubai firm was in the process of buying, after a furore among US lawmakers who said this presented a threat to national security.

Objections from Capitol Hill also scuppered a Chinese bid to take over US oil company Unocal. And China, opening up but tightly steered by the Communist Party, is breeding an economic patriotism of its own, developing homespun technology for highspeed trains and mobile phones and starting to question if it is letting foreign investors buy into its companies too easily and cheaply.

South Korea, too, is having doubts because of an American bid for its tobacco company.

For Ms Barysch, Europe's anxiety over globalisation is as much about the EU's eastwards expansion to Poland and other former communist countries as about China, and the fact that the older, wealthier EU members now fear cheap competition "from within".

"You can put anti-dumping duties on Chinese shoes but not on Polish furniture," she said.

Recently, France and other countries forced the EU to gut a directive on service sector liberalisation of its most potent parts because of public fears of an invasion of workers such as Polish plumbers who might put others out of work.

[ Back To Voice of the Customer Community's Homepage ]
› Return to Voice of the Customer Home

FOLLOW US

FREE Voice of the Customer eNewsletter

Subscribe Now

Featured White Papers

  • Seven Best Practices for Speech Analytics: Speech analytics is valuable for identifying issues in the contact center. However, limiting its use to the contact center only considers a portion of all customer interactions and subsequently only reveals a small part of the voice of the customer. This paper discusses how organizations can optimize their Speech Analytics implementation strategy to realize the promise of this exciting technology.
  • Understanding the Voice of the Customer: Today's contact centers involve a sea of information that must be captured, processed, and distributed on a daily basis. Effective use of this information enables companies to remain competitive in an increasingly aggressive and customer centric marketplace. An overwhelming percentage of the information that circulates in a contact center's audio recordings, documents, web pages, and emails is unstructured in that it resides outside of a normal structured database and cannot be managed efficiently. These unstructured items contain valuable information, yet this information historically has been difficult to organize, categorize, and access.
View All ›

Case Studies

  • Aflac: Aflac, the leading provider of guaranteed-renewable insurance turned to Autonomy to help them automate the process of monitoring their contact center agent for quality and compliance. The company now has a system that can offer continued improvement in agent quality and productivity while enhancing the customer experience. ...
  • Avaya: Avaya, a global leader in business communications, inherited 880 websites as well as numerous intranets and extranets when it was spun off from Lucent Technologies. The sheer volume and diversity of the sites and the over 500 content creators resulted in inefficient content distribution rife with divergent branding, messaging, and product information. ...
View All ›

Video Showcase

    Interview with Autonomy: Rich Tehrani interviews Simon Hayhurst, SVP of Autonomy

Featured Events

  • Multichannel Analytics with Autonomy Explore: In today's world of constant connectivity there are a variety of direct and indirect channels of communication between an enterprise (or a brand) and its customers. 80% of these valuable interactions are generated in a human-friendly, unstructured format across multiple touchpoints and channels. With this ever growing mountain of information how do you extract the emerging trends and topics of interest to the enterprise? ...
  • SES Chicago 2011: Marketers and SEO professionals attend SES Chicago each year to network and learn about topics such as PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more. The conference offers 70+ sessions, intensive training workshops, and an expo floor packed with companies that can help you grow your business. While you're at it, network with peers and leading industry vendors. Programmed by the SES advisory board, you can be assured - SES content really is king! ...
View All ›
 
Share
 
| More
RSS-XML alerts
Print this page
E-mail this page to a friend