contactcenter

Shoby Abraham is the Customer Care Manager of Samsung Electronics New Zealand. He’s COPC certified and has 20 years’ experience in the contact centre industry.

From his extensive experience in Quality Assurance, he’s identified there are 3 common pitfalls of most QA programs. He shares what they are and how to solve them.

The approach he shares helped Samsung shift Customer Satisfaction from 75% to 90%+.

The 3 Common Pitfalls of Most QA Programs:

1. Calls are often given an overall score. Instead, give a call an overall ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ (03:34).

2. There is often bias in how calls are picked for evaluation – Team Leaders and QA often pick them based on length. Instead, random calls should be evaluated (06:51).

3. Team Leaders and Quality Analysts should be calibrated in their ability to assess calls. This ensures alignment of call quality across your contact centres (08:33).

You'll Learn:

• The ‘sword’ metaphor that Shoby uses, which defines what a Quality Assurance program should and shouldn’t be (10:35).

• The different way of thinking Team Leaders and QA need to adopt when evaluating calls, to ensure great customer outcomes (11:09).

• What feedback should be given to agents – and when – which will make a massive difference to your Customer Satisfaction (11:28).

See the full show notes here: https://bravatrak.com/shoby-abraham-podcast

Connect with Shoby here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shoby-abraham-08381587/

If your priorities include boosting employee engagement, lifting customer experience, or increasing your focus on coaching and development, I can help you out with a few ideas that you can steal. Send me an email (at blairs@bravatrak.com) and we can organize a 15-minute call over Zoom or Teams.

Hector Farmer is the Digital Team Manager for TSB Bank’s Customer Engagement Centre.

He’s been a Digital Team Manager for the past 7 years, at 2 different banks. In 2020, he won the Customer Contact Network of New Zealand, National Team Leader of the Year Award.

He’s got a fantastic mindset which helps his people thrive. Exactly the sort of mindset to look for if you’re recruiting Team Leaders, or to replicate if you’re a Team Leader.

Hector's Top 3 Tips:

1. Share your “Why” with your team. And if you can, align your “Why” to that of your business. Purpose matters (11:45).

2. Have positive intent in how you coach and lead your team. It’s the foundation of great leadership. When you create a safe environment for your people, they’re empowered to be their best selves (12:03).

3. Slow down to speed up, by stepping back from the detail, and doing what only you can do as a leader - setting strategy, enabling others, and removing barriers (12:21).

You'll Learn:

• Hector’s apple orchard metaphor, which shows how you can help your team deliver great customer outcomes (03:42).

• The actions Hector takes each day to help his team thrive (05:52).

• The emotional bank account each of your team has, and why it’s vital to keep topping it up (06:15).

• The model which Hector uses to identify what coaching each team member needs (06:56).

See the full show notes here: https://bravatrak.com/hector-farmer-podcast  

Connect with Hector here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hector-farmer-488a68161/

If you’d like some ideas on how an evidence-based Coaching System can help you reduce unplanned absenteeism and attrition - while boosting employee engagement and customer experience - send me an email at blairs@bravatrak.com to book your 15-minute chat over Zoom or Teams.

Angela Wynn is the Head of Strategy at ASB Bank. She’s spent the last 20 years in the finance industry, within sales, service, and strategy roles. Most including big change management projects.

She’s the most incisive strategic thinker I know. Today, she shares her tips from one of her change management projects around how to increase customer service in your contact centres, while increasing sales revenue.

Top 3 Tips:

1. Take the time to understand what your customers want, and what looks like in what your agents do. It’s vital to put your assumptions aside (07:28).

2. The more positive feedback your managers give their people, the better. All of us think we give a lot of it, but when you track it, you may realise you’re not giving as much as you thought (07:55).

3. Establish an operating rhythm around when you expect your managers to coach, and track it. It’s easy to assume people are doing what you’re wanting done, but they may not be (08:33).

You'll Learn:

• The key part of operating rhythm Angela credits for lifting performance (04:58).

• How you can lift sales by improving customer experience (05:24).

• The shift Angela made in their recruitment of Centre Manager and Team Leaders, which made all the difference in creating long term improvements in customer service and sales revenue (09:40).

Show notes: https://bravatrak.com/angela-wynn-podcast 

Connect with Angela on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angela-wynn-51847a14/

Get your free copy of Game On here: https://bravatrak.com/game-on-book

In this episode of the webcast, I’m joined by Shameem Smillie, the Director of Global Contact Center Solutions at Mitel for a conversation around connection, personalized customer experiences, and what ‘meaningful connections’ mean in a digital world, what the future of work looks like in post-pandemic times — and some practical ways businesses can think about strengthening their communication skills.

Let’s face it, the last year has been a slog. Almost a year ago to the day, for many of us the world shut down, our companies shifted almost overnight to remove work, kids shifted to remote learning, and we hunkered down. And in case you’ve not noticed, it’s largely been cloud solutions and collaboration applications/platforms that have made this shift possible. 

We kicked off our conversation talking about the rapid shift involved globally as organizations and their workers shifted to work from home and how navigating work, family, obligations regarding children and beyond have played a role.

Shameem shared with some of her thoughts on a change in the demographics that has embraced technology, how the BandAid solutions that were initially put in place by many organizations in the early WFH days are now being evaluated (and often replaced), and how her expertise in customer experience helps her be especially attuned to meaningful moments of conversation and the things organizations can do to empower and facilitate them.

Our conversation touched on:

• Remote work is here to stay
• Consumer appetite is for faster, more personal interaction and the businesses rising to the top are those that understand that and put good communications first
• What businesses seem to have struggled with the most as they adapted to a WFH, distributed workforce
• What kind of adjustments companies are going to need to make as we gradually ease back into a more normal of doing things
• The tangible ways that businesses can strengthen communication skills
• What the foundational technology is, the must-haves, in order to get communication technology and communications skills where they need to be so as to deliver not only the optimum in customer experience (think contact centers) as well as the optimum in employee experience.

Shameem also shared some great customer use cases, including touching on some verticals who have experienced hyper accelerated growth over the course of the last year, and how they’ve navigated a sudden pivot in their work, collaboration, and communication style, and their experiences and success stories that we can all learn from.

If you’re looking to up your communication game and focused on how to create more meaningful digital communications in a remote (or hybrid) world, this is a conversation that I think you’ll enjoy — and benefit from.

If you’d like a deeper dive into this topic, download an ebook developed by Mitel that I was thrilled to participate in, Mitel’s Now of Work. The ebook features insights from a group of well-known industry experts and focuses on the integrated solutions for remote, hybrid, and in-office workforces that are the future of work, and how using streamlined communication for better collaboration, understanding best-in-class practices around security and compliance for tech solutions is the path to a future of work that is personified by meaningful communications that are both collaborative and hassle free.

Welcome to the Secrets to Contact Center Success. The podcast which connects you with the latest and greatest tips from the best and brightest minds in the industry.

But before I tell you a bit about myself, let's talk about you. More specifically; the value you can expect to get from regularly tuning in.

My focus is on interviewing experts in the contact centre space, to share with you the best secrets for solving the challenges that you're facing.

The reality is that whatever problems you're currently facing in your contact centers, someone else has faced them as well and overcome them. Someone else already has the answers. And I want to connect you with those answers to shortcut your path to success.

Each episode will cover a contact center improvement project - or a change management initiative - that a contact center leader has lead, which was highly successful.

See the full transcript here: www.bravatrak.com/welcome-to-the-podcast

Playing at work have been traditionally unacceptable in the workplace. As adults, we think playing is childish and working meant being serious all the time. However, based on what we see from top performing companies in the world today, play has been an important aspect in their success. Play has led to innovation of products like Gmail, Google Meet, and many others. So, if you are a call center executive or have a call center business, should you allow or encourage playing at work? Does play make a positive impact in your customer experience strategy?

Listen as Jeff Harry helps you rediscover your play. Playing is not merely having fun at work and wasting time and reducing productivity. Playing encourages fun and allows your employees to feel positive, thereby leading to enhanced creativity and a more positive customer experience.

Intelligent Sourcing's Talking Sourcing podcast makes its debut sponsored by TTEC. TTEC's Iain Banks and independent advisor Peter Ryan examine the impact of chatbots on the contact centre industry and where the next few years will take us.

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Presented by Guy Clapperton

Hal and Ric discuss today's Contact Center and Sharpen's Agent First philosophy. Learn about Active Contact Resolution and how it would apply to your business or organization.