August 2002
Keeping Customer Satisfied is Big Business
Good customer service is something Australians generally pride themselves on but one Adelaide company believes there is still room for improvement. Click here for full article.

October 2001
Interact presents at International Conference
Interact Managing Director Trevor Richards has presented a paper on Interact's Customer Information Quality (CIQ) Methodology at a prestigious international IQ conference in London. Click here for full article.

June 2001
New Privacy legislation set to drive Data Quality improvements in Corporate Australia
"The new legislation will lead to corporations focusing effort on both the content and structure of their Customer Information", Mr Richards said. "In particular, the Act calls for companies to ensure that personal information they collect is accurate, complete and up to date". Click here for full article.

August 2002
Keeping Customer Satisfied is Big Business

Good customer service is something Australians generally pride themselves on but one Adelaide company believes there is still room for improvement.

InteractCM specialises in helping businesses to build greater customer satisfaction, here and overseas.

Managing director Trevor Richards said there were a number of ways companies, particularly in finance and retail, alienated their clients.

It could be calling people by their wrong title, not knowing their product or services or repetitive telesales calls.

He said mistakes including customers who "more than a 1000 years old", 12-year-olds issued with credit cards because of poor date of birth records and demanding payment when no money was owed.

"Many Australian businesses are failing to take advantage of one of their major assets - their customer base,"he said. "We get large organisations to treat customers individually like the local corner store owner."

"Then the customer does not feel like a number on a data-base, rather someone has taken the time to treat them as a person."

In the past 18 months InteractCM has doubled in size and in turnover after opening a Sydney office.

It now has large scale clients who have a million customers or more.

"In the next 12 to 18 months we want to build our relationships in the United States and United Kingdom," Mr Richards said.

"With those opportunities we should be able to grow significantly, employing 100-people plus in the next two or three years."

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October 2001
InteractCM presents at International Conference

Interact Managing Director Trevor Richards presented a paper on Interact's Customer Information Quality (CIQ) Methodology at a prestigious international IQ conference in London. Trevor's presentation was based on methodology developed and applied by InteractCM in very large-scale consumer and business customer environments.

Several of the 60 plus conference participants from a broad cross section of industries commented that Mr Richards' experience in Customer Information Quality "really showed" and that his paper was "practical, insightful and full of tips for Information Quality practitioners".

Interestingly, Trevor was on the same podium as Larry English, the American author of "Improving Data Warehouse and Business Information Quality". Contrasting the Larry English presentation with his own, Trevor observed that information quality practices for Customer Information were quite different from all other data types for several reasons. Customer Information is all pervasive, it is required for unique customer identification, yet it is typically dispersed through multiple (un-linked) repositories and, because of the common use of 20-year old industry standard ETL technology, master customer repositories and data warehouses alike are continually being polluted. As a result, the quality of these repositories naturally decays without any pro-active CIQ process in place.

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June 2001
New Privacy legislation set to drive Data Quality improvements in Corporate Australia

"The new legislation will lead to corporations focusing effort on both the content and structure of their Customer Information", Mr Richards said. "In particular, the Act calls for companies to ensure that personal information they collect is accurate, complete and up to date".

The Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Act 2000 enshrines ten National Privacy Principles for the protection of personal information. The Principles cover the following areas:
	Collection
	Use and disclosure
	Data quality
	Data security
	Openness
	Access and correction
	Identifiers
	Anonymity
	Trans-border data flows
	Sensitive information

"The new legislation will lead to corporations focusing effort on both the content and structure of their Customer Information", Mr Richards said. "In particular, the Act calls for companies to ensure that personal information they collect is accurate, complete and up to date".

Equally important, "Organisations must provide individuals with access to personal information held...". Providing customers with access to all information held by an organisation may prove to be a difficult challenge with many organisations possessing more than 50 sources of customer information. Integrating those sources of information in order to identify all points within the organisation where personal information is kept will test the resolve of companies to become truly customer focused.

Ensuring that appropriate alterations to staff training and business processes are aligned with the new requirements will prove to be another important aspect to companies' preparation. "Employee actions in collecting, using and disseminating personal information will be closely scrutinised during any Privacy audits", said Mr Richards.

Federal Privacy Commissioner Malcolm Crompton, responsible for implementing the Act, said "Some businesses and organisations are already in a strong position to comply with the Act while others may need to do some work to get their privacy house in order to conform to the Act." Organisations are expected to derive considerable commercial benefits from early preparation for the December 2001 date at which the legislation comes into effect.

For more information regarding the new Privacy legislation, please contact Interact or visit the Privacy Commissioner's website at http://www.privacy.gov.au/.