Telecom is getting ready to implement its new NGT (Next Generation Telecom) customer service technologies – it sounds like overdue good news.
What does it all mean? For the contact centre staff, I believe it will speed up their resolution time with customers, as they will have a newer, faster, more customer-friendly system to work with. They will finally have some bells and whistles to work with as they don’t have much flexibility with the current Integrated Customer Management System (ICMS).
Why do I care? As an ex-employee of Telecom and having grown up with “old faithful” ICMS, I feel a little nostalgic about it all. It was past its used-by-date when I was there in the 90s – you had to click through screens, and the shortcuts were your saviour if you could remember the screen number. For those still wondering, it is a ‘green screen’ world. It had fixes and patches and complexity everywhere, so was getting hard to be classed as user-friendly.
Telecom notes that a feature in the new system is virtual hold, so you don’t lose your place in the queue when calling into the contact centres. Boring – that’s been around for years. My 25-seat centre had that for the last five years! It’s about time Telecom caught up with that option for customers.
Another feature is PC remote. Hmmm… again, it’s not leading technology anymore. But three cheers for online self-service though and contextual web chat sessions.
Costing $6-$8 million to deploy, you would hope they have listened to customers at some stage as well. To even get a quality CRM is a huge leap forward and since it’s one of the biggest businesses in New Zealand, it’s about time.
Telecom has been running on this ‘spaghetti’ on 'spaghetti' system for too long.
All in all, it’s good news, it means sharper, streamlined processes for staff. Customers should get the benefits via new options to communicate with Telecom.
I’m even going to say a better level of customer service in the long term (maybe it’s the ex-employee in me saying that!). Only time will tell.
Read the Computerworld article, click here