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3rd May 2007 | Contact the Editor | Register here to receive your own FREE copy of contact news
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LATEST NEWS |
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 NZ council re-thinks customer service
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New Zealand's Far North District Council's continuing drive to improve customer satisfaction with its front-line services has sparked a major re-think of the way in which the council conducts its business. The customer contact strategy’s main objectives are to change the corporate culture, produce tangible results and significantly improve the customer experience.
"We needed to understand our customers better and gear our services accordingly. We collected data on all customer contacts over the counter and by phone, e mail and fax." said the council's strategy project manager Pam Greenfield. "This gave us a better understanding of why our customers contact us, the nature of the contact, and which communication channel they choose to use." Requests for information, applications/renewals, and access to other parts of the council emerged as the top reasons with 45% of business conducted in person and 42% by phone.
The results pointed to some obvious opportunities: self-service such as kiosks and web for information and common, simple transactions; phone systems that would make it easier for people to access other parts of council, staff training to enable more calls to be answered centrally by asking the next question; and redesigning of processes from an 'end to end' perspective with the whole customer experience in mind. One of the council's first projects is to transform the contact centre from a "largely reactive" operation to a proactively focused multichannel contact centre. |
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UPCOMING EVENT: Do Not Call Register Information Sessions |
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Is your business affected by the
Do Not Call Register?
The Australian Communications and Media Authority is hosting a series of industry information sessions about the Do Not Call Register.
Melbourne
Monday 7 May
10am-12pm |
Mercure Hotel
13 Spring Street, Melbourne |
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Sydney
Tuesday 8 May
10am-12pm |
The Grace Hotel
77 York Street, Sydney |
Brisbane
Wednesday 9 May
10am-12pm |
Mercure Hotel
85-87 North Quay, Brisbane |
Industry information sessions are free. Registrations essential.
To register, email donotcalltaskforce@acma.gov.au (In the subject line, please write 'Industry Session' and the event you wish to attend) or call (03) 9963 6888.
Advertisement |
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 Do Not Call register opens for business
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Internet registration for the government's Do Not Call Register opened today, with companies banned from phoning people on the list from the end of the month.
Communications Minister Helen Coonan expects Australians will want to register up to 1 million phone numbers in the first week. "We've had a discussion paper out and have had an enormous response from people who are just absolutely fed up with getting unwanted, unsolicited telemarketing calls," she said.
Groups including charities, religious organisations and political parties will still be able to call those who have registered. Coonan warned telemarketers they face big penalties if they defy the new register. "There'll be obviously a period of grace and then there can be a series of escalating penalties up to over $1 million, so we're really serious about getting after people who are pests, quite frankly, in contacting people when they don't want to be," she said. |
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St George looking to employ more staff |
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Australia's fifth largest bank, St George, says it will beef up its contact centre agent numbers as part of plans to hire more staff in the next six months.
After the bank reported a 14.5% cent rise in its first-half profit, managing director Gail Kelly said she expects business will continue to grow and there will need to be more branches and other customer service operations. "We are investing more in our contact centre just as we speak, so there will be further increases in staff over the next six months," she said.
"We are certainly gearing up, as you've heard, opening new branches, both business banking branches and retail branches," said Kelly. |
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NZ help desk knocks back Gay's email |
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A woman's email to the Telecom New Zealand help desk was rejected by a computer system because her first name was Gay and deemed "inappropriate for business-like communication".
Gay Hamilton, who says she is also actually gay, said she was concerned that the country's biggest public company was spending its time and resources on trifling issues, the Herald on Sunday reported. "If they do have to put content filters on, then maybe they should ensure that it only gets genuinely abusive words," she told reporters.
Telecom's automated reply to her email said the message "was identified by our content filtering processes as containing language that may be considered inappropriate for business-like communication". It confirmed that the offending word was "gay". Telecom spokesman Lenska Papich said the response was triggered by the company's internal email monitoring system. "Our systems internally detect a number of words, including both the words gay and heterosexual, that could be deemed as inappropriate for use at work," she said. | |
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