TUANZ

Auckland After 5's

Posted Tue 19 August 2008 @ 2:18 p.m. by Megan

I had the pleasure of attending the Agile After 5’s which happened to be a breakfast this morning in Auckland. 200 people came along to the event and we heard from Steve Shaw. One part of the presentation caught my attention. It was around the skills we are looking for in the Contact Centre space, in dealing with text and having the nous to reply to business emails. No real surprises there, but I believe that our Generation Y workforce are learning these basic communication skills at school anyway...

Categories: Events

Introducing Megan

Posted Tue 19 August 2008 @ 12:10 p.m. by Sarah

Great news! Megan Lacy has just signed on as the TUANZ Contact Centre Section Editor. In addition to editing the section, she will be finding and writing new content and contributing to Mouthpiece. Many of you will know Megan as she is a stalwart of the profession in New Zealand. Her last role was as the Contact Centre Manager for LIC, and she served as Chair of the TUANZ Contact Centre Committee. One of the really exciting features that Megan will be adding to the section is Talk Time with TUANZ....

Categories: Leadership | Profile

Vodafone adopts First Call Resolution as its primary metric

Posted Mon 11 August 2008 @ 3:32 p.m. by Sarah

Had an interesting conversation with Vodafone’s external relations manager Paul Brislen the other day about the metrics the company uses in its contact centre. Apparently they’ve just changed from Average Handling Time to First Call Resolution, which in typical Vodafone fashion has been rebranded as Right First Time. I immediately spotted a topic for a Mouthpiece blog post and emailed Paul straight away with my questions (in italics below). He spoke to Sarah Howells, Vodafone’s new GM of Service,...

Categories: Benchmarking | Profile | Recruitment and HR

Comments (7)

Hyperconnectivity, and Gen Y

Posted Mon 28 July 2008 @ 1:15 p.m. by Ernie

Hyperconnectivity! Its a wonderful word and sums up beautifully the presentation being given at the TUANZ Contact Centre lunches this week.In one of the most thought provoking and engaging presentations for some time, Darren Leffler of Nortel in Australia told the audience at our bulging Christchurch venue today about the impact of Web 2.0 on the contact centre. The new way Generation Y customer interact in Web 2.0 is a historic inflexion point, he said.Leffler - a Gen X who got an iPod for his 40th...

Categories: Events | International | Technology | Vendors

Comments (4)

Outsourcing and TV3

Posted Fri 25 July 2008 @ 5:33 a.m. by Sarah

Did anyone happen to catch the Campbell Live piece about outsourcing on TV3? It was prompted by a review of the KiwiShare in which the government suggests that certain core services such as the 123 service remain in New Zealand based contact centres. Outsourcing is a contentious topic, and when it focused on the local scene, the article drew some interesting responses. EPMU secretary Andrew Little discussed the impact of losing contact centre jobs in Hamilton and Palmerston North and TUANZ Chief...

Categories: International | Profile

Do not call list - United Future wants legislation

Posted Wed 16 July 2008 @ 4:54 a.m. by Ernie

As the election approaches and parties look around for differentiating issues, United Future has called for outbound telemarketing to be legislated through a national "do not call" list. This is despite the voluntary list that has been run for several years now by the Marketing Association.While there is no doubt telemarketers can sometimes be persistent and annoying, the issue in New Zealand has reached nothing like the scale of countries such as the USA where some consumers had reported receiving...

Categories: International | Lifestyle | Technology

Comments (10)

Contact centre lunches – what’s happening?

Posted Wed 9 July 2008 @ 5:12 p.m. by Ernie

Something great is happening to the TUANZ contact centre lunch programme! After a year in the doldrums the numbers have really bounced back over these last few months. In June we had an unexpected surge to 230 people across the 3 centres with a great presentation from UCMS. (In fact, in Auckland our numbers caught the venue on the hop and the delay getting fed was such that they sent all our attendees a voucher for a free drink to say “sorry.”) But I’m surprised and delighted to see that we’re repeating...

Categories: Events

TUANZ lifting the bar on contact centre activities for 2008/2009

Posted Wed 9 July 2008 @ 4:57 p.m. by Ernie

Bernice Archer, TUANZ Key Relationships Manager, reports as follows: “Following a decision in May by the TUANZ Board to allocate more resources to serving the needs of contact centres, A dynamic and buzzing TUANZ Contact Centre Committee convened a few days ago for a Strategic Planning Session for 2008 through to 2010. Committee Chair Megan Lacy (Livestock Improvement Corp), committee members Anne Withington (TelstraClear), Paul Eastwood (Coca Cola Amatil), Giles Potter (Great Outcomes),...

Comments (3)

Telemarketers the least trusted profession in NZ – Readers Digest

Posted Wed 25 June 2008 @ 4:45 p.m. by Sarah

The Readers Digest has released its annual most trusted list and it’s not great news for you folk in outbound sales. Out of 40 professions, telemarketers came out rock bottom at 40th – below sex workers, politicians and real estate agents.The reason? “‘They don’t appear to have the best interests of people at heart,’ says Hall (a business consultant and author of The Truth About Trust), who cites their pushiness and need to reach targets as the key impediment to trust. We suggest they change their...

Categories: Benchmarking | Profile

We're all in sales now

Posted Mon 23 June 2008 @ 5:26 p.m. by Sarah

I’m on the plane returning from a jam-packed Contact Centre Lunch in Christchurch. Any three of the speakers chosen by host Nick Egerton from UCMS could have held the room for 40 minutes, but together under the title ‘The Importance of Customer Interaction’ they presented a comprehensive session on this broad topic.Chris Price from Permission (specialists in online marketing) talked about how to turn website leads into paying customers. That is, the casual user who is looking for a product or service...

Categories: Events | Recruitment and HR | Technology | Vendors

Monitoring agents on the web – but where’s the trust?

Posted Tue 17 June 2008 @ 10:52 a.m. by Sarah

Staff abusing their web privileges and wasting time on sites like Trademe and Facebook is a problem that plagues many contact centres. There is plenty of software out there that will monitor individual workstations, and I often get press releases emailed to me from companies advertising their solutions. But the one I received today for a product called Spector 360, gave me pause. Here’s their advertising pitch: With Spector 360 you will find out: Which agents are off-task instead of doing their...

Categories: Leadership | Recruitment and HR | Technology | Vendors

Contact Centre – industry or profession?

Posted Fri 13 June 2008 @ 7:56 a.m. by Sarah

“New Zealand contact centres are dynamic, productive and exciting, and very well regarded in the global customer service and sales community.” That statement is on the back of the cover of the DVD 'NZ Contact Centre Industry Profile', and you will find no argument to that claim in this blog. But, I do have a query about the title of the DVD – in particular the use of the word ‘industry’. Can we really describe contact centres in this way? Isn’t an industry about a product or service – for example,...

Categories: International | Profile

Speech analytics – is this the next big thing?

Posted Thu 5 June 2008 @ 8:39 a.m. by Sarah

It appears the tech boffins are at it again – they’ve come up with a software tool that will electronically analyse what customers say, text and blog about a company. According to an article in this month’s CIO magazine, text analytics technology is able to group and categorize customer comments and then electronically produce an easy-to-read report that will pin point for senior management exactly where customer dissatisfaction lies. The article features a case study about a hotel chain in America....

Categories: International | Technology

“You’ve just wasted all my time.”

Posted Mon 19 May 2008 @ 9:10 a.m. by Sarah

As a contributor to Mouthpiece I’ve shied away from dissing contact centre agents, having been of the opinion that there is plenty of that going on in other media and we’re about supporting the profession. But over the weekend I was told an anecdote at a social occasion which led me to consider just about how much power the humble agent has. Because if it’s true that a manager is only as good as his or her staff; then senior management needs to realise their brand’s reputation is only as good as...

Categories: Leadership | Recruitment and HR

Marketing struggles to be heard in the boardroom too

Posted Thu 15 May 2008 @ 4:24 p.m. by Sarah

One of the issues contact centre managers struggle with is how to get the ear of their company's CEO and its board. So I couldn't help but smile when, in the latest issue of NZ Marketing Magazine, chief executive of the Marketing Association Sue McCarty mentioned boardroom buy-in was a hot topic at a recent US conference run by The Economist."There was a lot of talk about the challenge of getting marketing into the boardroom and the language and approach senior marketers need to adopt in order...

Categories: Events | International | Leadership

80/20 – why is this the ubiquitous metric?

Posted Tue 13 May 2008 @ 8:47 a.m. by Sarah

If there is one metric that appears to be universal it’s the target 80/20 – that is 80 per cent of all calls answered within 20 seconds. I was reminded of this while reading a summary report on the Telecommunication Dispute Scheme, which mentioned the Scheme’s administrators had exceeded this telephony target. But why is 80/20 such a ubiquitous metric? Where did it come from? This was a question that came up at the Contact Centre Conference workshop on metrics and then, just last week, a very...

Categories: Benchmarking | International

Clarity, Specificity, Brevity, Power of the pause – Conference 08

Posted Thu 1 May 2008 @ 9:57 a.m. by Sarah

As a delegate, the success of a conference can be measured by the number of tools that you take back to your workplace the next day. So it was rather good of keynote Kare Anderson to provide so many 'take-home' in the first session on day one of the TUANZ Contact Centre Conference 2008. Her insights into how we communicate and how those at the coalface of customer service can ensure they make a good – and lasting – impression, were extremely valuable According to Kare, there are four ways to can...

“This time it’s different”: Contact Centre Manager of the Year Winner

Posted Tue 29 April 2008 @ 4:00 p.m. by Sarah

It was another night to remember for the Contact Centre profession at the 2008 TUANZ Awards on Thursday. Around 630 filled the banqueting room to hear MC Dominic Bowden announce this year’s top professionals. All the winners were enthusiastic in their acceptance speeches, all the crowd gracious in their support. Dominic mingled with some show biz pals in the room – Comedian’s Irene Pink (winner of Contact Centre Manager of the Year under 25 seats) and Mike King. The small army of SkyCity staff...

Categories: Events | Leadership | Profile | Recruitment and HR

Boxes, buses and corporate tables

Posted Thu 17 April 2008 @ 10:08 p.m. by Sarah

We closed registrations for the Awards this morning because we had to get the numbers through to SkyCity. Because we offer menu options, we have to tell them a week out from the event – but the room was pretty much at capacity anyway. Still some people haven’t quite got the message about cut-off dates. I took this photo of Leah just as I was leaving the office tonight. She was on the phone frantically trying to see if she could get 14 more people a table for the Awards – never mind that a table...

Categories: Events | Vendors

Dear diary...

Posted Wed 16 April 2008 @ 9:53 p.m. by Sarah

OK, so the prizes for the networking and exhibitor competitions are in, the speakers presentations are mostly here, we’ve confirmed the meeting with the Awards MC for next week, our keynote has emailed to say she’s excited about coming over, the committee are all …. Yes, yes, less than a week to go before kick-off and heaps of stuff still to do, but mostly we’re just really excited about the Conference and the Awards. Fielding questions and making sure all our delegates are well informed about...

Categories: Events | International | Leadership

The cheques are on their way – delivering great customer service

Posted Thu 10 April 2008 @ 5:18 p.m. by Sarah

Customer service is simple. A dollop of product knowledge, a dash of niceness and a sprinkling of common sense and you have the tried and true recipe for customer service delivery. Simple right? Actually no, it’s not. I’d even go so far to say it’s the opposite of simple. Good customer service is complex because human beings are complex. Every time a customer phones a contact centre to ask about a product or service, the agent who answers must not only deal with the enquiry, they must contend...

Categories: International | Recruitment and HR

Telecom to continue outsourcing

Posted Thu 10 April 2008 @ 5:15 p.m. by Sarah

Telecom has signaled to investors that it intends to continue with outsourcing its contact centres. In an article on stuff.co.nz, chief executive Paul Reynolds is reported to have announced that the company plans to push its policy of outsourcing. Is this good news for the contact centre profession? I guess it depends on whether the business is moved to an outsourced centre in NZ or Manila. Of course telcos aren’t averse to outsourcing offshore, with Vodafone’s highly publicized move to Egypt provoking...

Categories: Events | International | Recruitment and HR

Comments (3)

You can leave your suitcase

Posted Thu 3 April 2008 @ 9:19 a.m. by Sarah

Registrations for the Contact Centre Conference and Awards are rolling in but this year we’ve had a bit of feedback about the fact the Awards ceremony is the day before Anzac Day. Some of you, especially those from out of town, are a little concerned about having to travel the next day. One manager told me he had an 8am flight the next day, and while that hadn’t stopped him booking a corporate table for the Awards (good man!); he was wondering a little about how he’d cope. So I rather cavalierly...

Categories: Events | International

TUANZ Contact Centre Awards - finalists announced

Posted Thu 20 March 2008 @ 3:25 p.m. by Sarah

The finalists for the 2008 TUANZ Contact Centre Awards have been confirmed. Thanks to all those who took the time to enter the awards and good luck to all those who made the final. You can check out the list of finalists here.See you all at SkyCity in Auckland for the black-tie awards ceremony at the TUANZ Contact Centre Conference next month.

Categories: Events | Leadership | Profile | Recruitment and HR