Support for industry forum

By Adam Gifford


A new forum has been launched for senior executives in the rapidly-changing call-centre and customer-interaction industry to discuss trends and common problems.

"The Exchange" is the initiative of Unisys New Zealand. Senior consultant Paul Gordon says the idea won strong endorsement at its first meeting this month.

"People thought it could be a worthwhile forum. Some participants were also keen to do qualitative bench marking, to see where industry should be going," Mr Gordon says.

"It's not an anti-competitive thing. There will still be strong competition between the different participants."

Unisys New Zealand has about 90 developers specialising in customer interaction, call-centre and client-relationship solutions.

"What we say is we are a true end-to-end supplier. We start with analysing the business problem and go right through to designing the business solution," he says.

"We're product neutral, so we can provide the best product for that customer."

Mr Gordon says the forum is an attempt to add value to the whole industry rather than promote sales.

"Forums are definitely needed to make sense of all the hype. There's a huge amount of hype in this industry, lots of products, and a fair amount of failures.

"You can have the best technology, best processes and best people but still fail as a business if everything is not lined up properly."

Mr Gordon says customer interaction is more than call centres. It can include: interactive voice response (IVR), those voices which ask you to press a number for the next step; proper training for front- office or show-room staff; e-mail, Web pages and even the bill.

"The issue is trying to maintain consistency across all your channels."

He says call centres can fail if they are not properly aligned to the business.

"Let's not just improve the call centre, let's ask 'is it the most effective channel'? In some case the people strategy may be store-fronts, with the call centre for backup."

He says the Internet and globalisation have created major challenges for companies, with customers expecting ever higher standards of interaction.

"Companies are trying to compete against international standards. If a customer calls an airline and gets great service, they will expect the same level of service from a bank. It can be hard to keep pace.

"Then if you start being good, customers will call you, so you have to be able to cope with the extra traffic."

Technological convergence, ergonomics, training, and health and safety could be the sort of issues the forum looks at, although it is likely to shy away from a political role.

"The expectations are people will join, speak frankly, and participate in a qualitative benchmark study. We don't have an agenda other than to facilitate a networking forum of senior people."