Trustpower Contact Centre
Our thanks to Fiona Smith and her team at the Trustpower contact centres located at Tauranga and Oamaru.
Below - Tauranga Contact Centre
Please provide us with a brief overview of how your centre is structured and the main call types the centre receives?
We have two main inbound contact centres in Tauranga and Oamaru and a small “assistance centre" in Kaikohe to help us ensure we answer the phones quickly during peaks. We have a fantastic team of 70 CSRs plus our credit team and Kinect (phone and internet) teams plus the team that provides fault service 24 hours, 7 days a week. That is around 100 staff in all focussed on providing that seamless excellent customer experience.
We look after a myriad of calls from signing up for power to advice on how much appliances use, technical trouble shooting all the way through to lightning strikes taking out major sub stations when the power goes out! The crew is highly trained service focussed and “jacks of all trades”.
What is the overriding vision that drives your team?
Quality service and conversations that both the customer and my staff enjoy. We are focussed on getting it right and the elusive "one and done" (where the customer never has to call us back). The entire experience for our customers is incredibly important and weaving the customer experience ethos through all of our departments is key to our success.
What are some of main values you and your staff live by?
We have built a culture we are proud of where our staff's goals are aligned and focussed on the customer experience. Passion for service, innovation, quality conversations and simply getting the basics right are key drivers for us. A big part of our culture is to also let off steam and to have a bit of fun along the way!
What are the main challenges you are facing this year?
We have a brilliant new system coming which brings huge leaps forward in the way we will be able to proactively service our customers. The challenge will be maintaining our customer experience of low in queue waits as AHT rises while staff get familiar with the new system – it’s going to be great but we need to ensure our system does not impact our customers and cause stress for our front line staff.
Of course the economic wobbles have brought a challenge for our team. Ensuring we maintain a balance of working with our customers through tough times without placing the business at risk of not getting money in the door has been key. Across the last six months we have worked hard with those who have hit financial snags – and we must be doing something right as our actual disconnections for non payment have not gone up.
What systems or initiatives have you implemented that are delivering the best results for you right now?
Focus on "one and done" for the contact centre and "none and done" for our administration or back office units. This means if they send a letter, bill or do anything that impacts a customer that it will be done in such a way that it does not cause the customer to call as their job has been done well.
We have rewritten our Call Quality template and have moved further away from scripting and closer to a good old fashioned quality conversation. This is backed up by a heap of training and we invest heavily in developing our staff and giving them the right tools and trust to make good decisions for us and our customers.
We are calling those who we get great marks from in our real-time after-call survey to find out what we did right. And we are calling those who told us we failed so that we can learn from their experience and fix the problem quickly. No point doing a survey if you are not going to act on it!
Overdue text reminders for our customers – gently reminding them the bill is overdue or that their direct debit has failed. We are getting a fantastic response and payment of accounts using this method.
General information
- Seats - 100 across multi-skilled teams (CSR /credit /faults dispatch /Kinect (phone and internet) provisioning and technical help
- Staff numbers (back office, admin staff etc)- We have 220 staff on deck in Tauranga
- Induction training length - five full weeks of training with mix of classroom, theory, double jack, practical and soft skill training
- Ratio, inbound and outbound - Mainly inbound with 10% of staff making outbound contact with customers for call backs
- Call volumes - 11,000 CSR answered calls per week and our fully automated IVR systems answer around 2500 calls per week
- Average talk time - Across all queues 390 seconds
- Service level or grade of service or KPIs - 80/20 : Although our surveys and customer analysis shows that this measure is irrelevant if you don’t resolve the customer's query!
- Hours of operation - 24/7 for faults and 8am to 7pm for customer enquiries Monday to Friday
Technology used
- Phone system - Cogent
- Call recording - NICE
- WFM - Blue Pumpkin
- CRM - Will be part of our Oracle roll out, currently using Gentrac with very limited CRM capability
- Call routing software - Zeacom and Ve Commerce for speech recognition in queue routing
Oamaru Contact Centre Team Building
