ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Announces a Comprehensive Business Partnership between ITOCHU Corporation, CTC, and BELLSYSTEM24 Holdings, Inc. in the BPO Business Field with an Emphasis on CRM

Aug 17, 2015 ITOCHU Corporation
ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation
BELLSYSTEM24 Holdings

ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (headquartered in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; Satoshi Kikuchi, President & CEO; hereinafter "CTC") announced today that it had concluded a comprehensive business partnership with ITOCHU Corporation (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; Masahiro Okafuji, President & CEO; hereinafter "ITOCHU") and BELLSYSTEM24 Holdings, Inc. (headquartered in Chuo-ku, Tokyo; Kenji Komatsu, President & CEO; hereinafter "BELLSYSTEM24HD") in the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) business field. This partnership will primarily focus on CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and the contact center business.
A project team jointly established in July by these three companies will play a key role in promoting the planning and developing new services, deepening relationships with existing customers through joint businesses, and developing new customers.

In recent years, the number of organizations that use BPO service has been on the rise. This increase reflects the desire of organizations to concentrate their management resources, such as human resources and systems, in their key businesses in order to streamline operations. At the same time, more organizations are outsourcing indirect operations to external companies. In the midst of this changing environment, contact centers play a key role in the BPO field. For customers, contact centers are the first point of contact, and the range of operations handled by these centers is expanding as indirect operations diversify. In addition to traditional operations, contact centers are now also responsible for things such as data entry agents, various survey agents, and the creation of operation manuals.

With this comprehensive business partnership, the business know-how on business expansion possessed by ITOCHU, the cutting-edge IT offered by CTC, and the operation know-how on customer operation held by BELLSYSTEM24, Inc. (hereinafter "BELLSYSTEM24"), a group company of BELLSYSTEM24HD, will be combined to provide CRM and contact center services that represent the latest BPO services.
The aim of this partnership is to develop services to improve customer satisfaction. Specifically, this includes the realization of an omni-channel contact center*1 based on WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication), a standard that allows for the communication of sounds and image data on Web browsers, the automatization of services and operations utilizing software robots that facilitate the automatization of operations, and cognitive computing*2 that makes it possible to systematically accumulate operation know-how and the analysis of voices of customers by combining a state-of-the-art affect analysis engine and text mining*3 to streamline operations as well as improve services.

ITOCHU is consistently strengthening its initiatives for non-resource areas with an emphasis on the consumer-related sector. Its aim is to position the BPO business, which is highly compatible with IT, as one of the new core businesses and propel its development.

CTC has handled numerous contact center-related products, and thus is well-versed in the system architecture and operation of a large size contact center that links various products. In addition, CTC is also working on a big data business, which serves as a platform for Cloud utilization and information analysis, in order to improve cost effectiveness. For this reason, CTC has listed the expansion of the BPO business and other service style businesses as a key issue in the mid-term management plan.

BELLSYSTEM24 is a leading company in the CRM field and has over 30 years of experience managing contact centers. It provides high-quality contact center services from its own 25 domestic operation centers and hubs staffed by approximately 22,000 operators. In addition to the traditional service providing methods utilizing telephone as a chief service channel, it is working actively to develop new BPO services utilizing new channels such as SNS.

The project team is determined to actively promote service development and acquire new customers in the future by utilizing its strengths in each business territory, and thereby make a positive impact in the revenue of each organization at an early stage.

  • *1 Omni-channel contact center  Omni-channel contact center refers to a contact center that can communicate with the same customer through multiple channels such as telephone, fax, mail, SNS, chat, and videophone. They are able to provide consistent services by linking various channels.
  • *2 Cognitive computing  Cognitive computing refers to a system that utilizes a large quantity of data and can understand natural languages spoken by human beings, as well as learn languages through conversation.
  • *3 Text mining  Text mining refers to a method or system that divides a group of non-standard sentences into words and phrases by utilizing a method of natural language analysis, and then extracts effective information by analyzing the frequency of use and correlations between words.

Contact Information

ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation, Corporate Communications Dept.

E-mail:press@ctc-g.co.jp

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