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LATEST NEWS |
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 City Software puts sales focus on contact centre, online
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Melbourne-based City Software has recently closed its two retail shopfronts in Sydney and one in Melbourne to put a stronger focus on online and contact centre sales.
The company says it has made structural changes to help it gain better traction in the consumer space which has led to an increase in online sales. City Software managing director, Lorenzo Coppa, said it had spent the past two years building up its corporate division, CSW-IT, as a separate unit to its consumer business.
"Corporate is the area we are looking at growing - we have invested heavily in staff in the last five months and expect that to generate even stronger results," Coppa said. The company reported a 43% growth in gross profits in the year to June 30. |
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 Contact centre recruitment a tough HR role
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Media and disaffected employees have been known to talk down working as a contact centre agent, but a new article has included contact centre recruiter as one of the five worst jobs in human resources.
"The issue with the call centre recruiter role isn't the type of work, it's the quantity and the economics of the situation," says the article on the Workforce Management website. "As a consumer call centre recruiter, you'll be asked to recruit new hires for a large call centre (generally 300 to 1,000 seats). You'll use your recruiting skills and innovation initially, then your excitement will wane as you realize the ugly truth-you're being asked to produce 15 to 30 new hires every two to three weeks from a stretched labor market."
The article said contact centre recruiter was an over-specialised role, which makes it tough to branch out into something more general. |
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MDA National deploys virtual contact centre |
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Insurance company MDA National has deployed a virtual contact centre that allows staff to field calls from any customer anywhere in the country.
MDA initially contracted communications company Nortel for a routine phone system replacement, but the project evolved into a unified communications deployment. MDA initially consulted Nortel and its Platinum nPower channel partner Commander when it decided to switch from an old analogue phone system to IP telephony, but the project rapidly expanded beyond voice once the company saw the broad range of business benefits possible through Nortel's unified communications solutions.
The new system allows MDA to access multimedia communications, unified messaging for mobile staff to easily retrieve e-mail and voicemails remotely, and a complete IP-based ‘virtual' contact centre that allows customer inquiries from any Australian city to be easily directed to the most appropriate staff member regardless of their physical location. "Nortel's solutions not only gave us features to link all our agents into a virtual contact centre but in combination with Nortel's Quality-of-Service (QoS) enabled hardware, we are now able to guarantee the quality of voice calls across the data network," said MDA IT manager Graham Owens. |
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Convergys remains focused on offshoring |
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Offshore contact centre services will remain CRM and outsourcing company Convergys' key business focus in Australia and New Zealand, according to the company's new senior account executive for the region Max Tennant.
"Contact centres will always play a major role in services based organisations. The need will increase as services such as telephone banking and home shopping become further adopted in Australia," Tennant said. A recent study by Everest Research found that the offshore contact centre market was shown to be in "a rapid growth phase," with key delivery regions, such as India and the Philippines, experiencing growth rates as high as 25%-60%.
Prior to joining Convergys, Tennant was the managing director of Acquire Asia Pacific, a consulting firm he founded in 2005 to assist the migration of contact centre and BPO functions from Australia to the Philippines. |
| SmartCall Podcast Programme |
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Smart Call # 22 - How the ATO could break the public phone network
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.
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.
Listen to the programme here
 The Contact Centre Industry's innovative new podcast programme by callcentres.net and itradio.com.au.
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CCEngage: The Contact Centre Industry Employee Engagement Tool |
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Currently employee attrition levels in contact centres in Australia and Asia-Pacific are over 30% per annum. Levels of employee engagement with contact centre work are typically lower than employees in other industries. Subsequently it is now imperative that the contact centre industry has a reliable tool to predict and influence agents' engagement, behaviour and performance. In line with its new organisation-wide research program EnterpriseEngage, callcentres.net has developed CCEngage, a measure of employee engagement specifically designed for contact centre industry employees.
CCEngage will allow you to...
- Measure the strength of the relationship between Work Aspects, Employee Engagement, Loyalty and Performance for individual employees as well as the whole centre.
- Identify areas of low performance compared to industry benchmarks.
- Through multiple regression analysis derive the significant drivers of Engagement, Loyalty and Performance.
- Recommend key areas to focus on to improve employee Engagement, Loyalty and Performance at individual and centre level.
Read more about CCEngage here | |
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| Events |
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2008 Australia & New Zealand Contact Centre
Industry Benchmarking Reports - Launch Events
Sydney - Wed, 3rd Sept 2008
Melbourne - Fri, 5th Sept 2008
Auckland - Tues, 9th Sept 2008
callcentres.net invites you to attend the breakfast launch of the 2008 Australia & New Zealand Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Reports.
Sponsored by Zintel & Autonomy etalk, the 2008 Australia & New Zealand Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Reports produced by callcentres.net will provide detailed information to enable you to better manage your contact centre.
Full event and registration details here
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| Press Releases |
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Optus and Telstra head to head as Australia's most authentic telecommunications brand
The Speech Receptionist: the integration of telephony and the web
MessageLabs Launches Email Continuity Service |
| Latest Research |
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Asian Contact Center Industry Benchmarking Report 2008:
China, India, The Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia
Why this is essential reading:
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The report provides you with information about the size and scope of the contact center industry in Asia and the eight countries studied
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Learn about industry benchmarks of performance in areas including: Operations, Human Resources, Technology, Finances, Sales and Revenue generation, Outsourcing and more
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Use the information contained in this report to gauge your center's performance in relation to the rest of the industry
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Find out the difference between the Outsource sector and the Captive contact center markets
View Table of Contents
Click here to order
Research Report Sponsored by:
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