tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55771993117290490912024-03-14T14:38:34.385+13:00Life in the contact centre fast laneJohn Chetwynd, Managing Director of Telnet Services Limited shares case studies, tips, news and advice on successfully operating a contact centre and the industry as a whole.Telnet Services Ltdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16752352863371358593noreply@blogger.comBlogger55125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-41633954505204922412013-06-18T14:48:00.000+12:002013-06-18T14:49:18.736+12:0040 Stats Shaping the Future of Contact CentresI came across some interesting research that highlights the important role contact centres play in retaining customers. <a href="http://blog.vpi-corp.com/blog/performance-optimization-2/40-stats-shaping-the-future-of-contact-centers">Click here</a>.<br />
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The article brings home the ongoing importance of focusing on customer satisfaction. At Telnet we call this "The Care Factor" and we measure it with real-time <a href="http://www.netpromoter.com/">NPS</a> scores obtained via our IVR at the end of each call. Since introducing NPS about 2 years ago independent customer satisfaction surveys undertaken by our clients have all recorded significant improvements.<br />
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Happy customers stick around and Telnet's clients all love that!<br />
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John Chetwynd<br />
<br />John Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-71348521355571764412013-06-14T11:52:00.004+12:002013-06-14T11:56:44.124+12:00New Zealand CallingIt is good to see growing interest by Australian businesses in New Zealand as a location for their contact centres. View this story by Australian ABC News <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-13/new-zealand-calling-thousands-of-australian-jobs/4752974">Video</a><br />
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John ChetwyndJohn Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-6665460644024407012013-04-10T11:49:00.002+12:002013-04-10T11:49:55.772+12:00VIDEO: 2013 Census "Pop-Up" Contact Centre<br />
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The 2013 Census was the first full census for 7 years, and to handle the calls, . Telnet turned the Ballroom of the Stamford Plaza Hotel in the middle of Auckland City into a 170 seat temporary “Pop Up” contact centre.</div>
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Handling over 40,000 calls on census day itself, with wait times of only 4 seconds took an innovative approach.</div>
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Watch the video to see the full story.</div>
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<span style="text-align: start;">See </span><a href="http://www.telnet.co.nz/casestudies.aspx" style="text-align: start;">http://www.telnet.co.nz/casestudies.aspx</a><span style="text-align: start;"> for more Telnet case studies</span></div>
Steve Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15001204632410767524noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-91957510302128058062013-03-21T11:44:00.000+13:002013-04-10T10:55:53.954+12:00Creating the Census 2013 "Pop-up" Contact Centre<br />
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So how does a New Zealand contact centre make space for over 200 additional staff to take a massive hit of additional phone calls over predominantly a 3 day period? Oh, and there is to be no disruption to the existing work handled by the centre….</div>
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That was the challenge that Telnet’s IS team was given around 18 months ago when Telnet won the contract to once again provide contact centre services for the New Zealand census. </div>
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There were many things on our to-do list from making sure there were enough telephone lines, server capacity through to network and even internet bandwidth that made this something other than your normal contact centre project. The bigger challenge though – at least from a systems and resource perspective – was “where do we put everyone?”</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our home for the 2013 Census</td></tr>
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The perfect answer to this conundrum turned out to be somewhat unexpected – the ballroom of the 5-star Stamford Plaza hotel, in the heart of Auckland’s CBD (and only 100 metres or so from Telnet’s head office). Despite the rather unlikely sounding collaboration, the massively supportive hotel management and staff played host to hundreds of Telnet contact centre staff over the two main weeks of census, and became part of a success story that not only showcased the resourcefulness and innovation of Telnet’s IS team, but really brought to home how important it is that our suppliers really see themselves as true partners. <br />
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Indeed without our partners, and their engagement and excitement about this project (and them coming up with quite a few non-standard, outside the box ways for us to buy/hire/use their products or services) there is no way we could have pulled this off. Throughout this post I’ll mention a few of those key providers – not because they are paying us – but as my small way of saying thanks for all their help!</div>
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<a href="http://www.stamford.com.au/spak">Stamford Plaza</a> provided the space for us to work; their in house AV team from <a href="http://spyglass.co.nz/">Spyglass</a> worked their magic providing the not in significant supply of power to all the desks and <a href="http://vectorfibre.co.nz/">Vector Communications</a> handled the job of providing fibre services to connect our voice and data networks back to HQ. Next step was to install kit to all the desks; almost 1.5km of network patch leads, <a href="http://www.necbs.co.nz/">NEC</a> IP Phones, Power over Ethernet(PoE) network switches and lots and lots of HP Laptops and power supplies!</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One or two laptops....</td></tr>
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Making the decision to use laptops to provide the computer systems for the centre was an important one that saved a lot of time and energy in set up – though the initial challenge to the team was where we could get them from. Typical NZ based “events” don’t call for this quantity of hardware - so the “events rental” companies couldn’t really help. Luckily, our friends at<a href="http://www.public.co.nz/"> Public Technology</a> (who supply a lot of our desktop hardware) came through with a great mix of HP Elitebooks and Probooks that were more than capable of handling our ContactSuite application.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One of our UPS units along with <br />
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Using laptops and not desktop PCs also, almost by accident, solved another challenge of providing systems support to such a high profile event – by their very nature the laptops are tolerant of power loss – so this saved us from having to provide battery backed power for the desks. <a href="http://www.itpower.co.nz/">IT Power</a> provided us with UPS units to support our networking (including powering theVector kit at the hotel) – meaning we could continue to operate fully in the event of a short term (an hour or so) power failure.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Snapshot" stats display</td></tr>
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Once we had set up the desks, the final piece of the puzzle before adding the agents was plugging in all the headsets (provided by <a href="http://www.cackle.co.nz/">Cackle</a>), Firing up ContactSuite (developed by our own incredible development team – thank guys!!- powered by infrastructure from <a href="http://www.dimensiondata.com/rgn/nz/Pages/Home.aspx">Dimension Data</a>), and delivering some calls (which of course relied on the very excellent <a href="http://www.zeacom.com/">Zeacom</a> Communications Center product, with telco cloud based routing management through <a href="http://www.gen-i.co.nz/">Gen-i's </a> Tollfree Self Manage product. ) </div>
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Thanks to some pre-work, we had the contact centre live and taking calls within a couple of hours of us getting access to the room. Over the rest of that day, and the next two days, we fully set up the rest of the centre, moving staff to each newly configured set of workstations to give them some real world use before the big census day. We set up a projector and stats display (Using the Zeacom <a href="http://www.zeacom.com/products-services/products/multimedia-contact-center/business-intelligence/snapshot">Snapshot </a>product) so the whole centre could see the calls we were receiving, but more importantly, keeping our contact centre supervisors “heads up” and walking the floor, rather than tied to their desks watching the screen.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Pop-Up Centre in full flow</td></tr>
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Census day itself was pretty much the monster we expected –we took over 40,000 calls and 6000 emails but we had no significant technical issues with our new centre, had network utilisation (our 100Mbit Fibre links that we spent a lot of time worrying over!) of only around 20-30% at peak and perhaps best of all, our staff (most of these hired en-masse through WINZ – see John Chetwynd’s blogpost) answered all these calls with an average wait time of only 4 seconds.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"It's hardly even tickling the fibre link!"</td></tr>
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By the end of the “day-after-census” we were starting deconstruction. A day and a half, and a lot of packing, cable coiling, de-gaffa-taping and stacking later, we’d turned our contact centre back into three pallets of kit to go back to storage or our various suppliers. It was an awesome ride, and we’re proud to have been the supplier of services to such an important project as the NZ Census. </div>
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If you’d like to hear more about our story, or maybe even have a need for something like this yourself then drop us a line. In the mean time though, here are some of the people we'd like to thank, and a selection of photos from the pop-up Census 2013 contact centre at the Stamford Plaza.<br />
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Steve Hennerley, <br />
GM Information Systems<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A big thanks to all our partners!</td></tr>
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Steve Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15001204632410767524noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-15730560264999761412013-03-14T19:46:00.002+13:002013-07-26T15:06:17.540+12:00Census Helpline: Managing peak call volumesWhen you accept the contract to manage the help line for a country's Census you do so with a certain amount of trepidation. The experience is pretty unique. Typically a successful contact centre evolves over time through continuous process improvement both in terms of resourcing to meet expected volumes and delivering a quality experience.<br />
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With a project like Census the rules all change. The centre needs to scale from zero to major volumes in a matter of days and the staff need to hit the deck running answering a wide range of queries confidently and efficiently. This is what the team at Telnet has achieved in the last week with the New Zealand Census. In the attached press release we talk about how we answered 75,000 calls over 3 days with an average wait time of 3 seconds. We complemented our existing staff with over 200 temporaries obtained by our sister company <a href="http://www.callcentrepeople.co.nz/">CallCentre People Limited</a> who worked closely with Work and Income New Zealand (WINZ). Also, Knowledge Management systems, designed for ease of use, enabled staff to quickly identify and resolve customer queries.<br />
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I am pleased to say that with a lot of planning and very hard work by our loyal Telnet team we pulled it off. Programmes like this that test you and the learnings provide a platform for innovation and further growth.<br />
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John Chetwynd<br />
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<a href="http://www.callcentres.net/announcements/telnet-answers-more-than-75-000-calls-for-census">Press release</a></div>
John Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-9980293039291448672012-10-01T13:19:00.000+13:002012-10-01T13:24:21.285+13:00Are you over complicating your customer serviceI was reading this article by Schumpeter in last week's Economist <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21563295">(click here) </a> and I realised how closely it aligns with our thinking at Telnet.<br />
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We are finding that the more we focus on the basics of customer service the better our customer satisfaction scores become. We agree with Schumpeter when he infers that you need to make it easy for customers to contact you if they really need too. And of course when they do, make sure their query is understood and resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible.<br />
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It isn't rocket science really, but it does take a commitment to getting the basics right.<br />
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John Chetwynd<br />
Managing DirectorJohn Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-83037023987626875332012-09-14T18:50:00.000+12:002012-09-14T18:50:23.876+12:00Testing the theory - DR Testing TakeawaysEveryone says you need to do it - hey <a href="http://blog.telnet.co.nz/2012/03/art-of-business-continuity-5-learnings.html"><b>I</b> even said you should do it</a>, but how many of us do "really" test our disaster recovery processes? I mean from start to finsih, warts and all. We've been testing our plans for years - but somehow never really got to putting everything together into a single full scale "get out there an do it" kind of test. We've been able to extrapolate and make assumptions, and generally be pretty happy about our capabilities should the world of BAU come to an end, but could never say, for sure, in the end, it would all hang together.<br />
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We decided - particularly on the back of some fairly big updates this year, that we really needed to do a full on, no holds barred test, by taking our primary centre fully offline, and then seeing how it all went - here are some of the things we learned:<br />
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<b>Be Prepared?</b><br />
Yes, it's a question and not a statement - you really want to make a decision on just how "prepared" you want to be. When we talked to our partners, we found everyone wanted to "plan" this test - and that's something you need to be a little careful of. Having everyone and everything all in the best places possible to achieve a successful outcome might well be what you are used to doing - but in this case you risk lulling yourself into a false sense of security - in a real disaster, all the prep time you have has already gone.<br />
<br />What you DO need to be prepared however, and prepared as well as possible, is for is a clean and rapid rollback. If something goes disasterously wrong with the test, or if curcumstances mean that safety or the business is put at risk - you really need to make sure that however you simulate the disaster, you can "unsimulate" it as fast as possible<br />
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<b>Accept Failure</b><br />
Whatever you think going into it - there are going to be things that don't work as you thought they should - to be honest I'd be more worried if everything DID work as it was supposed to - if so you probably missed something! If your test is realistic (and not planned to primarily highlight the best bits of your DR plan!) then there should always be things you can learn - even if it's just an opportunity to speed something up.<br />
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When writing the test plan, it helps to have someone who didn't design the recovery procedure recommend what the scenario is - if you can resist it, try not to overthink the situation.<br />
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<b>Record everything</b><br />
Have someone who is not involved in the recovery act as referee, they will be able to avoid the hustle and bustle of trying to make things work, and they will actually have the time to write things down as the test progresses. The referee is also a great pair of eyes on other opportunity to improve processes that might be missed by those who are in the middle of it all<br />
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<b>So.. How did it go?</b><br />
I guess you are all wondering how it went for us then? I suppose it would be unfair for me to preach the things above and not tell our story - so here goes...<br />
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We planned our DR event for late at night, when we only have a few staff around, and impact to customers would be minimal - maybe not as big and scary as the middle of the day - but the sysems and processes are identical so it's still a valid test.<br />
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We simulated a complete loss of our contact centre and data systems, and at 11:18pm we pulled the plug (quite literally in some cases) on our internet, phone lines and external WAN connections. Simultaneously we killed the lights and the staff had to get themselves out and into cabs to our DR site (diverting critical lines to mobiles as they went).<br />
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Once at the DR site, the fun began....<br />
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Overall we had a successful test - it was a great validation of the work we'd done over the last year - but the real value came in the things that maybe didn't go 100% to plan. It took longer than expected for some of our recovery servers to come up - something only a realistic test would show - we've since reorganised the startup process. One of our backup telephony servers also decided not to fail over cleanly (even though the previous 6 test were flawless) - we'd never seen the issue before - but now we know about it we're better placed for next time (test or real event).<br />
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One of the most suprising things though was how engaged the staff who participated in the excercise were - even though they were "off the clock" by later in the evening (morning!) - many staff were keen to stay on and help out even when they weren't specifically needed anymore (we had a second crew back at HQ who took over once the testing was complete and we'd "rolled back" - this save additional delays whilst we got staff back to base)<br />
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If you want to hear more about our test (particularly if you are a client of ours), drop me a line, I'll be happy to tell you in more gory detail! But I'd like to leave you with one final, and most important learning from this exercise. I've said it before, and I'll surely say it again...<br />
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<b>Test it. Test it again</b><br />
No amount of talking about it, looking at diagrams, or testing parts of your DR process is anywhere near as valuable as taking the risk to do a full scale test. If you've never done it (or only done it part way) make a resolution to yourself to prove it. What's the worst that can happen? If you keep your primary site/systems ready to go - not a lot - but you sure will learn where you need to focus your efforts. Once that's done, start thinking about doing it all over again.... best of luck !!<br />
<br />
Steve Hennerley<br />
GM IS ,Telnet<br />
<br />Steve Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15001204632410767524noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-65821330162663795802012-09-03T16:21:00.000+12:002012-09-03T16:23:12.150+12:005 ways to get the right people for your contact centre<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB">Our people
are the most important part of Telnet – our technology is leading edge but
it’s our team that really makes the difference. For this reason</span> I
take an active part in the employment of everyone in the company. These are my
guidelines:</div>
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<div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
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<ol>
<li><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-size: 7pt;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: -0.25in;">I make sure our recruiters know
their brief really well – I only want to interview people I want to hire</span></li>
<li><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: -0.25in;">Attitude is all important –
the twinkle in the eye - the passion – not past experience, of course that
counts in some roles but even when it is necessary experience is not all.</span></li>
<li><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: -0.25in;">I ask myself will the new person fit
in with our team – or if not are they going to bring a new skill or personality
that we really need?</span></li>
<li><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: -0.25in;">Will they CARE about our business
and our clients as much as we do ?</span></li>
<li><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: -0.25in;">I try as often as possible to
promote from within Telnet – recognition means more than money to most people
and it’s our role as managers to ensure our people grow and develop.
Almost everyone I interview asks about opportunities for promotion and I enjoy
telling the stories of people who have gone on to succeed in senior roles both
here and in other organisations</span></li>
</ol>
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Penny Calder<br />
Director Operations Telnet Services Ltd</div>
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John Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-32722169812927678732012-08-17T15:26:00.000+12:002012-08-17T15:26:55.535+12:00The ContactSuite Story - Contact centre CRM from the ground up<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
You may have noticed on our website that Telnet has now made
our in-house CRM solution, <b>Contact</b>Suite
available as a standalone product (ie you can use the product without needing
to first be a contact centre or Octopus client). I thought it would be a good time to blog a
little about what <b>Contact</b>Suite
actually is and where it came from.</div>
<h3>
</h3>
<h2>
What is it?</h2>
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If you’ve read the whitepaper <a href="http://www.telnet.co.nz/whitepapers/IntroducingContactSuite.pdf">(Here)</a>
then you’ll know that it’s a CRM (Customer Relationship Management ) solution,
the essence of which means that it can track incoming or outgoing contacts (that
we call “<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5577199311729049091" name="OLE_LINK1">interactions</a>”)
and, if you need to , arrange
collections of interactions together (into what we call “cases”), all while
relating these to a database of customers. </div>
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Sounds easy right?
Well if you read my blog on disaster recovery, one of the things I
mentioned was that it was always the simple <i>everyone-must-have-these-kind-of-problems</i>
things that vendors told you they didn’t have a solution for! This led us over the years to time and time
again conclude we had to build our own contact centre focussed solution rather
than pick something up of the shelf. </div>
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One if the main requirements that we had of a CRM solution–
was one of flexibility and ability to react to new requirements. We also had to make sure we could integrate
into our telephony system (even if it changed or got updated) and allow us to
manage a very complex mix of different inbound and outbound processes and
staff. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A quirky requirement was also that it must be easy to
integrate other CRMs – either through a database or API, or embedded in the
screen. It must of course be incredibly
fast – wasting time on the contact centre front line is quite literally wasting
money, oh, and it had to do all this and be completely web based (relying on no
software other than a web browser installed on the client)</div>
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<br /></div>
<h2>
Humble Beginnings</h2>
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Nearly everything we do at Telnet seems to have a “humble
beginnings” story, and the application that became our core CRM is certainly no
exception. We have in fact been using
<b>Contact</b>Suite, or one of it’s predecessors
(Call Manager and Client Manager) for over 13 years.</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM51ofPmQJQK5tZXVBFg0C142VmbZdsYr8u3ntYbUhL6NioY19tXD6EOXM1tmfNMC3hh0Aidu3SCNeS1crV8URt1S2bYHQPtZI9U_25M975sJ5h9DBXE_f3VnJyhQaQEFMF1uXu6wKA3c/s1600/ClientMgtCS2.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjM51ofPmQJQK5tZXVBFg0C142VmbZdsYr8u3ntYbUhL6NioY19tXD6EOXM1tmfNMC3hh0Aidu3SCNeS1crV8URt1S2bYHQPtZI9U_25M975sJ5h9DBXE_f3VnJyhQaQEFMF1uXu6wKA3c/s320/ClientMgtCS2.gif" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i style="text-align: start;">Then and Now - Client Manger circa 1999 vs <b>Contact</b>Suite</i> </span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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In the early days the main driver was a tool to create
outbound campaigns and use our Zeacom phone system as an autodialler. Gradually other functionality was added
including inbound calling (screenpops), agent management, knowledge management,
email/fax/SMS, “customer centric” CRM capabilities and so on until we had a
very feature rich suite of applications.</div>
<h2>
</h2>
<h2>
Head in the Clouds?</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Cloud Computing” in my opinion is a much overused and
overhyped terminology. Most people,
including tech pros, fail to really understand what it is despite everyone
being told this is the way of the future.
In reality there is little new in the tech world, and “Cloud Computing”
has really been around forever (depending on your definition). </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One premise of the current crop of cloud offerings though
really struck a chord with us when we started to use
<b>Contact</b>Suite at our remote
Octopus (itself really a “cloud” solution) sites. Traditionally
<b>Contact</b>Suite was an installed
Windows app, and this started to be a challenge to support once it was outside
our own walls – managing update rollouts and testing against hardware and
networks outside our direct control became much harder than we’d hoped. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The solution was to look at the “cloud solutions” in the
marketplace, including some, like Litmos and Basecamp, that we were already
using ourselves. There were two key
traits – they required no installation on the client machine, and they worked
completely within a web browser.</div>
<h2>
Webification</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The natural progression was for
<b>Contact</b>Suite to become a web
application – but was that even possible?
<b>Contact</b>Suite used a variety of technologies – such as a local client
based plugin for the telephony platform, real time communication with servers to
generate screen pops and client side plug ins for various applications we’d
developed over the years. Turning this
into a web application wasn’t going to be easy!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our biggest worry was speed – was it even possible to use an
event from the phone system to generate in a web based application, in real
time, where time was money, a “screenpop” for an agent to correctly greet a
caller without delay. Our reference
examples were actually social media sites, which use real time chat – we thought
if they can do it, why can’t we?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We had an ace up our sleeves though, personally knowing the
founder of a successful kiwi born cloud company gave us the chance to get a
handle on all this, and, crucially, to work with him to get a working model of
our biggest challenge – the CS Screenpop.
Armed with this, and Telnet’s skilled dev team (including a new member
with a background in web based CRM design), the project had it’s first beta out
within months.</div>
<h2>
The Final Product?</h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Contact</b>Suite (or CS2 as it’s known in house) has been in
prime time operational use now since early 2011 and has come a long way in that
time. One of the original principles of the project was that one of the
benefits of a “cloud” application, other than keeping it simple for the users,
is that you can apply principles such as continuous integration to allow for
incremental improvements, without needing significant rewrite or “new version”
deployments. The analogy of choice here
was Gmail – Do you know what “version” of gmail you use? – no improvements
happen all the time and users get the benefit of all these incremental
improvements without the “forklift” upgrades needed by other products.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Contact</b>Suite is improving all the time – the latest
innovations due to hit the application in September/October being an all new
knowledge management engine, with better search capabilities, all new content
creation tools, and “social knowledge” support (using the brains of your users
to improve the quality of the information at hand.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Contact</b>Suite has been, and continues to be an exciting
product to work on – and has taken Telnet to a new level. Making this available to everyone is the
next level of progress as I’m sure we’ll be tasked with once again solving more
“simple problems” that nobody else can.
Our ability to integrate with other platforms, and dedicated in house
configuration and dev team are pretty excited to see what new challenges lay
ahead!</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If you want to have a look at
<b>Contact</b>Suite or see how it
might help your business, drop us a line at one of the places in the “contact
us” page and we’ll set up a meeting or webinar to go through it</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
Steve</div>
Steve Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15001204632410767524noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-84633682012381989412012-07-30T12:36:00.000+12:002012-07-30T12:46:13.378+12:00NPS in an Outsource Environment – Friend or Foe?One of Telnet’s core principals is that “we care”, and in the current economic climate, proving that we care can define us as a company. The question then becomes how can we define a principal and use this within the call centre to enhance our performance?<br />
<br />
Late last year we introduced Net Promoter Score (NPS) with our largest client. For those of you unaware of NPS, it is based on the fundamental perspective that all customers can be divided into three categories, Promoters, Passives and Detractors. By offering all the callers to the call centre the opportunity to rate “the quality of the service they have just received” we are getting a temperature gauge of the customer’s satisfaction with the job we and our clients are doing. This gives us real time feedback on that we are able to pass on to the agents also in real Time.<br />
<br />
Within weeks of its launch, we quickly realized the power of NPS as quality tool. Daily feedback and coaching sessions with the agents helped us focus on areas we may previously have overlooked. Agents embraced the ability to be recognized as a Promoter and rewarded for exceptional customer service.<br />
<br />
Six months on and we have added NPS to all our major clients. In these six months I have seen the most dramatic improvement in quality since joining Telnet. I personally listen to each detractor with the team leader from the relevant team and I have found that these sessions and the subsequent agent feedback are the most valuable use of my time on a day to day basis. Agents have become competitive over who has the best “NPS Score” and we now hold monthly competitions across the entire centre.<br />
<br />
Telnet's clients are seeing the benefits of our work with NPS, and we are working together to move away from the old fashioned way of monitoring random calls, to using NPS as our key quality measurement tool. The feedback has been great, and we continue to work together to not only improve customer satisfaction in the call centre, but for our clients business’s as a whole.<br />
<br />
Roy O'Hara<br />
Inbound Divisional ManagerJohn Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-22613004391075832892012-05-16T12:49:00.000+12:002012-05-16T12:50:13.414+12:00The partnership story between Z Energy and TelnetIn 2010, following the purchase of the downstream assets of Shell New Zealand, Z Energy needed a local contact centre partner that would demonstrate the company’s commitment to provide a strong consistent brand that resonates with New Zealanders. They chose Telnet, and have not only improved the experience for their customers, but are saving both time and money.
Click here for <a href="http://www.telnet.co.nz/whitepapers/Z-EnergyCaseStudy.pdf">The Z Energy and Telnet story</a>John Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-9291169045402779652012-03-02T10:33:00.005+13:002012-03-02T15:39:48.722+13:00The Art of Business Continuity – 5 Learnings<p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">Many of our long time customers will know that Telnet puts quite a bit of effort into business continuity, and disaster planning – often going much further then companies the size of Telnet will normally go, and expecting more from our suppliers than they are used to providing. For Telnet, it’s a simple equation – our customers simply expect that we’ll be able to continue providing a service – almost no matter what – so we put in the time and effort to make sure that this is, as far as practicable, what we deliver. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Along the way, we’ve learned a few things, and we’ve turned many corners, and the goalposts have moved – many many times. We’re never actually “finished” with our implementations, and you quickly learn that this slippery, ever changing beast known as BCP, will never let you rest.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b>It’s a Journey not a Destination<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal">It’s easy to get frustrated, depressed and downright annoyed at the fact that, almost immediately after you thought you had created a solution, someone gives you another problem, or a much easier way to solve the first one. Some solutions in fact, take so long to put in place, that by the time you’ve got there technology, that fast moving animal, has seen fit to move on. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">This is just part of the game we are playing, and once you accept this, and realise you’ve never really got an endpoint, just a series of ever improving “beta” solutions (a bit like Google!) – then you realise that this is in fact a better state of affairs – and you’ll always be that little bit better than you were. They’re not goalposts you are chasing, simply milestones along a very, very long road.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">It does make it a little trickier to manage budgets, and notify your users – but overall it’s just something you need to accept – the inevitable, and somewhat inescapable scope creep. The only thing you can really do to stay sane is to make sure you always stay focused on my next point:<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b>What are you trying to protect?<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The obvious answer that will be given to this question – particularly if it’s on the table of an executive meeting is “everything”, of course that may well be a possibility depending on the size and complexity of your organisation (if you only have one laptop, and can make a backup to the cloud you’re pretty much done) – but more likely you have to decide what’s really important for your business, and whether there is only one way to do that or not. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">For us, it was perhaps this question that has most led the first point. “Back in the day”, when I first started with Telnet (almost 10 years ago now), the most important thing in the world was the ability to take phone calls, mainly for just our “most important” clients, with everything else (including capturing that we had in fact taken that call) as a secondary concern.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Roll forward a few years, and incrementally we’ve been adding feature after feature, gradually closing the line between what we do BAU, and what we can do in an emergency. From having a few seats reserved in someone elses call centre for our use (with their systems), we moved on to having our database environment replicated to a backup, then on to domain controllers, and eventually to having real time cloud based backups for almost all our line of business services. We’ve ended up with a second PABX and ACD server, and redundant diverse fibre paths and telco links between us and our DR site, hosted by a well known specialist BCP company in Albany!<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Picking what to change and “improve” is always an interesting challenge, lying somewhere between “what our clients say we must do”, through “what our gut tells us” and into “what’s realistic to achieve” (passing somewhere near “what the latest conference/white-paper/news-report says we should do). Of course disasters such as Christchurch Earthquakes “help” by focussing the mind too – but that’s just the start of the process:<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b>No, everyone else doesn’t have that issue too<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal">When you’ve chosen what to change, you normally have a bit of a think, rationalise what it is you want to protect, and almost inevitably decide that everyone else must have this problem too – so I’ll just ask my suppliers/vendors/partners what I should do and make it all happen… right?<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Now I really don’t think that I have had any really “out there” ideas around BC – take for example wanting to have out internet access delivered in a way that meant we can access it from our primary or secondary sites, allowing us to spin up our DR copies of our web servers if we were to lose our main site with little or no interruption. Sounds like a problem many people would have doesn’t it?<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Another example is diversion of phone calls – we have well over 200 active phone numbers we answer calls on – surely most call centres ask their telcos for a way they can move this traffic at short notice to an alternate delivery location?<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">There’s many other examples, but the point is never to assume this sort of thing – just because your supplier is the biggest with the best reputation and range of clients, doesn’t mean for a second that they’ll “just know” how to solve a seemingly simple problem. For us we spent months (and in some cases years) just trying to find a solution to an apparently simple common problem it seemed nobody else (in NZ at least) even had.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b>Test it, test it again<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Ok, ok, so I know when you started reading this you fully expected me to say this, and it IS obvious – but it’s so important I couldn’t miss it out – and not only for the blindingly obvious reason (ie. does it work?). Simply the process of doing something like this opens up cans of worms, Pandora’s boxes and any other metaphors you can think of.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">It’s the testing process that one of the most direct drivers of the “journey” and “what to protect” phases, and one that keeps you thinking what the next stage would be. When you’re testing you should think a little outside your test plan, get users to “try stuff” and make notes on what you learn – these are the jewels that will take you to the next peg. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I’ll not go on about this stuff too much, we all know we need to do this, and we all don’t do enough – but writing it here reminds you (and me!) once again that it needs to be done. And again. And once more, at least.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b>Make sure you never have to use it<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The best thing you can do after expending all this effort though (on an ongoing cyclic <i>ad-nauseum</i> basis) is do your level best to make sure that you’ve just wasted all that money you’ve spent on kit, and services, and processes. Nothing keeps your business going better then not having a failure in the first place. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In the real world of course, this is just as impossible as the concept of “finishing” your BCP plan – but the point is that no matter how much effort you put into backup systems, and alternate ways of doing things, these will never be as good as never having to use them – regardless of how good your BCP plan is – those regular patches and maintenance, and redundant hardware, and monitoring software, required to keep “Plan A” ticking along are more important now than ever!<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I’ve just sent out to all Telnet’s customers the latest iterations in what we’ve been working on – there’s quite a few things we’ve done in the last 12 months to move us to the next level up – but as you might expect, there’s still more we can do – and of course that will be the way of things, not just for the near future, or the foreseeable one, if we stop looking for improvements, we’ve simply given up – and that’s not a place we want to be!<o:p></o:p></p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">The conclusion I have come to is that there simply isn't one answer, or one approach that works, there doesn't even appear to be a consensus among service providers on how to do the things you might first think are obvious - providing the right solution for your business really is all about the art rather than the science.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Steve Hennerley</p><p class="MsoNormal">GM Information Systems @ Telnet</p>Steve Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15001204632410767524noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-2757228941569683042012-02-13T11:34:00.003+13:002012-02-13T11:44:35.101+13:00Net Promoter Score (NPS) drives quality improvementsTelnet is working with some of our key clients to make use of the large number of calls we receive from their customers to assess in real-time the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The NPS is calculated by asking customers “how willing would they be to recommend the client to others?”<br /><br />This initiative is already seeing encouraging results and I am very excited about the potential to use NPS to enhance the customer experience even where our client is a natural monopoly. The power of NPS can probably be summarised as follows:<br /><br />1. By substituting a single question for the more usual complex customer satisfaction surveys we can focus our agents on the task of improving the customer experience.<br />2. NPS gives us an immediate and accurate account of how the customer felt about the just completed interaction.<br />3. Real-time reporting provides an immediate feedback loop to agents enabling them to understand more about the behaviours that please customers and the behaviours that don’t.<br />4. NPS is way more cost efficient than any other quality monitoring process that we know of.<br /><br />John Chetwynd<br />Managing DirectorJohn Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-91553238571335832292011-12-20T09:24:00.003+13:002011-12-20T10:53:47.756+13:00A great year at TelnetWell we are almost at the end of another year.<br /><br />It's been a very eventful year in New Zealand. We have had it all, from earthquakes to oil spills, global financial strife, and the highlight of the World Cup win. And of course, we top it off with an election. pheeeww !!<br /><br />Amongst all this we at Telnet have just got on with the job. Its been a very good year for Telnet and we end the year bigger and stronger than when we started. A lot of that I credit to our people who should all take a bow and congratulate themselves. What a team eh!<br /><br />As we move into the festive season, I would like to wish our staff and our clients all a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous New year.<br /><br />Be safe and best regards<br /><br />John ChetwyndJohn Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-65312168833415300632011-11-29T13:48:00.005+13:002011-11-29T14:49:15.204+13:00Winning back Contact Centre business from ManilaI am pleased to report that Telnet has now successfully migrated the contact centres for two significant businesses from Manila to New Zealand; the most recent being a fast growing Australian based business in the telecommunications space.<div><br /></div><div>In both cases the businesses were experiencing disenchantment with the service experience they were receiving from their Manila supplier. And I am pleased to report that since the move to Telnet independent surveys are confirming that customers have noticed and appreciate the improvement in customer experience.</div><div><br /></div><div>Probably of more importance is that the price difference has not been as great as expected. This is because Telnet's unique approach results in significant reductions in handling time. Customers love the fact that their queries are understood better and resolved faster. </div><div><br /></div><div>John Chetwynd</div><div><br /></div>John Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-61315775225686754202011-10-28T13:24:00.002+13:002011-10-28T13:28:39.454+13:00The Art of SellingWe at Telnet have always seen the power of good old fashion selling. As a specialist telesales provider we see the phenomenal results that can be achieved when a good sales plan comes together! This article from the Economist puts it rather well. <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/21533371">Click</a>John Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-64948431489489660912011-10-04T11:11:00.000+13:002011-10-04T11:12:57.939+13:00Web channels outperform phone channels<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;line-height:15.8pt"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#333333">There is growing evidence that the web is becoming a critical part of the mix in delivering a superior customer experience.<span> </span>Recent research by </span><a href="http://ecm7.com/rp/71/process.clsp?EmailId=500040620&Token=2D2792F9304C71CC3F31F6D28714A1B42"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"">Avaya and callcentres.net</span></a><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#333333"><span> </span>has not only highlighted the growth in web self-service, but has also identified quick query resolution as the most important attribute for delivering the “ideal customer service experience” </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;line-height:15.8pt"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#333333">The research is consistent with the fast paced world we live in.<span> </span>As consumers, we like self service as it gives us more control, and when we need to interact with a service provider we want the experience to be quick and efficient. In my view, the growth of ultra fast broadband and smart phone technology will put the web at the centre of customer support.<span> </span>A well constructed website should not only be the first port of call for customers but it should also be the principle knowledge tool for CSR’s when servicing customers (e.g. older people)who prefer speak with a person. Businesses that can take advantage of this trend will enjoy considerable benefits. Ostensibly, customer satisfaction levels will rise, and the cost of customer service will fall due to fewer calls to the centre and the reduced handling time that results from better knowledge management </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;line-height:15.8pt"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#333333">So what needs to be done? A lot!<span> </span>A quick review of most websites of major providers shows that they are not at all user friendly when it comes to satisfying customer queries. Many search functions in particular are generally ineffective particularly when you compare them to a ‘Google’ search. In my experience, despite the significant gains that have been made in recent years to improve the software tools available to business, knowledge management systems available to CSRs are still ineffective making it hard for them to solve customer queries quickly. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;line-height:15.8pt"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#333333">In my view, the future role of the contact centre will be to handle those queries for customers that can’t be handled by self service. And, when we need to make that call we should expect to have the call answered promptly, and our query answered accurately and efficiently.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: 15.8pt"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;font-family: "Georgia","serif";mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";color:#333333">John Chetwynd<o:p></o:p></span></p>John Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-86181233666824083082011-09-14T11:24:00.003+12:002011-09-14T11:33:29.765+12:00World Cup Fever hits Telnet!<p class="MsoNormal">This month Telnet’s staff all participated in a Call Centre wide competition to celebrate the launch of the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. Each member of senior management teamed up with a team on the call centre floor who in turn adopted a Nation participating in the World Cup. They then had a week to decorate their allocated area in their respective team’s colors. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">The response was fantastic, with everyone joining in, management dressing up and the excitement levels reached fever pitch on the judging day. The winning team was Z-Energy (Samoa) who won a team lunch for all involved. Go to our website <a href="http://www.telnet.co.nz/">here</a> to have a look!</p><p class="MsoNormal">We will continue to have competitions throughout the world cup, so watch this space…..</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">John Chetwynd</p>John Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-43507041496824080032011-08-16T13:30:00.002+12:002011-08-16T13:46:05.060+12:00Service Design ThinkingThis is another interesting post by <a href="http://www.callcentres.net/_blog/'your_call'/post/Service_Design_Thinking_and_Multi-Channel_Service_Centres">Dr Catriona Wallace</a>. In my view she hits a few really important buttons, namely the importance of good process design in our contact centre world and of course putting the customer and (in my view) the front-line staff at the centre of the design process.<div>
<br /></div><div>We read alot about the focus on staff training and morale. Whilst these are clearly important I would put design and a superb CSR tool kit ahead of everything. We need to make it as easy as possible for our people on the front-line to satisfy customer queries. In my experience staff morale improves and training is simplified when you get the design and tools right.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>If you don't already follow Catriona's blogs I recommend that you start</div><div>
<br /></div><div>John Chetwynd</div>John Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-60637504572503394662011-06-11T14:27:00.003+12:002011-06-11T14:33:10.354+12:00Congratulations to LitmosTelnet congratulates Litmos on its recent acquistion by US software company, Callidus. <div><br /></div><div>As one of Litmos's first customers, we have always recognised the power of the Litmos product.</div><div><br /></div><div>We wish them well.<br /><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/callidus-software-acquires-litmos-nasdaq-cald-1525270.htm">View Press Release</a><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>John Chetwynd</div></div></div>John Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-29593492768976116162011-05-20T11:06:00.005+12:002011-05-20T11:45:17.762+12:00Web channels outperforming phone channelsI read some interesting research on callcentres.net that highlights the growth in non voice channels. We at Telnet are certainly strong advocates for the use of multi channels to improve customer experience and hold costs, particularly the use of SMS email, and web. As highlighted in the research, quick query resolution is the most important attribute for delivering a better customer experience. And from an economic point of view it makes sense to satisfy customer queries electronically where you can.<div><br /></div><div>Click <a href="http://ecm7.com/rp/71/process.clsp?EmailId=500040620&Token=2D2792F9304C71CC3F31F6D28714A1B42">here</a> to for the callcentres.net article </div><div><br /></div><div>John Chetwynd</div>John Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-72779607577163401172011-05-09T17:26:00.001+12:002011-05-09T17:28:17.166+12:00From Ireland to New Zealand - Interview Roy O'Hara1. What brought you to NZ?<br /><br />A big plane! When I was twenty-three I moved to and lived in Canada for a while. I went back to Ireland for a job, but always said that I would go travelling again before I settled down. I knew that if I had to travel I would have to do it before I turned thirty, as it gets hard to get a visa after then. Once I realised that Ireland was on the brink of recession, I felt it was the best time to go.<br /><br />As I had done Canada, and Australia and America didn’t appeal to me, New Zealand was the obvious choice – a choice I am glad I took (so far).<br /><br />2. How long have you been in NZ?<br /><br />I’ve been here just over eighteen months, which feels like both no time and a lifetime.<br /><br />3. What were you doing before you came to NZ?<br /><br />The majority of my background is in retail. I have ten years experience, mostly in various levels of management. Before I came to New Zealand, I spent two years working at the Bank of America, working firstly in sales, then in the Fraud Department.<br /><br />4. What made you apply for Telnet?<br /><br />I needed a job! I had blown all my money travelling across America and Telnet was the only place that would hire me!<br /><br />To begin with I interviewed as an agent, but was offered the role of sales coach. Within time I moved up to 2IC, Team Leader and now to my current role of Services Manager<br /><br />5. What do you do in your spare time?<br /><br />I am a film geek – for my sins, and I also love getting out fishing. Fishing here is so different. In Ireland, we often went out for a day without catching anything!<br /><br />6. What is the toughest part of your job?<br /><br />The unplanned! I try to plan out my week as best as possible, but anything can happen to throw all your plans out the window. For example, when there was the recent earthquake in Christchurch, it was decided to have someone from my team available through the night in case of emergency calls. I had to rush home, shower, and come back in, working right through the night to man the phones, then come back in the following night to do it all again. But if every day was the same, then work would be boring.<br /><br />7. What’s the best part of your job?<br /><br />Call me cheesy, but the people I work with. I am really lucky to have staff that are dedicated to their jobs and make my life so much easier. You can’t become a good manager, unless you surround yourself with good people.<br /><br />8. What’s some advice you can give agents?<br /><br />The best advice I can give any agent is to listen to what the customer is telling you. So many times I listen to a call and the customer has to repeat themselves, which can cause frustration. All of us have to call call centres at some stage in our lives, so we all know what we would judge as a good experience. Put yourself in their shoes, be patient, be understanding, and try to resolve their query on that call. For sales, the customer most likely to buy from you is a happy customer. It is up to you to make them happy!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-63645274140197470332011-04-14T13:38:00.002+12:002011-04-14T16:14:59.971+12:00Wage rates versus Australia - business opportunity<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-NZ">There has been a lot of debate recently in the media following Bill English’s comments about our lower wage rates giving us a competitive advantage over Australia. The reality is that the current wages and currency settings create a window of opportunity to attract big business across the ditch. The combination of lower labour and exchange rates at present can mean a saving of up to 35 per cent on the final bill which gets attention in the cost competive world we live in.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-NZ">It is important to note that this does not mean that Telnet bases its business proposition on cost. Quite the contrary, we are a high value provider servicing a blue chip client base.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Our average wages for customer service and telesales reps are about 26% above the minimum wage and our offices are based in the heart of Queen Street in a modern corporate styled and fitted office, giving our staff the respect they deserve as valued employees.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-NZ">We also work hard on training and developing our employees’ skills so if they choose to leave the profession they come out better skilled. As result of this almost all of our managerial staff, apart from those in IT and accounting positions have started with the firm as a telesales or customer service representative. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-NZ">Importantly, innovative technology is also a key attraction when we pitch against firms in call centre competitive countries - as is our shared culture and comradeship with the Australian culture. We will never compete with the likes of India or the Philippines in an area like wages but we can compete against Australian domiciled centres. Therefore, a combination of innovative technology and competitive wages as well as quality staff with superior customer service all combine to enable us to compete at an international level. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-NZ">This is something we are proud of and shouldn’t shy away from. Just because we don’t like being the poorer cousins that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do the best to take advantage of a competitive situation to grow our business.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-NZ">We talk about this more in our recent intervie<a name="_GoBack"></a>w with TVNZ’s business programme. Click <a href="http://tvnz.co.nz/business-news/amp-kiwi-company-uses-wage-gap-advantage-3-34-video-4121322">here</a> to see this clip: </span></p>John Chetwyndhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11626503852179533898noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-65257846635738427042011-04-06T15:04:00.000+12:002011-04-06T15:05:50.100+12:00Telnet Awarded QFE Status - First NZ Contact Centre<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 24px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" ></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >I am happy to announce that after a great effort from the team at Telnet, we are the first NZ Contact Centre to be awarded QFE status.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >Have a look at our press release below</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >John Chetwynd</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><b>TELNET SERVICES FIRST NZ CONTACT CENTRE TO BE AWARDED QFE STATUS</b></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >New Zealand’s largest privately owned contact centre Telnet Services is pleased to announce that it has become New Zealand’s first contact centre to gain the Qualifying Financial Entity (QFE) accreditation, making it easier for Telnet to market financial products to retail customers on behalf of its clients.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >Telnet Managing Director John Chetwynd says the accreditation is a significant step for the company. “We have worked hard to develop a first class training, monitoring and compliance environment at Telnet which we believe has positioned us well for obtaining QFE status.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >Telnet provides telephone sales services to a number of substantial financial services companies. “By seeking registration our clients will find it easier to use Telnet as a partner to promote their products.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >Telnet’s QFE status enables it to sell Category 2 products which include insurance products, and consumer credit contracts such as hire purchase and loans.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >Chetwynd says Telnet sought accreditation with expansion of the business in mind. “Being the only contact centre at this stage with QFE status will enhance our competitive advantage in the financial services space.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >Under the requirements of a QFE, Telnet must take responsibility for ensuring its telephone sales agents deliver a professional service to retail customers. But Chetwynd says this is an area in which Telnet has always excelled.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >”We have always placed integrity of service high on our priority list for our clients and their customers. We believe that passing the standards required of a QFE is confirmation of this.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >Telnet has a comprehensive performance management framework in place for its training and development, customer service, technology and people management. This was further developed over recent years as a prerequisite to securing the business of financial service companies in the already tightly regulated Australian market.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >As part of Telnet’s push into the Australian market it has also obtained accreditation with the Australian Teleservices Association and its esteemed Centre Standards and Accreditation Programme (CCSA).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >The CCSA is a framework of guidelines, processes and disciplines focusing on five key areas of a contact centres’ business – Planning, Infrastructure & Environment, People, Process and Achievement & Performance.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" >“The rigour of assessment required to promote financial products within Australia and the standards required within the CCSA program provided an excellent foundation for us to secure QFE accreditation for our New Zealand business,” Chetwynd says.</span></p><p></p>Steve Hhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15001204632410767524noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5577199311729049091.post-2326928784568314522011-03-16T14:38:00.001+13:002011-03-16T14:40:57.256+13:00HELPING CHRISTCHURCH GET BACK TO BUSINESSGetting back to business for those companies caught up in the devastation of the Christchurch earthquake is being made a little easier with Telnet’s help.<br /><br />With all the disruption caused by the earthquake in Christchurch last month, it is going to be a while before many businesses find their feet again. And with all the rebuilding they will need to do, their IT infrastructure is just one of the things on their list of priorities.<br /><br />But Telnet, partnering with a leading business telecommunications group, Zintel, are helping those business owners by offering to provide front line support for Fronde.<br /><br />Fronde, an IT services company which delivers software solutions to blue chip companies, is offering free Google Apps accounts to businesses whose IT infrastructure has been devastated by the earthquake.<br /><br />It will mean those businesses will be able to access email, create calendars, documents and spreadsheets which can be shared and collaborated on by employees across the organisation.<br /><br />All companies will need is a laptop, browser and internet or wi-fi connection and employees will be able to access their mail, calendar and documents anytime and anywhere from any computer or smartphone.<br /><br />The service will remain free for 12 months and is available free to businesses based in Christchurch with 150 employees or fewer.<br /><br />Telnet and Zintel are playing their part by providing the 0800 call service and front line support.<br /><br />Agents at Telnet will be responsible for the data capture when businesses call in, passing this information on to Fronde will set up the Apps, activate the service and provide on-line training.<br /><br />The number to contact is 0800 007 663.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com