The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

April 05, 2011 -- If you rang a Telstra call centre a month ago and was served by a nice, slightly nervous consultant called David, there's a chance you were talking to the most senior person at the phone company.

Prompted by a cheeky invitation from consumer boss Gordon Ballantyne, Telstra chief David Thodey, along with his top executive team, found themselves manning the phones at the company's spanking new "call centre of the future" premises at Melbourne's Docklands.

The challenge took Thodey and team by surprise and this was evident as the moment was taped.

A documentary style video, capturing some of the tension, was shown to an analyst briefing yesterday and revealed a pained expression on the face of chief financial officer John Stanhope and a thinly masked visage of nervousness on business boss Deena Shiff at the thought of engaging with live, possibly irate, Telstra customers.

It's no secret the telco has plenty of catch-up work to do in the customer service space but that's what Thodey has hired Belfast-born Ballantyne to help fix.

With Telstra having added a staggering 919,000 new mobile customers in the last half, it's clear there is a need to provide these new recruits with decent service to limit churn.

Indeed, Telstra's call centre head Peter Jamieson revealed mobile sales and support were responsible for the highest number of complaints to call centres.

Ballantyne has identified pre-paid and post-paid mobile as two of the three "must win" segments Telstra is keen to pursue, underscoring the continued investment into improving services.

Anecdotally, it appears the better systems and staff training is paying off, but there's always room for improvement given Telstra has 38 call centre premises in Australia and another six located in and around the centre of Manila in The Philippines.

Calls are carefully routed to ensure the right level of expertise is deployed to the customer.

For example, Foxtel inquiries have a dedicated centre in Lismore while complicated bundling and billing questions get routed to large centres such as the Docklands premises.

Simpler inquiries like pre-paid phone or SIM activation are the types of calls that usually get farmed offshore.

Telstra claims it manages to target customer inquiries to the right division about 80 per cent of the time and aims to answer 70 per cent of calls within 20 seconds.

Yesterday it confirmed people could call their customer service hotline and simply say the word "complaint" to be transferred to a special team charged with resolving issues.

Given Telstra's objective of lifting sales online to 35 per cent over the next two years, it's possible the call volume to centres may fall and with it the number of centres and staff.

Yet Project New, the program under which Thodey's customer-centric vision is to be delivered, is not an exercise in cost cutting but in simplifying the processes and making sustainable changes to the business.

The improvements to service are, of course, welcome though many seem to highlight just how behind the times Telstra had let itself become.

Elsewhere, Telstra has decided to widen its offering to business by cementing its position in the video confering space through its acquisition of the specialist group iVision.

Telstra did not reveal the acquisition cost but, it is thought to be small.

Posted by Veronica Silva Cusi, news correspondent
Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au

About Telstra:
Telstra Incorporated is a global provider of advanced communications services to multinational corporations.