AS THE recession bites, customer retention is becoming more and more critical for the UK's mobile network operators. However, O2 now has a secret weapon in its armoury – call centre software supplied by Jacada.

O2 has a team of around 850 call centre agents who work in what it calls its 'retentions group' to try to dissuade customers who are presently on contracts from leaving the network.

The act of leaving one network and joining a rival service is known as 'churn' in industry speak.

The level of competition and churn can be gauged from the fact that Vodafone just lost 27,000 out of its total of 18.5 million subscribers in the last quarter.

The tactics employed to 'retain' customers across all the major networks are the same. The agents try to provide 'rewards' – most often a new handset, or to make 'offers' – such as trying to match or beat rival operators' tariffs. All to keep the contract customer onboard.

The catch is that the whole process is time critical. Agents can't put callers on hold for three minutes and play them music while they try to find a better deal.

Unfortunately, those same agents are faced with searching through multiple applications just to get the information they require. Some appsare so old they have IBM-style green screens.

What Jacada's software does is bring this all together into a single UI which the agent can easily understand.

The technique used to be known as 'screen scraping' but Jacada flinches at the mention of such a term. It would probably prefer to call it software re-engineering.

The results are the same because it's much faster, cheaper and easier to con vert old UIs into a current HTML format than it is to spend the dosh on bringing legacy apps up to date.

The INQ was hoping that O2 and Jacada would spill the beans and quantify just how much of an improvement the software roll-out makes. O2 probably doesn't want the opposition to get wind of how much difference it makes, though.

The good news is that if you're an existing O2 contract subscriber, you're bound to be able to haggle a much better deal out of the call centre than was ever possible before. µ