Contact Centre Manager of the Year under 25 seats - Irene Pink, NZ Post
Our thanks to Irene Pink from New Zealand Post Call Centr
e and her team.
1. Congratulations on your win. NZ Post has certainly evolved over recent years from the traditional post office functions to new the products and services offerings. Can you tell us what role does the contact centre in NZ Post have now and for the future, and/or how does the contact centre fit into the NZ Post strategy (i.e.: what products and services is the centre responsible for)?
New Zealand Post call centres fit into the postal group side of our business. It is the front facing part of our customer strategy in which our integrated channel strategy plays a major role. The centres support our consumer, business and internal customers
2. As part of your winning Award entry, you would have outlined some of your targets - are you able to share some of them with the TUANZ contact centre community. If so, what are they and how do you meet them?
One of my targets was to increase the amount of sales my business teams achieve through better questioning and opportunity gathering. We believe that great customer service is about understanding the needs of the businesses calling us and being able to offer or suggest a better way of sending or posting or communicating with their own customers.
We will be concentrating our efforts through increased sales questioning training and measuring this by an increase in lead takes
3. In your opinion do you think entering the awards (evaluating the metric you use, and how you manage your team) was useful. If so, can you provide us with tangible examples of what you learned during the process?
In all honesty I didn’t want to enter the awards but was encouraged to by my boss. It meant a lot of data gathering and having to sit down and really analyse what it was I was trying to achieve and how I needed to go about doing this.
Even if I hadn’t have won, the exercise of filtering down my achievements and goals was invaluable and will hold me in good stead for the future.
4. It's been over six months since the TUANZ Awards in April, what difference has the win made to you and the contact centre?
I’ve had a couple of invitations to talk at conferences and my team now have to curtsey when I enter the room…
5. After your success last year, it would be easy and very human, to sit back and bask in the glory. How do you motivate yourself and/or your team to achieve even more for the future?
Call centre environments are unforgiving and you’re only ever as good as your last month’s customer satisfaction results. Unfortunately ours have been a bit ropey of late so for me it’s back to the drawing board for a little while.
NZ Post Purpose: “We are people connecting people, helping New Zealand run”