The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

Rick Costa, General Manager - Strategic Business at Link:Q is among the presenters in the 'Best Contact Center' category during the 2009 Top Ranking Performers Conference in Singapore, June 24 - 26. Read this exclusive interview, and be sure to attend the conference to receive the best tips and ideas if you want to run a world class center!

Click here to learn more about this annual Best-of-the-Best Conference!

Please describe your contact center - no. of agents/reps, types of calls, emails etc you manage, volumes. Inbound or outbound etc
I could have easily described the Link:Q Contact Centre based on my perception, understanding, client feedback and years of service at Link:Q, but instead I extended this question " Our Contact Centre Staff" and this is what they said:

- Relaxed atmosphere with generous sized workstations for each rep
- Reps are being multi-skilled allow them to take a variety of calls from a diverse group of customers.
- Great satisfaction in being able to provide a solution for a callers problem
- Always new services to learn never boring
- On going training/coaching allows us to provide the best customer service possible
- Multicultural environment where we all learn from each other
- Multicultural call centre employing people from all walks of life
- Congenial and positive working environment
- Staff are given the opportunity of advancement within the company
- Diversity of our network enables us to employ students and working mothers
- We are mindful of people's individual needs regarding rosters and try to accommodate as much as possible.

Link:Q has approximately 340 utilised seats and a pool of 523 agents across Australia and Indonesia.  Link:Q is an Outsourcing Provider to over 4000 clients, across 20 different business sectors, utilizing in excess of 10 various Link:Q products.  We are currently generating in excess of 70 million transactions per year consisting of Inbound & Outbound calls, SMS, email and IVR.  As inbound traffic is a major part of our business, we also perform "Outbound" activities on behalf of various clients for Data Cleansing and/or Data Base Collection.  Currently we are the process of structuring an Outbound Tele-Sales department that will initially focus on increasing service offerings of our products to our existing client database. Once we have gained the necessary confidence, perfected infrastructure and developed the required agent skills, we will commence the outbound tele-sales activities with the external client.

What makes your center a little bit different than others out there?
Link:Q believes what makes us different between others is our "Call Blending" ability. We are able provide our contact centre staff with multi-skill exposure within a unique Blended environment.

This encourages staff satisfaction, career progression and an excellent morale environment. This is clearly evident by the years of services our agents have with Link:Q averaging approximately 10 to 20 years of service, with one case of 42 years of service, we call her Aunty Jude!

How do you go about recruiting and retaining talent?
In an Industry that is forever evolving with strong competition, we need to be flexible in all aspects of our business, in this respect we appreciate that our clients business and their strategic directions are constantly changing also.  As a result of all these changes, we need to be flexible, therefore all aspects of our business practices are strategically manipulated to suite today and tomorrow and thereafter.  As an Outsourcing Provider "Recruitment" is one of these changes! Our recruitment process is predominantly based on the needs of our client therefore we need to adopt various recruitment methods that are suited to our clients.  Link:Q currently utilize an internal recruitment process that allows current employees to advance within the company across various skill sets and back office operations such as IT, Project Management, Finance etc. We also utilise external third party recruiters for specific agent groups that require specialized recruitment procedures. On a regular basis, our external recruiters attend workshops and call centre management meetings to gain first hand understanding of the agents they have placed with us. This feedback further develops our recruiters knowledge and prepares them in providing agents that suite our environment and our clients. Overall Link:Q prefer to be a part of all recruitment therefore the task of recruitment is shared equally between our recruiters and ourselves, generally our recruitment consultants focus on advertising, initial interviews, grammatical testing, typing skills etc and ensure availability is suited to the role. Once our recruitment partners have identified the most suited candidates, they are then referred to us for a detailed interview session with us.  To retain our agent talent, our training and development team have designed several training program as following:

- Generic Induction Training
- Operational Training
- Refresher Training
- Performance Development
- One on one training

Please describe some of the technologies you use in your center and what advantages they give you
1) PABX - Standard features of the PABX include:
- Screen Pop - Presentation of the relevant client data when the voice call, email or web interaction is routed to an agent
- Real-Time and Historical Reporting - A unified view of all contact centres operations, with the ability to blend all forms of interaction data (calls, emails, web) with business information (sales made, customer service levels) in order to help contact centre managers improve the effectiveness of the centres.
- Real-time supervisor monitoring - Provides the current status of agents and queues across multiple contact centres and media to the Management Team.
One key advantage for Link:Q is the ability to integrate contact management reporting with data gathered from desktop application into tailored reports.

2) Genesys CTI:
Genesys Universal routing treats all Link:Q contact centres and all available agent resources as if they were in one "Virtual Contact Centre". The CTI system makes all routing decisions on a call-by-call basis while the call is still at its point of origin. This reduces the traffic across our VPN and improves the efficiency with which calls are delivered to agents.  The Genesys Universal Router prioritizes calls based on agreed service level standards. Call routing allocates calls to skilled Link:Q agents trained to effectively service call requirements. Link:Q’s network routing solution maintains detailed agent profiles that reflect various skills and proficiencies. Incoming calls are routed to the agent with the best skill set for the caller’s needs.

3) Proprietary Call Centre Applications:
LinkNet is a proprietary contact centre scripting tool developed and supported by Link:Q’s in-house staff. The system is fully redundant and flexible, allowing Link:Q to develop and roll out a customised service specific to client needs.

LinkNet II is an HTML platform, which builds on the functionality of LinkNet, and also provides the option of Payment Processing, advanced search engines, frequently asked questions platforms and data reporting.

As these systems are in-house, the main benefits include:
- Link:Q constantly maintains, updates and further develops them, to ensure optimum performance and stability.
- Development of service can be done in a very short time frame.

4) VPN (Virtual Private Network):
All Link:Q call centres are interconnected by Virtual Private Network (VPN) that provide Link:Q with the following advantages:

- Provides our clients with a redundancy based on call acceptance capability allowing calls to be interflowed between our centres ensuring that all calls are answered in shortest possible time.
- Supplies Link:Q with the operational flexibility to allocate resources or costing benefit to suit our client’s operational requirements and service performance expectations.
- Delivers our clients the peace of mind that their outsourced operation holds full service redundancy capabilities.

5) WFM Application:
The WFM Application is utilised by our WFM team to continuously monitor our centres’ traffic and make the necessary adjustment / change to ensure forecasts are as accurate as possible.  Link:Q employs a National Workforce Manager to assist in the successful management and co-ordination of Link:Q’s Contact Centre traffic and workforce deployment, through providing accurate, timely information and forecasts for the development of optimised rostering to achieve national service benchmarks. This provides Link:Q with best practices used in traffic and workforce forecasting and workforce rostering processes to anticipate significant change in traffic volume. The National Workforce Manager investigates, reviews, develops and recommends Contact Centre operation traffic and workforce management strategies and directions to ensure that service delivery benchmarks are achieved and maintained which is part of initial staffing process for each new service.

What plans do you have to continue developing your center in future years?
- Link:Q has 4000 customers across 20 business sectors within Australia.
Endeavouring to explore the "Outbound Tele-Marketing" business through initially focusing on our Internal Products and Services.
- Link:Q has plans to extend our contact centre services internationally, specifically within the USA market. Link:Q offers the combining benefits of the Jakarta Call Centre and Australian Call Centre and therefore we can position our contact centre with the best quality and with a cost efficiency outlook.
- As any "Open Minded" business, we maximize our knowledge by learning from industry leaders throughout the Contact Centre Industry and as a result we strongly believe in sharing our knowledge in return as this generates excellent business ethics and results.

Why did you enter the 2009 awards for best contact center?
Link:Q has been involved with the ContactCenterWorld Organisation for the past 12 months. During that time, we had the pleasure of LEARNING form Industry leaders from around the world at the Sydney Australia and the Las Vegas Nevada events.  Winning the Best Outsourcing Partnership in Asia Pacific and the Best in the World for 2008 has naturally provided us with confidence but more importantly it has injected a different sense of satisfaction and pride throughout our organisation. We have maximized this recognition to our existing clients and certainly promote it to potential clientele also.

In 2009 we want to learn once again from industry leaders around the world and more importantly we want to share with thousands of contact centre experts the skills and knowledge that have brought us through 45 years of call centre Evolution. We at Link:Q are certainly proud of our achievements therefore we want this opportunity to show the world how well we service 4000 clients across 20 different business sectors, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, meeting hundreds of service level targets – not just one but more importantly, how we maintain a staff attrition rate of 3.2% consistently for many, many years…

What are some of the challenges you have had to overcome to get to where you are today
Link:Q strongly believes that "Change is the Only Constant Variable – In the Contact Centre World" … and with "Change comes Challenges!

Some challenges are initiated by unforeseen or unpredicted influences such as an influx of calls that result in effected service levels or a high volume of sick leave during your busiest day of the week. These challenges certainly apply in every contact centre across the world everyday, but at the same time, these challenges and experiences play a major part in our strategic contingency planning and risk management. At times we think we have identified the problem early enough until 2 months later it occurs, then back to the drawing board we go. Link:Q have put in place measures of "Elimination" to manage the effect of sick leave and even though we could never get it 100% right, we are confident that our processes could only become better.

For example,

Link:Q have invested in state of the art technology that is suppose to identify sick leave patterns, but once again that is just a machine that digest a load of historical data and spits out a report. Other than technology, we believe the challenge of reducing sick leave is to create a healthier working environment therefore our national Work Force Management team aim to understand our people, their habits, what they like doing, when they like to work and more their family or personal commitments. By doing so, we focus on rostering student at night not to interfere with their studies or on a Saturday afternoon once they have recovered from a late night out.  And on the other hand, we focus on rostering the working mum or dad to start and finish their shift in time to drop off & pick up the kids from school, prepare dinner, breakfast etc.

Overall, we employ more staff than we require, but this actually pays off and this is evident by our astonishing attrition rate of approximately 3%. We also believe that we at Link:Q have the DOUBLE CHALLENGE when it comes to customer service. As an Outsourcing Provider, we need to not only satisfy our clients but we need to also satisfy our clients’ customers. This in itself would have to be another major challenge, but once again after almost 5 decades of experience, we seem to have minimized the challenge and maximized a great result.

For those members who come along to one of our conferences to hear what you do, what will you be sharing with them? Please give some insights into what you would like them to go away with in terms of ideas to improve their center
- We would talk about the benefits of MULTI –SKILLED AGENTS in a BLENDED ENVIRONMENT
- We will share suggestion on how to reduce their staff attrition rate significantly.
- We will talk about our challenges and how we work towards improving them
- We would talk about Sick Leave and how to reduce it significantly
- We would talk about why and how we choose our customers to suite our staff and the results of doing so

Lastly, as a presenter at our 2009 June conference, what do you hope to learn from other presenters?
I strongly believe that there isn’t anything more rewarding than being in the same room with hundreds of people all speaking the same language … "Call Centres!!!!

As per other events held by CCW, I found it fascinating how we all share common contact centre challenges, but what’s even more rewarding is hearing so many different solutions and the actions people take in overcoming these challenges.  "Just when you thought, you have learnt everything about contact centres, a colleague or a customer comes along and teaches you more"!  Then! Just when you thought colleagues or customers have taught you everything about contact centres, a conference like CCW comes along and just teaches you more!

About Rick Costa:
Rick Costa is the Strategic Business and Project Manager for LinkQ in Australia.

About Link:Q:
Link:Q has over 40 years experience in outsourced contact centre services, directory assistance, call answering and messaging in Australia. With a strong customer base comprising in excess of 5,000 corporate, government and SME clients, Link:Q processes more than 1.7 million calls a month, in addition to millions of messages via e-mail, SMS and pagers.