The number of seats in the ihug contact centre was boosted by 20 seats to 80 in January, following a difficult two months last year in which the company was widely criticized for poor customer relations.
Vodafone executive Russell Stephens has been drafted in as the general manager for Customer Care at ihug and his duties include managing the contact centre.
“I came across the first week of November, and November for a lot of people in the industry was a pretty horrendous month with spam and everything else. We had a horrendous service level and one that just wasn’t acceptable really,” he told me.
Stephens says in the last three months the ihug contact centre has improved its service level by a factor of five. Currently 80 per cent of calls are answered within a minute.
“One of the things I have to do in the next two months is not to decide what I want, but to talk to our customers about what they think is good, and also to look at the industry and understand what’s best practice in New Zealand,” he says.
Ihug are still in the process of detaching themselves from the iinet systems (see Mouthpiece blog about the iinet move to the Auckland CBD) and moving “towards the Vodafone environment”.
Stephens wouldn’t disclose call volumes and staff churn rates but he did invite me along to the contact centre to check it out for myself. Which I intend to do in a couple of weeks, so will tell you more about what’s happening at ihug then.