TUANZ - Telecomunications Users Association Of New Zealand

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Posted Fri 26 February 2010 @ 12:31 p.m. by Ernie

Everything has its day. "Mouthpiece" is no exception.For several years its been a popular resource for contact centre professionals up and down new Zealand. But since the recession, things have changed dramatically in the contact centre arena. We've seen a decline in visitor numbers to this part of our site, while the viability of luncheons, awards and conferences specific to contact centres has evaporated. We can see no sign of it coming back.So reluctantly, our Board has decided to stick...

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Nortel Asia gives its take on unified comms

Posted Wed 3 June 2009 @ 12:48 p.m. by Ernie

Nortel Asia is running around New Zealand this week giving its take on unified communications. Speaker Darren Leffler, a veteran of the TUANZ circuit, hails from Sydney, and is accompanied by colleague Steve Harris from Melbourne. There are a lot of messages in Leffler’s presentation which I found rich in insight. To me it lifted the case for unified communications to a new level. Check here for more on UC. He talked a lot about the notion of “human latency” – the delays caused by people’s unavailability...

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Thoughts on Managing Through a Recession

Posted Fri 20 March 2009 @ 7:17 a.m. by Ernie

I rarely blog here on Mouthpiece but thought I'd make a break after attending a couple of Megan Lacy's "Managing your contact centre through a recession" sessions this week. Megan's going to post a major summary of the conclusions once she's back in Tauranga and has recovered her composure and voice. She did a great job, along with all those who contributed their thinking by video or in writing - thanks from TUANZ to you all.I guess if I had one big "takeaway" it is this:Over the years when I've...

Categories: Benchmarking | Events | Leadership | Recruitment and HR

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A new way to audit your Centre?

Posted Thu 4 December 2008 @ 4:37 p.m. by Megan

Curiosity got the better of me this week, and I had to find out what this new contact centre audit tool was all about. New Zealand based business Customer Services Audit are promoting their new Snapshotz software that is specifically design for contact centres.How do you benchmark your Contact Centre and/or perform a full audit on all areas? From my perspective, I had barriers that were time, effort and price. Enter Snapshotz, what can it do? Does this software cover all areas of...

Categories: Benchmarking | Profile | Technology | Vendors

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Speech Recognition-Don't make me talk to the automated person...

Posted Thu 20 November 2008 @ 1:22 p.m. by Megan

I was out to dinner with small but successful business the other night and the conversation got on to contact centre’s that have speech recognition as part of their service option when calling. And the most disappointing thing was that there were no ‘happy’ service stories with the technology during the evening. One story was of a genuine cough during the call and the next thing this person was transferred to another area as it ‘recognisied’ a cough as a word. I know this is might be an extreme...

Categories: Benchmarking | Leadership | Lifestyle | Technology

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Workforce Management, do you want to know more

Posted Wed 17 September 2008 @ 11:58 a.m. by Megan

Do you want to know more about Workforce Management and Solutions. The difference between Skills based routing vs Skills based scheduling. How to handle multimedia work and how ACD and Workforce systems interact with each other. Giles Potter from Great Outcomes has found a great website that answers these questions, plus alot more. We have added this to our Resource Library under Workforce Management go here>

Categories: Benchmarking | Leadership

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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

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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),...

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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

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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

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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...

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Hanging out with the Manawatu Contact Centre Cluster

Posted Wed 19 March 2008 @ 9:07 p.m. by Sarah

The Manawatu Contact Centre Cluster held their first meeting of the year today and I was lucky enough to be invited to make a presentation to the group. About 30 managers and team leaders were present from 9 centres around the Manawatu and lower North Island. It’s such a vibrant area for contact centres and I was left wondering how much of this is down to the fact that those who work in the region are committed to getting together on a semi-regular basis (about four times a year) and sharing...

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Offshoring of contact centres can be two-way

Posted Sun 24 February 2008 @ 12:09 p.m. by Ernie

Two different stories about offshoring of contact centres hit my inbox this morning, and I happened to read one immediately after the other.First, the DomPost reports that Telecom is investigating replacing jobs in its Hamilton contact centre with outsourced roles in the Philippines. Second, finding outsourcing to Canada is becoming less attractive as the Canadian currency strengthens against the US, so some US businesses that outsourced their contact centres to Canada a few years...

Categories: Benchmarking | Events | Lifestyle | Recruitment and HR

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E-govt – 6 days to answer an email!

Posted Mon 18 February 2008 @ 2:32 p.m. by Sarah

I've just received a press release from Otago University about research conducted by Associate Professor Robin Gauld from the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine. Apparently his team of researchers has been studying e-government responsiveness – a flash way of saying that they’ve worked out how long it takes to get a reply from a government agency when you send them an email. Professor Gauld says the team emailed 273 government agencies in New Zealand Australia. The message asked...

Categories: Benchmarking | Technology

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Judges tips for 2008 TUANZ Contact Centre Awards

Posted Fri 15 February 2008 @ 6:49 a.m. by Sarah

Entries for the TUANZ Contact Centre Awards are now open and can be accessed on our website. This year, the entry criteria has been completely revamped by a panel of three of our most experienced judges* in order to ensure they reflect best practice in the contact centre profession in 2008. Filling out the online entry forms is the first, very crucial stage. If you can effectively express your achievements in writing, you will make it into the second round. Once you are in the finals, the...

Categories: Benchmarking | Events | Leadership | Recruitment and HR | Technology

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Conference programme at the printer

Posted Wed 13 February 2008 @ 9:30 p.m. by Sarah

Well the TUANZ Contact Centre Conference and Awards 2008 Programme is off to the printers and it's 8 pages long. No wonder I haven’t had any time to write Mouthpiece blogs! It feels like a novel (with plenty of interesting characters I assure you!). TUANZ members should receive the programme in the mail early next week. You all know about our keynote – Kare Anderson – and the theme is Leadership and we’ll be having site visits and well, I think that’s all I’m willing to divulge. Today at any rate....

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Site visits return to Conference programme

Posted Thu 24 January 2008 @ 8:14 a.m. by Sarah

A popular feature of the TUANZ Contact Centre Conference in the past has been the organised visits to Auckland-based contact centres. We didn't run the tours last year, but there have been calls to bring them back for 2008.As always, we're open to the views of Mouthpiece readers. So if you there's a contact centre you'd like to visit, or if you manage an Auckland-based contact centre and would like to host a tour please email our Events Manager Leah Neels - leah@tuanz.org.nz. Alternatively you can...

Categories: Benchmarking | Events | Profile

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Ma'as Salaama 2007

Posted Fri 21 December 2007 @ 9:19 a.m. by Sarah

For those of you wondering, Ma’as Salaama means goodbye in the version of Arabic spoken in Egypt. Or at least according to the website I just Googled it does. I thought it would be an appropriate way to sign off on the Mouthpiece blog for 2007 because the post about Vodafone outsourcing the pre-pay section of its contact centre to Egypt was one of the top five blogs for 2007.The metric I’ve chosen to assess blog popularity is the number of comments the post received. Scanning through all 106 posts...

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Government researches good service delivery

Posted Fri 28 September 2007 @ 8:58 a.m. by Sarah

The State Services Commission is taking an active role in researching and promoting customer service expectations in the Government’s contact centres. Earlier this year it commissioned a Colmar Brunton survey into service delivery - the report, entitled ‘Satisfaction and Trust in the State Services’, showed the perception of the civil service is more negative than the actual service it’s customers receive. According to the study, while 58% of respondents perceive the overall quality of public service...

Categories: Benchmarking | Leadership

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Only 50% of technology used effectively

Posted Mon 30 July 2007 @ 1:48 p.m. by Sarah

When Datacraft representative Paul Goode moved to New Zealand he was initially impressed with the high level of technology adopted by contact centres. His first thoughts were that the local scene was equal to Scandinavian countries in being the most technically advanced in the world. Then he discovered that while New Zealand contact centres might have the gear, they aren’t using it effectively. He estimates that only 50% of technology in contact centres is actually utilised. Goode has 15...

Categories: Benchmarking | Technology | Vendors

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Statistics, trends and strategies

Posted Mon 23 July 2007 @ 1:49 p.m. by Sarah

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about contact centre professionals, it’s that nothing quickens the pulse quite like a good set of statistics. And that, Mouthpiece readers, is what the Datacraft presentation at the Contact Centre Networking Event is set to deliver. I’ve been offered a sneak preview of the presentation and it’s sure to get the pens racing across the page. Based on the Dimension Data Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report, a number of key findings are backed by statistics...

Categories: Benchmarking | Events

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How do you measure First Call Resolution?

Posted Thu 19 July 2007 @ 9:24 a.m. by Sarah

First Call Resolution might be the most important metric, but how do you measure it when your contact centre isn’t set up to complete every transaction? That’s the query from one contact centre manager at a national financial organisation with multiple branches. Here’s her dilemma: “We complete 70% of the functions that a branch does except for specialized investments and lending etc. These calls have to go through to the branch or specialist to deal with as they can’t be handled in our contact...

Categories: Benchmarking | Leadership

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Is 10 seconds standard for abandonment rates?

Posted Tue 10 July 2007 @ 10:04 a.m. by Sarah

When do you start measuring abandoned calls? Ten seconds after the connection or 10 seconds after the voice announcement is complete? Or is there an entirely different industry standard? That’s the query from one manager whose had conflicting advice on how long to allow before a counting an ‘abandoned call’. They had thought the industry standard was 10 seconds, but they were recently advised that as their voice announcement (which offers alternative contact numbers) is 29 seconds, abandoned calls...

Categories: Benchmarking | Profile

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The metric that matters the most

Posted Thu 7 June 2007 @ 1:40 p.m. by Sarah

The most important metric for customer satisfaction is First Call Resolution (FCR) according to Lyn Trewenack, director of ST Squared and associate partner AsiaPacific, SQM Group.SQM Group work with more than 260 contact centres worldwide and have surveyed over 500,000 customers every year for the past 11 years. Trewenack is a speaker at this month’s TUANZ Contact Centre Conference and I caught up with her today to find out why FCR is rated ahead of other key metrics. I was particularly interested...

Categories: Benchmarking | Events | International

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TUANZ member survey – benchmarking services

Posted Wed 23 May 2007 @ 1:55 p.m. by Sarah

Results from the membership survey TUANZ conducted this month on the usefulness of benchmarking services for contact centres has produced some interesting results. The areas where the services appear particularly strong is in providing information on performance measures and comparisons with other contact centres in the same industry. Areas that aren't being covered as well are technology, financial management and comparisons with contact centres in the global marketplace. The survey ran from May...

Categories: Benchmarking

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