Louise Wilson, APN
TUANZ Contact Centre Manager
of the Year 2007 (26 - 75 seats)
Louise Wilson may have spent 15 years of her working life in media sales, but when she took charge of APN’s outbound sales team, she had zero experience as a contact centre manager. Yet in just a year she has turned it into one of the most profitable business units in the company, and she’s been named the 2007 TUANZ Contact Centre manager of the year (for 26 – 75 seats).
This achievement is especially significant when you consider that as a company APN has embraced the concept of outsourcing. In an unusual move for a high-profile media establishment (APN publishes The New Zealand Herald) the sub editing department has been moved off shore. And yet the outbound contact centre, the area of a business that is often the first to be outsourced, remains not only in the country but in the company’s main offices in downtown Auckland.
Yet in May 2006 when Wilson took over it was a different story. Staff churn was high and morale was low. When I paid a visit to APN this week, one agent on the floor told me that on the day he started two years ago three people left and he wondered what he’d gotten himself into.
The most significant change Wilson made was to restructure the centre into five markets – or ‘pillars’ as they are referred to at APN - real estate, motoring, retail, employment and general classifieds. Agents sell classifieds in each of these pillars across three newspapers and are given targets both individually and as a team.
But perhaps the greatest pay off to the centre has been in aligning its structure to the way the business itself operates. By doing so it has not only increased revenue (a real achievement when you consider that classified adverts are on the decline globally), but it has turned itself into a vital source of market information. As Wilson explains:
“We have more customer touch points in the pillars than any other part of the business, so that’s a tremendous amount of market intelligence and knowledge that we have and that we use - whether that’s initiatives or product development or business planning. Having that as an integral part of the sales force, which is where we’re at now, is immensely valuable to APN. You couldn’t get that from outsourcing.”
Wilson’s primary role at APN is in strategic development and it was in this capacity that she was asked to take on the challenge of turning around an ailing contact centre. She’s clearly achieved this goal and has the accolades to boot. In addition, she has embraced the TUANZ award, not as an individual achievement, but as recognition for her entire team. She told me that one of the great things about entering the TUANZ awards was that it gave the centre an opportunity to review a year of rapid progress and change and to appreciate just how far they’d come. She said the same presentation that they gave to the judges, they later gave to the staff.
When I arrived at Wilson’s centre to interview her about the TUANZ award, she had a cup of coffee waiting for me. Later she explained that it was ‘fair trade’ and although this seems like a tiny detail to mention, in the end it is what impressed me the most. She may have the vision to carry out disruptive and substantial change (and completely restructuring a 41-seat outbound centre with 44 sales deadlines a week is no walk in the park) but she also has the intuition to know that a successful contact centre is all about making people feel valued - even a visiting blogger.