ITOCHU Announces a Comprehensive Business Partnership between ITOCHU Corporation, CTC, and BELLSYSTEM24 Holdings, Inc.

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.