On this show, we have a look at two unusually advanced ways to improve agent performance.
The first comes in our main presentation, which comes from Paul Cahill, General Manager Customer Service at Internet Service Provider iiNet, which operates contact centres in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Paul explains how iiNet works to build a consistent culture across these three nations. One tactic: sending staff abroad so they can experience its centres in other nations, share experiences and make sure everyone delivers consistently.
Our second feature is a sponsor interview with Fergal Murphy, IBM Global Business Services’ Senior Managing Consultant for Business Analytics & Optimisation.
Fergal joins us to explain Analytics Optimised Routing (AOR), a new technology from IBM that applies analytics to the task of routing. The idea behind AOR is that skills-based routing is great, but if you can route to an agent whose personality and lifestyle matches the caller’s, they’ll be more empathetic and you’ll get better results.
Fergal explains the genesis of AOR and offers a case study to explain its benefits.
In this episode of Smart Call, we ask: Who’s the Boss?
And we do so in two ways.
First up, we have Dr. Catriona Wallace of callcentres.net sharing the results of her firm’s annual Australasian Benchmarking Report with us. Catriona finds that call centre bosses have some happier challenges at the moment, because fewer workers are leaving the industry.
Our second interview is with the ATA’s Michael Meredith. Together, we explore the prospect of the government setting customer service levels, a notion flagged in recent telecommunications industry reform proposals.
This episode of Smart Call gets geeky as we talk to two IT strategists.
But don’t worry that we are going to go all dry and technical on you! Instead, we have a fascinating presentation from Genesys’ G-Force about the future of customer service, from Bill Peer, a Vice President for Enterprise Architecture at the InterContinental Hotels Group.
We’ve also got a CIO for you, in the form of Phil Edwards from Smart Salary. Phil teams up with Global Speech Networks Nick Rodda to explain how he’s adopting an incremental approach to contact centre innovation.
This week’s show tackles a couple of long-held assumptions:
Contact centres are rightly an unloved and expensive enclave in most businesses
Offhsoring takes jobs from Australia
Many listeners’/readers’ will be just about to leap out of their chairs upon reading this pair of statements, because they just are not true and this week’s Smart Call proves it with two stories explaining how the call centre tail is wagging the dog.
We prove it in an interview with Genesys’ Jason Stirling, who explains how the company is working to get every part of an organisation that touches a customer working together, instead of just leaving the contact centre to do it all – or just to cop all the flak when things go wrong.
We’ve also got an interview with Denice Pitt and Sadip Sen of Aegis, who together explain how Aegis – which has just formalised its takeover of UCMS – plans to bring 2000 new BPO jobs to Australia. Yep that’s right – an Indian company BRINGING jobs to Australia!
One of the big buzzwords in IT right now is “crowdsourcing,” the practise of harnessing “the wisdom of the crowd,” as represented by the millions of people online, to find the talent needed to solve problems.
Crowdsourcing is generally held to be a positive thing because it lets you tap into willing and clever people who help you to solve problems.
But what if crowdsourcing instead solved problems that your customers have? Like their frustration with your IVR?
That’s what’s happening at Ihateholding.com, a site on which members of the public can post the keypress sequences that get them through an IVR and straight to an agent.
Sean Riley, the site’s creator, joins us on this week’s show to explain why he developed the site, the public’s reaction and his future plans.
We’re also joined by Dr. Catriona Wallace from callcentres.net to analyse news including:
Disaster recovery plans for call centres
What Avaya’s looming purchase of Nortel’s enterprise network business could mean for call centres
This week on Smart Call we meet a Chief Information Officer. His name is Colin Thomas, he comes from NSW teachers Credit Union and he shares what sounds like a very, very healthy relationship between his IT team and the Credit Union's customer service operation.
Also on this week's Smart Call, Dr Catriona Wallace rejoins us to discuss news including:
Good reports about the DNC register
The contact centre where staff warn customers about offshoring
Why emergency services contact centres need standards
This episode of Smart Call features Richard Gaze of Customer Service Benchmarking Australia, a Melbourne organisation that uses mystery shopping and surveys to analyse customer service experiences.
The company has recently updated its research and says mobile phone companies, airlines and banks are the worst customer service exponents in Australia. We ask Richard why in this interview.
We also look at news, including:
Analyst Datamonitor’s assessment of the top contact centre software vendors
Growth prospects for India’s domestic BPO industry
The company using retirees to deliver service to retirees
Authenticating callers to a contact centre consumes a big percentage of every call.
Voice biometrics promises a faster and more secure way to confirm a caller's identity and this week we have two interviews with new users of the technology.
Frank Lombardo from Aviva and National Australia Bank's Sam Jackel both worked with Salmat VeCommerce to get voice biometrics up and running and join us to explain why they chose the technology and how it's working for their organisation.
Dr. Catriona Wallace also returns to help us with news including:
Relocating workers from Scotland to Manila
What we should expect of emergency services contact centres
This week's Smart Call is brought to you by Verint, who ran seminars in Sydney and Melbourne this week entitled How to Survive (and even Thrive) During the Economic Downturn.
Verint's Principal Global Solutions Consultant Bill Durr joins us with part two of his presentation to the event.
Our feature interview is with Toby Poulson, Chief Financial Officer of a company called Layby Services, which sells pre-paid Christmas hampers. The nature of that business means the load on its contact centre is very seasonal. The company has six full-time agents, but a 40-seat contact centre.
Close to Christmas, all those seats are filled. But for much of the year, those seats are empty. Toby explains how the company copes with these seasonal spikes in activity and reveals some interesting technology and human resources tricks!
This week's Smart Call is brought to you by Verint, who ran seminars in Sydney and Melbourne this week entitled How to Survive (and even Thrive) During the Economic Downturn.
Verint's Principal Global Solutions Consultant Bill Durr joins us with the first part of his presentation to the event.
Our feature interview for the week is with Alex VanDerLeij, Communications Officer for the new Contact Centre Institute of New Zealand (CCINZ). The CCINZ is the brand spanking new peak body for the industry in NZ and Alex explains its aims to us this week.
Australia's contact centre industry was not entirely happy about the introduction of a Do Not Call (DNC) register, but accepted its necessity.
But the industry is livid at the proposal, unveiled in the recent Federal Budget, to extend the register to businesses.
This week, we learn why the industry is so unhappy about the proposed extension in interviews with the Australian Direct Marketing Association and the ATA.
Dr. Catriona Wallace also offers her five cents worth on the topic and helps us to analyse news including:
How green are contact centres?
Consolidation of emergency services contact centres
This week's Smart Call features Jennifer Scott of UK outsourcer Capita.
Jennifer visited Australia to speak at the Voice Leadership Forum and shares her experience of introducing speech recognition to a contact centre where efficiency and cost control were at a premium.
This week's Smart Call comes to you live from the Australian Customer Management and Contact Centre Summit and features Family First Senator Steven Fielding explaining his proposed Stop Booting Jobs Offshore Bill.
The bill would make it very hard for contact centres to use offshore resources, making it understandably controversial.
We've been trying to get the Senator on the show without success, but tracked him down at this event!
Also on this week's show, Dr Catriona Wallace joins us to look at news including:
The decline of India's contact centre offshoring industry
The loss of 250 jobs in a Tasmanian regional contact centre
Internet cafes that become contact centres by night
This week's SmartCall is brought to you by NSC and features Vicki Herrell, Executive Director of the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals.
Vicki joins us with her tips on how to get the best from workforce management tools.
We also have part two of our sponsor feature with Anthony Seaegg, former national chairman of the ATA and now Director of ICT Group. Anthony continues his talk about turning a contact centre into a profit centre.
We also welcome back Dr. Catriona Wallace of callcentres.net to help us analyse the week's news, which includes:
The contact centre with a culture of sarcasm
More on Steven Fielding's 'No Offshoring' bill
Is it wrong to hire out of work geniuses in your call centre?
Australia's national broadband network - what does it mean for customer service?
This week’s Smart Call is brought to you by NSC, who bring us a sponsor feature with Anthony Seaegg, former national chairman of the ATA and now Director of ICT Group. Anthony talks about turning a contact centre into a profit centre.
Our main feature interview is with Nicole Twyford, Medibank Private’s Group Manager Direct Sales & Service. Medibank Private has changed the way it routes calls and now has one pool of agents who solve small problems, fast. Then there’s the pool of agents that tackles weightier issues and aims to achieve first call resolution to ensure customers with complex queries go away satisfied.
Nicole explains why the company has chosen this strategy and how it is managing two pools of agents with different skills and KPIs.
And in this week’s news we consider:
Senator Steve Fielding’s anti-offshoring Bill
The New Zealand Bank offshoring to …. Australia!
French research suggesting fixed-line phones are on their way out as a customer service channel
CIOs’ attitudes to customer service during a downturn
This week's Smart Call is brought to you by NSC, which brings us a sponsor feature from Community First Credit Union's Catherine Samon.
Catherine shares with us the full story of her recent contact centre upgrade and touches on all sorts of project management and vendor selection issues in a very, very candid and useful story.
We've also a feature interview with Pitney Bowes' Navin Sharma who explains the concept of data quality and how to make sure the data your contact centre team works with lets them deliver top-grade service.
Before those two items, we have a special guest news analyst in the form of ATA CEO Michael Meredith, who joins us to discuss:
A call center strike in New Zealand
ANZ Bank's decision to offshore ... to New Zealand
A decade ago, the idea of contact centres in India or the Philippines seemed a bit exotic.
Today, Indian offshoring is so well known that it features in Slumdog Millionaire, winner of Best Picture at the Academy Awards!
But one commentator says this big, fast shift of services around the world is only 10%-20 complete and that if you or your team work behind a computer screen, someone else somewhere else in the world will soon bid to do your work.
The good news is that doing it cheaper is not a reason to move - so not all work will follow the dollar.
But the bad news is that there is change a-plenty on the way!
On this week's Smart Call, we speak to this commentator - Robert Kennedy - and discuss his book The Services Shift and the globalisaton of services.
In this week's news, Dr. Catriona Wallace of callcentres.net joins us to discuss:
Hoax emails about mobile numbers and the Do-Not-Call Register;
Contact centre security;
New sources of customer service innovation;
The social status and romantic prospects of Indian women in contact centres.
On this week’s Smart Call we explore “Channel Economics,” the study of how to make sure your customers end up in the right channel.
To understand why this is an important thing to study, consider your bank and the fact it has probably spent years trying to get you to use the low-cost channel of an automatic teller machine.
Once that’s your preferred channel, how can the bank get you into its branch to sell you more products?
Martin Dove, Managing Director for Customer Interactive Solutions at Dimension Data, explains Channel Economics and how to apply it in this week’s show!
We’ve also got a sponsor feature, with Matt Paterson, Head of Business Improvement at ING. Matt joins us thanks to our sponsor Verint. In part two of Matt’s presentation, he explains how Verint products have made big and very positive changes for ING.
We’ve also got Dr. Catriona Wallace analysing the week’s news.
On this week’s show:
Telstra’s “always be answered by an Aussie” call centre option
Martin Dove, Managing Director for Customer Interactive Solutions at Dimension Data.
On this week’s Smart Call we speak to National Australia Bank’s Tim Cullen and learn about the Bank’s new speech recognition system, which is bringing all sorts of benefits to NAB and its customers.
Tim also reveals why the persona for the system is a man - apparently customers feel better about dealing with a virtual bloke!
We’ve also got a sponsor feature, with Matt Paterson, Head of Business Improvement at ING. Matt joins us thanks to our sponsor Verint. ING’s a big Verint user and Matt explains how he’s using their products to meld the back and front offices.
On this week’s show:
Dr. Catriona Wallace returns with this week’s news, which includes her take on a medical insurance call centre
This week’s Smart Call looks at a very public apology, in which a company used its blog to spell out customer service errors. We asked the company, GoodBarry, why it decided to be so frank and open with its customers … and the rest of the world!
We also speak to Inference Communications, and Australian company with a new technology called ‘Voice Search’ that is not quite IVR and not quite open-dialog speech recognition!
This week’s Smart Call is a special show, devoted to the Victorian bushfire emergency.
We speak to the CEOs of UCMS and Stellar, both of whom personally took calls during the emergency after their respective companies volunteered their services to the Red Cross.
Smart Call wants to help too - sponsor next week’s show and we’ll pass your fee to the Red Cross!
This week’s feature interview is with Marianne Walker, National Contact Centre Manager at Superpartners. Marianne shares the tale of how she and her team designed a new IVR and future possibilities like personalised IVR.
We also need to mention next week’s show, which will feature the back story on how the industry provided the Red Cross with help to set up and operate contact centres to take donations for victims of Victoria’s bushfires.
In recognition of their efforts, Smart Call has a special sponsorship offer: sponsor the bushfire special and we’ll donate the fee to bushfire victims.
Email simon at jargonmaster dot com and we’ll make it happen!
On this week’s show:
Love in the contact centre
The airline that won’t process complaints on the phone
Contact centres usually find it hard to attract and retain staff. But with unemployment tipped to rise this year, will it become a little easier to find staff?
This week, we talk to two recruitment consultants to learn about the typical employment patterns in a downturn and early signs of a shift in the labour market.
We also have the news with Dr. Catriona Wallace from callcentres.net, who explains why the theft of her large-breasted Buddha makes some complaints about regional call centres for Police in Queensland silly.
On this week’s show:
Hallis Chief Psychologist Stephen Walton on what to expect in a downturn.
FuturePeople’s Rob AShton on the current employment situation
In the first Smart Call for 2009, we learn all about operating a contact centre in Fiji, a destination that outsourcer Mindpearl has chosen because customers in the UK and USA think it is Australia!
We also learn about what it’s like to work in a country with an … ummm … interesting government.
In our first news segment for the year, we assess what is being called “the world’s best passenger complaint letter” as callcentres.net’s Dr Catriona Wallace joins us for another year.
On this week’s show:
Mindpearl CEO William Pattison explains his decision to open a 2500-seat facility in Fiji.
Nortel and Satyam fallout
What the world’s best complaint tells us about customer service in the online age
In the last Smart Call for 2009, we have a special look back at 2008 and predictions for 2009, with Kevin Panozza, Genesys’ Jason Stirling and callcentres.net’s Dr. Catriona Wallace.
But before we get there, we have one of the year’s most interesting stories, as UCMS’ General Manager for Human Resources, Wendy Bonici, explains how the company is working very successfully with home agents who have phobias that make it hard for them to work in conventional workplaces.
Amazing staff loyalty is just one benefit of this impressive arrangement.
On this week’s show:
Wendy Bonici of UCMS shares her experiences with phobic home-based agents.
Kevin Panozza on why customer service’s impact on brand experiences will be big in 2009
Jason Stirling from Genesys explains why downturn represents opportunity for the contact centre
Dr. Catriona Wallace sees the year out with her best moments for the industry in 2008
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL SMART CALL LISTENERS!
This week, we learn how studies of ant behaviour could transform your online customer service. The idea, as explained by RightNow’s Doug Warner, is that just as ants follow trails laid down by other ants to find food, you can find trails to useful information laid down by your customers.
Once you know where those trails start and finish, you can show customers how to find the information they need, instead of hoping they find it themselves!
We also have a sponsor interview this week, with Verint’s Craig Seebach who continues our look at ‘the ripple effect’ that we first covered back in Episode 41.
On this week’s show:
Catriona Wallace returns with a Christmassy version of the news.
Can contact centres give you diabetes?
Doug Warner on artificial intelligence, ants and the futility of web search
Craig Seebach from Verint continues our excerpts from ‘The ripple effect’ seminar
Can you imagine letting your customers know your current time-to-answer statistics before they call? Would you do it if time-to-answer was 20 minutes?
Adelaide Internet Service Provider Internode has done just that. Click here and you’ll see the data the company offers its customers.
Of course those statistics can also be seen by Internode’s prospects … and competitors.
Simon Hackett, the company’s Managing Director, is our feature interviewee on Smart Call this week and explains why he decided to make this data public and what he hopes it will achieve for the company.
SmartCall has turned one! November 21st, 2007, was the date the first ever SmartCall hit the Net.
We're not sure whether or not to celebrate, however, given that last week saw another attack on customer service as Australia's federal government singled out telecommunications companies as the subject of too many complaints. We report on the incident and offer response from Three Mobile and the ATA.
Speaking of the ATA, we learn why it has changed its name to the ATA.
This week's sponsor interview is with Mark Mathieson, Chief Information Officer of Manchester Unity, who explains how our sponsors HigherGround and Integ helped the company start to work with remote agents.
This week's feature interview is with Avaya's James Haensley, who explains why unified communications is over-rated in the contact centre and outlines new ways to deliver customer service that don't sentence customers to "IVR Jail."
We also have a sponsor feature, with Verint explaining the "ripple effect" that sees back-office operations cause all sorts of issues for the contact centre.
On this week's show:
Contact centre agents complain about software that they say makes it hard to do their jobs
The hot new African call centre market
James Haensley on breaking out of IVR jail
Our sponsor, Verint, talks about the ripple effect
This week’s feature interview is with Steve Fergusson from New Zealand Company Meridian Energy, which has recently announced it will bring its contact centre back in house after a protracted outsourcing engagement.
The aim of the move is to fundamentally transform customer service in an industry whose customers are disinterested in the product and acquire it only grudgingly.
Steve explains why the company has decided to take this step and the customer service outcomes he hopes to achieve as a result.
Dr Catriona Wallace from callcentres.net is on tour this week, so host Simon Sharwood reads the news, including an item about a survey that says receiving telemarketing calls is the most irritating thing in Australia.
On this week’s show:
Psychologists explain irritating customer service
Full speed ahead in the Philippines
Steve Fergusson from Meridian Energy explains why the company is bringing its contact centre back in house
This week, we meet Gemma Horsfield, Customer Advocacy Manager at Uecomm and learn about an innovative program that has seen the company research its customers’ perception of its value proposition. The learnings from the research have led to big changes in the way it interacts with customers!
On this week’s show:
Uecomm’s Customer Advocacy Manager Gemma Horsfield on customer value proposition research.
Dr Catriona Wallace helps us to decipher the week’s news
We learn about the Vatican’s call centre, and what happens when someone calls up asking for an exorcism
The general public’s dislike of unsolicited inbound telemarketing is well known: it’s why we have a Do Not Call Register.
But some people still think it is worth taking their dislike of telemarketing further, by conducting pranks when they receive a call. Some take it even further and record their pranks and put them on the Net.
This week’s Smart Call meets one of these pranksters, Gerant Kenneth, who has posted more than 30 pranks on his YouTube channel. We asked greant why he conducts pranks and how he feels they impact telemarketers.
On this week’s show:
Musician, artist, comedian and telemarketing prankster Gerant Kenneth explains his motivations.
Dr Catriona Wallace helps us to decipher the week’s news
We finally find a way to cover the US election, just like every other media outlet in the world!
Here at Smart Call, we cannot escape stories about Internet start-ups, biotechnology start-ups and general technology start-ups. But we hardly ever hear about contact centre start-ups.
Hence our interest in youcallme.com, a Perth start-up using the Net to invert the inbound call queue for the contact centre. One of the company’s founders, Jason Jordan, joins us this week.
We also have news about how the global credit crunch is boosting one particular part of the business process outsourcing industry.
On this week’s show:
Jason Jordan explains the queue-inverting strategy of youcallme.com.
Dr Catriona Wallace helps us to understand the week’s news
This week’s epispode of Smart Call features Dean Brown, Executive Manager, International Customer Services at Commonwealth Bank. Dean’s team just picked up the ATA award for best contact centre under 50 FTE staff.
Last year they missed out on a State awards and vowed to crack the big time. We’ve got the story of how they did it, and also how the center takes on the very interesting task of providing multi-lingual service in a very important revenue-generating role.
For this week’s sponsor interview we spoke to Virgin Blue’s Guest Contact Centre Business Analysis Manager Dustin Laidsaar. Our sponsor NSC wants you to hear from Dustin — aka the horse’s mouth — about the company’s all new IP based contact centre.
Along the way, Dustin fools me good. So listen out for that!
We’ve also got Dr Catriona Wallace from callcentres.net back again, after her exotic travels and other adventures.
On this week’s show:
How the Commonwealth Bank won an ATA Award with its multi-lingual international customer service team.
NSC brings us Virgin Blue’s Dustin Laidsaar
Dr Catriona Wallace analyses what the global financial meltdown means for the contact centre
This week’s first feature interview on Smart Call is with Brady Jacobsen, BigPond’s Director of Customer Operations.
Brady explains that the company’s foray into Twitter., a micro-blogging service, has resulted in unprecedented levels of feedback from customers about how it can deliver customer service more effectively online.
In a similar vein, Social Networks Strategist Laurel Papworth expands on her Blog post that says customer service professionals - not marketing or PR - should get the job of interacting with customers in online communities like blogs and forums.
On this week’s show:
Why BigPond is using Twitter and how it is bringing the company inprecedented levels of customer feedback.
Why customer service teams should be responsible for online community engagement
The Philippino company buying a US contact centre operator
This week’s feature interview on Smart Call is with Alan Hodgson of Repco.
Alan explains how the company uses ‘presence’ to see if subject matter experts across the company can help the call centre to give customers detailed assistance that no contact centre agent could ever hope to deliver.
Smart Call has wondered how - or if - this kind of system can work, but as you’ll hear this week, Repco has pulled it off!
Dr Catriona Wallace from callcentres.net is back from New Zealand and helps us with the news again this week, including a hilarious tale about what happened when one contact centre decided it could be fun to dress up as cops and robbers for a day.
This week’s feature interview on Smart Call is with Brad Dixon from Railcorp.
Brad explains how and why Railcorp has opened a travel agent in its call centre and also details his team-building strategies that sometimes plan for agents to leave the call centre and Railcorp forever.
That sounds counter-intuitive, but actually makes a lot of sense, given the Newcastle-based centre has a lot of gradautes on the team.
Dr Catriona Wallace from callcentres.net is on tour this week, so host Simon Sharwood reads the news, including an item about a new movie called Call Centre.
This week’s Smart Call is brought to you by Citrix Online.
Our feature interview is with Marise Hannaford, IT Director at McKesson Asia-Pacific, who explains how the company is rolling out the National Health Call Centre Network.
Marise outlines how she is outsourcing some functions and explores the challenges that come with a contact centre that has to employ registered nurses to staff the phones and is required to keep a record of all its calls for 25 years!
Also this week, Dr Catriona Wallace gives us a preview of callcentres.net’s annual Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Report.
In this week’s sponsor interview, Barry Dacus from Citrix Online drops in to explain remote support and what it offers a contact centre.
This week Smart Call meets Bob Jones, call centre manager for Centrelink’s Indigenous Call Centres, which serve clients in remote indigenous communities. It’s a different clientele and Bob has interesting tales to tell about how to serve them.
Also this week, we have Michael Meredith from the Australian Teleservices Association with reaction to the proposed Do Not Call changes. In news, we look at contact centre consolidations.
This week’s SmartCall is brought to you by a new sponsor, CallDesign, whose Managing Director Miles Stanton drops in to talk about how to get value from your service provider.
We also bring you a summary of Genesys’ G-Force conference, with four big interviews.
In news, we have a scary story: Australia’s federal government is thinking about giving businesses the option to include themselves on the Do Not Call Register. Dr. Catriona Wallace from callcentres.net analyses the potential impact on telemarketing.
We also have a response of sorts from Stephen Conroy, Australia’s minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
And in case that’s not enough for you, we also have news of the first Internet dating service for contact centre workers.
This week’s Smart Call brings you Optus’ Anthony Shiner, general manager of retail and direct sales. Anthony was in charge of the launch of a device you might just have heard about … Apple’s iPhone 3G.
In this exclusive interview, Anthony tells us how Optus fired up its customer service team and its contact centers to ensure they could deliver the right experience on the day the iPhone launched.
Before we get to Anthony, massive news from India, which has allowed home-based contact centre workers for the first time. Dr. Catriona Wallace from callcentres.net analyses this innovation for us.
This week’s Smart Call brings you Nortel’s Darren Leffler, who explains why it is important to recognise generation Y’s preference for instant gratification and respond with customer service in the right channel.
There are a few buzzwords to get through in this one, but for the first time we hear a reason for using unified communications!
Also this week, Craig Neil of NSC drops in for a sponsor interview to talk about video as a tool for customer service and business communications.
And of course we have Dr Catriona Wallace talking us through the week’s news, including the rise of the Caribbean as a source of BPO services.
This week SmartCall considers email as a customer service channel, especially for new customers and prospects.
Chris Moriarty of Strike Force Sales joins us to discuss the research he conducted into just how fast Australian businesses respond to emails sent from their websites. The results are pretty terrifying, because the average time taken to answer an email is about as long as you need to fly to the moon!
In this week’s sponsor interview, Craig Neil of NSC drops in to talk about thin clients in the contact centre.
And of course we have Dr Catriona Wallace talking us through the week’s news, including analysis of a major online service abandoning email-only service and opening a contact centre.
This week we talk to an industry legend: Kevin Panozza, the founder of Salesforce.
Kevin is about to write a book called ‘The Eight Enemies of Customer Engagement’ and he shares some of those enemies with us this week. He also previews his new venture, animated e-learning tools that tap into Gen-Y’s cartoon and PlayStation preferred learning style to create more effective contact centre agents.
callcentres.net’s Dr. Catriona Wallace is back with us too, analysing a contact centre that has decided to charge one dollar every time customers speak to an agent!
Home-based contact centre agents are seen as being able to reduce operating costs, while making it easier to attract and retain staff.
This week, we put the home agent equation to the test, interviewing a contact centre operator that only uses home based agents, plus one of the agents that has chosen to work in this new way.
Darren Sharp, Senior Researcher with the Smart Services Co-operative and Swinburne University explains how consumers are using social networks like Facebook to research the goods and services they want to buy. They are also using social networks to learn about the customer service their chosen providers offer.
That puts the spotlight on customer service like never before, which leads Darren to suggest that contact centres might need to hire someone to become a part of social networks.
And of course we also chat to Dr. Catriona Wallace from callcentres.net, who comments on whether or not contact centre recruiters have a hard job.
This week's episode of SmartCall features Jane King, Deputy Commissioner for Client Contact at the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). Jane explains that during tax season the ATO receives so many calls that if it queued them all, the backlog could cause problems for the public phone network.
Jane also opens up to explain the ATO's customer service strategy, future directions, favoured technologies and human resources strategies in a very frank exclusive interview.
In other news, SmartCall has become the media partner for Genesys' G-Force event. For more information on the event, visit the G-Force site.
Also on this week's podcast, we chat to Dr. Catriona Wallace from callcentres.net, who comments on the new career direction for one of Australia's most prominent contact centre entrepeneurs.
In this week's sponsor segment, HigherGround asked us to interview Frost and Sullivan's Keith Dawson - who has recently researched just why many businesses are averse to using home-based contact centre agents.
On this week's show:
callcentres.net's Dr Catriona Wallace wonders if higher fuel prices might be good for the contact centre industry.
Drake International’s Martin Conboy says contact centre staff who call you "mate" need re-education.
SmartCall sponsor HigherGround brings us an interview with Frost and Sullivan's Keith Dawson.
This week’s episode of SmartCall features an interview with Mark White, the Chief Operating Officer of internet service provider iiNet. We’ve asked Mark on the show because he, like everyone else at iiNet, is measured on customer satisfaction.
That’s right: everyone from the CEO to the contact center agents all get measured on customer satisfaction. Mark explains how and why the company operates this way!
Also on this week’s show, Craig Neill of NSC drops by to explain the power of speech analytics, and we explain our new relationship with NSC.
And of course we also chat to Dr. Catriona Wallace from callcentres.net to get across the week’s news, which includes a very interesting video application.
This week’s episode of SmartCall considers a very important issue: why customers churn. Contact centres are often blamed for churn, with slow time to answer or quality of service cited as major turn-offs for customers.
But as we discover this week, there is more to churn that a contact centre’s performance. Professor Adrian Payne, the University of New South Wales’ Professor Of Marketing, has conducted his own research that identifies many reasons that customers churn. And the contact centre is only part of the problem.
This weeks’s edition of Smart Call marks an important anniversary: the first birthday of Australia’s Do Not Call Register.
2.3 million Australians have signed up to be telemarketer-free, a figure that a year ago had our industry quaking in its boots. We analyse the register’s impact in this week’s news segment with Dr. Catriona Wallace from callcentres.net.
Also on this week’s show, a great feature interview with Ben Greenaway. His medical supplies company, CPAP Australia, hires staff who conduct medical consultations one moment, then offer teleservices the next. VoIP is a big part of the company’s very impressive customer service success story.
This week we feature three interviews from Dimension Data's Customer Interact 2008 event, with the lead featuring National Australia Bank's Tim Cullen explaining how the bank is set to launch "virtual chat".
NAB's customers will soon turn to virtual customer assistants for advice through the company's new chat robot.
Also on this week's podcast:
callcentres.net's Dr Catriona Wallace analyses the week's news
Kate Zawerucha from BT Financial explains how the company went from agents feeling aggrieved by quality management to a situation where the contact centre is now a source of insight for the whole business
Dimension Data's Andrew Briggs explains why contact centres have gone backwards in the past decade, and what can be done to prevent further slippage
This week we speak to Pieter Vierod of Friend Group, a marketing consultant who has helped the Australian Taxation Office to reduce the number of calls the contact centre receives as a result of letters that customers find confusing or confronting.
On this week's podcast:
callcentres.net's Dr Catriona Wallace analyses perks for contact centre workers and whether they really make a difference
Michael Meredith from the Australian Teleservices Association
We learn about "guerrilla recruitment" and explain why it is needed
Episode 15 of SmartCall looks at new customer service project at Melbourne's South East Water, where management have figured out that field service can impact the contact centre and vice versa. Also on this week's podcast:
callcentres.net's Dr Catriona Wallace reveals on the strange tale of an American contact centre company turning to India's domestic market for growth
We explain how to haggle for carpets in Marrakesh
We learn about the Philippines' latest BPO export push
Is the contact centre really a stepping stone to other careers, as the IT press suggests?
Episode 14 of SmartCall is here, and this week we explore the idea that contact centres are measuring the wrong things and communicating them to agents in the wrong way, with less-than-average results.
In this week's podcast:
callcentres.net's Dr Catriona Wallace reveals whether or not contact centres want unified communications
We reveal another hot offshore destination and its role in preserving the nightlife of contact centre agents
Gambling vs. contact centres: which is the better business?
Avaya's Roy Ivimey previews his session on contact centre measurement from Avaya's 'Connect' event.
Episode 13 of Smart Call, your weekly call and contact centre podcast, is available for download. This week's show looks at 'social CRM,' the idea that social network data could become available in CRM systems.
In this week's podcast:
callcentres.net's Dr Catriona Wallace analyses a proposed "Do not track" register for Internet users
We reveal the nation that is starting to emerge as a new offshore BPO destination
Episode 12 of Smart Call, your weekly call and contact centre podcast, is available for download. This week's show looks at big changes in customer service for one of Asia's largest telcos.
In this week's podcast:
callcentres.net's Dr Catriona Wallace explains that it is not all bad news when a company cancels an offshoring arrangement
We explore Pathfinder, a privacy arrangement driven by APEC that could have a big impact on the BPO industry
Consumers reveal what they think about voice biometrics being used for authentication
Telstra's Scott McMillan explains how the company is changing the way it conducts customer service
Episode 11 of Smart Call, your weekly call and contact centre podcast, is available for download. This week's show looks at the formation of a new regional body to represent Asia's contact centre industry around the world.
In this week's podcast:
callcentres.net's Dr Catriona Wallace explains why a new deal between Oracle and CSC is not necessarily bad news for existing contact centre-centric technology vendors and is probably something end users will welcome.
Catriona shares her experience of the book One Night @ the call centre, an Indian novel about working in a contact centre that has been turned into a movie called Hello. The story has a bit of a spiritual twist, we are told. Catriona says it is a useful source of insights into the Indian contact centre industry!
Simon Kriss explains the formation of a new group called the Asia Pacific Contact Centre Association Leaders (APCCAL), which aims to represent the region's contact centre industry to the world.
Smart call, your weekly call and contact centre podcast, is available for download. This week’s show peers into the future of the contact centre and explores the future role of video, maps and virtual reality in the delivery of customer service!
In this week's podcast:
callcentres.net’s Dr Catriona Wallace analyses email in the contact centre and why it is languishing as a little-used channel.
Bruce McCabe of S2 Intelligence looks at the future of the contact centre, explaining how voice analysis, video demonstrations and maps will become part of the customer service experience, but virtual reality probably will not.
Reminders about next week’s Voice Leadership Forum, a two-day event that will focus debate on the role of voice biometrics in defeating identity fraud! SmartCall is the official media partner for the event!
SmartCall, your weekly call and contact centre podcast, is available for download. We’re pleased to announce our appointment as the official media partner of the Voice Leadership Forum, a two-day event that will focus debate on the role of voice biometrics in defeating identity fraud!
We’ll be at the event on April 10 and 11 in Sydney, and a future show will bring you a show with some of the highlights.
But this week we’re looking at how to pull a contact centre out of thin air in a short period of time. It can be done!
In this week's podcast:
callcentres.net’s Dr Catriona Wallace analyses the new alliance between Aspect and Microsoft, Asia’s prospects for contact centre revenue growth and looks at how UK contact centres are helping to display corporate social responsibility.
Anthony Rohde of 1300 Flowers explains how his company has built a new contact centre from the ground up in a surprisingly short amount of time and lets us in on the secret of why roses cost so much on Valentine’s Day.
SmartCall, your weekly call and contact centre podcast, is available for download. This week’s show has news of a massive new customer service effort from an iconic Australian company, plus an interview with a contact centre pioneering a script-free outbound call technique.
In this week's podcast:
callcentres.net’s Dr Catriona Wallace on the Asian Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Reports findings for India and China, assessing the world’s top five contact centre outsourcers and whether or not automated telephone job interviews are a good idea.
Strikeforce Sales Ciaran Mcguigan explains his concept of “the conversation business” and how his company is building a team of outbound contact centre agents capable of doing more than reading a script and hoping they caught you at a good moment.
SmartCall, your weekly call and contact centre podcast, is available for download. This week’s show has a deluge of data, as we cover two major benchmarking studies that report on the performance of contact centres around the world.
In this week's podcast:
callcentres.net’s Dr Catriona Wallace on the Asian Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Reports and whether or not $428 per call is a reasonable cost for a contact centre
Dimension Data’s Andrew Briggs compares the contact centre of 1997 to the contact centre of 2007 … and surprises us with which era performed better on same basic benchmarks.
This week's SmartCall is a special show. We'll take an in-depth look at speech recognition in the contact centre, thanks to four industry experts plus one very happy user: Pay TV firm Austar.
You'll learn when to use speech recognition, how it works, how to design a speech application and even how to create a persona for your contact centre.
In this week's podcast:
Jason Sterling of Genesys offers his ideas on when to use speech recognition
Peter Chidiac from Nuance Systems explains speech recognition technology
Jane Curtain from Dimension Data explains how to plan a speech solution
Miles Stanton from Call Design explains how to make a good persona
Dean Walters, the CIO of Austar, tells how speech recognition has cut customer handling costs by 50%
This week's SmartCall features the closest we'll ever get to contact centre royalty as we speak to Jeannine Walsh, recently honoured with the Order of Australia medal for her services to the contact centre industry over more than two decades.
Jeannine offers us a fascinating insight into the evolution of the industry, which started for her at a contact centre where the staff had a phone, a calculator, and not much else!
In this week’s podcast:
callcentres.net's Dr Catriona Wallace analyses the week's news, including signs that India's contact centre industry may be experiencing labour shortages
Jeannine Walsh reflects on 20 years in the teleservices industry
Donald Brown of our sponsor Interactive Intelligence explains where unified communications and the contact centre intersect.
Dr Catriona Wallace joins host Simon Sharwood to discuss the week's news, including Bangladesh's bid to become a contact centre giant, the ramifications of a cable cut in the middle east and what's going to happen when offers of one cent airline fares hit Australia's contact centres
In this week's sponsor interview, Donald Brown from Interactive Intelligence talks about common contact centre tools that become a process engine that the whole business can use
Pipevines CEO Peter Spoto explains the concept of an on-demand contact centre and how they can help businesses scale up their contact centres quickly to deal with peak load
We're back! SmartCall this week kicks off its first full year of broadcasting. ITRadio and callcentres.net have teamed to bring you news and views from the world of customer service bundled into a neat podcast.
In this week’s podcast:
Dr Catriona Wallace and our own Simon Sharwood debunk research about germs on phones, stratify the outsourcing industry and explore the customer service preferences of Chinese consumers
Anne Burns from Accenture goes through the firm's global service survey and tries to explain why customers dislike being served by technology, but want the faster service technoploy enables
Matt Dixon talks about how the knowledge management and training software his company offers can put contact centre agents in control of their own destinies, and uses his company's recent sale to ING as an example of what can go right!
SmartCall #1 — Understanding the role of call centres in your business November 22nd, 2007
Hello and welcome to the first edition of SmartCall, brought to you by callcentres.net and ITRadio.com.au. We’re ramping up our podcast production in coming weeks, so you should see a few more editions of the show before we take a break over summer then return with a weekly netcast in late January.
On this week’s podcast:
callcentres.net’s Catriona Wallace discusses the news with ITRadio.com.au’s own Patrick Gray
Smart Call host Simon Sharwood chats to Dayle Grant, The Australian Teleservices Association’s contact centre manager of the year.
Mike Meredith, Chairman of the Australian Teleservices Association, reveals the two biggest concerns facing contact centres today.
SmartCall #56 — Get the best out of workforce management
Speaking of the ATA, we learn why it has changed its name to the ATA.
September 4th, 2008
SmartCall #21 — 61 ways to say "yes"
SmartCall #5 — 20 years in the game
