CC-APAC

Hong Kong Customer Contact Association in collaboration with CCAM visited some of Malaysia’s top customer experience and contact centres yesterday. Both CCAM and HKCCA are part of CC-APAC Association a regional collaboration that also includes China, Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. This alliance seeks to grow the regional industry through partnership opportunities, best practice, learning exchanges and the regional awards among others.

Our guests from Hong Kong were hosted by organisations that had won Gold Awards at our CCAM’s Annual Industry Excellence Awards within the last five years. Thank you to Maxis, DHL Express, TDCX and Concentrix Webhelp for opening your doors to our guests.

CCAM is dedicated to the development of this industry, and we look forward to more meaningful collaborations in the future.

There will be much more to come, so watch this space.

Friday, April 22, 2022 – The 14th Leaders Talk CC-APAC hosted by ICCA discussed “Change and Adoption of CRM” by inviting a professional speaker from a technology company. Andy Anugrah, Chairman of ICCA Indonesia, presented this discussion, and also with another speaker Yvonne Ng, Founder of ANBIZ Sdn Bhd.

Yvonne starts the discussion by explaining CRM. She said that most organizations nowadays, especially in the contact center, typically when they are implemented and set up their contact center, they will have their contact center systems, and the other key component is the CRM system. This CRM is the place we use to register customer information, keeping the history of these is the customer that calls and the information about the customer inquiries.

Moreover, Yvonne explains that if we look at an old-school approach to CRM, we can see what we do in the contact center and how CRM and CX correlate. But before we go into this correlation, it’s always best for us to take one step back and see what meaning CX to you and what is meaning CX to me. It matters because a lot has been talked about in the industry today.

When we go into implementations at some of the customer sites, Yvonne said that we notice one of the essential foundations in that inflammation framework is an understanding of CX and our company objective. One of the things when we look at CX’s strategy, is that we want to make sure our customer stays with us and the customer buys more from us. Moreover, we have also kept focusing on CX in recent years because we want to use CX to differentiate ourselves from our competitors.

The second tip is don’t take whatever the vendor says. She said that we have to check whether that vendor understands CX or CRM in the first place. If they don’t understand the process, they don’t understand strategy. The last one is always to continue learning and improving ourselves. (ANF)

Friday, April 8, 2022 – The 13th Leaders Talk hosted by CC-APAC discussed, “A Case Study of Contact Centre Australia: How Do We Manage Contact Centres Post-Pandemic?” by inviting two professional speakers to Asia Pacific contact center.

This discussion was presented by Andi Anugrah, Chairman of ICCA Indonesia. The first panelist is Steve Pels, Founder/Director of Contact Centre Action, Australia. The second panelist is Fiona Keough, CEO of Auscontact Australia. 

The discussion is started by sharing about the situation in Australia when the pandemic is coming. Fiona said that there were some strict things in place in Sydney, like Melbourne. She said that nobody was allowed to the office and large organizations took the opportunity to give up their real estate. As soon as the lease was up, they were out. 

Even the larger contact centers in Australia are pushing everybody home as they needed to. That organization contacted Fiona because they needed 10,000 headsets. They had all these people work from home without the kit to be able to do the basics and their procurement team couldn’t do it. We can see that nobody prepared for the pandemic COVID-19 was to come, nobody was in the right position, and nobody can predict how things might change.

Steve also said that was the interesting thing at the very start of the pandemic. There were still a lot of contact centers that had premises-based telephony equipment, but their hardware was on site. In most cases, staff could not work from home. But when the government said everybody must work from home, “We got about a week’s notice,” said Steve. 

Steve said that there were dozens of organizations that could not do it. Their premises-based telephony equipment would not allow staff to work from home. Then, they had to a very quick look at alternatives. In many cases, he said that the organization was to put an announcement on their IVR saying, “I’m sorry due to the pandemic, our call center is closed. Please send us an email to this address.”

Therefore, Steve shared a few suggestions for leaders after the pandemic. It’s a difficult one because there is not a single right answer. Steve said that we have got to talk to our staff, if we don’t understand our staff, their situation, their family situation, what drives them, and what motivates them, then we are going to have a problem retaining and motivating those staff.

“You don’t understand them. You also need to understand what you got as far as technology is concerned and start to build a brand-new strategy for what’s going forward,” said Steve. He thinks the only clear thing is that we don’t know what normal looks like and is going to be. Therefore, our company needs to be flexible and staff too. Steve said that there’s no one size fits all. Now it’s a matter of understanding what suits our staff and our business.

Fiona also explains her suggestion. She said that we don’t know what the new normal is or we just have to be. A lot of contact centers have been Infinitum, dynamic, flexible, and ready to take on change. Also, people that work in contact centers, she said tend to like to work in a putting out the fire type situation, “Perhaps not the fire that we’ve had for the last few years. The floods we could add, the bushfires, and the flood situation that we have currently in Queensland and New South Wales.”

Then we just need to go with it and make our best assessments for all the right reasons in equity integrity. That is the right way through for our organizations and people because they’re not disconnected, they are one. She said that make sure that whatever it is, we do it for the right reasons. Also, we need to adapt to the situation and we as a leader have to take the lead. (ANF)

Friday, March 25, 2022 – The 12th Leaders Talk hosted by CC-APAC discussed “Contact Center Assessment and Benchmarks for Continuous Improvement,” by inviting two professional speakers to the Asia Pacific contact center.

This discussion was presented by Andi Anugrah, Chairman of ICCA Indonesia. The first panelist is Deepak Selvaratnam, Founder and Co-developer of Snapshotz & Remotability, Director at Customer Services Audit. The second panelist is Pranay Anand, Vice President of NTT Ltd. 

The discussion is started by talking about why we need the assessment. First, Deepak said that today, contact centers are a science. Same as we do a health check or an organization does a financial audit. Customer service is as equally important as finance and should sit and have to talk about opportunities. And unfortunately, a lot of us haven’t realized the potential that customer service has today and haven’t realized how to use it. He also gives us an overview of some of these. 

For example in his snapshots audit, he has eight main sections and 30 sub-sections, all looking with about 800 different questions by looking at the complete health of a contact center. He said that because it’s not just about technology, people, or processes. Therefore, as a leader in our contact center, we should have a strategy. Not only for helping the organization but managing our customers and managing our teams. And also, we should have to influence what technology is going to be used in our contact center.

Pranay also explains benchmarking. He said that benchmarking addresses three things. First, we get to know what’s happening. But more importantly, we get to anticipate what is coming our way. Then we can figure out what it means for us, as a business and how do we react towards it? 

The second is on skill sets. The business model has changed. Our contact centers nowadays are a wealth of knowledge. Then, by benchmarking we can make our business against the industry’s best in a class by recognizing what are the challenges or opportunities that are coming our way we can adapt.

The last, never underestimate the power. The good CX is the good customer experience. The good CX not only improves our profitability but also improves our employee morale and it is competitive differentiation. Then, if we can be. we can put the whole thing together, how do we stay ahead of the curve? How do we know what I’m doing is best in class? But more importantly, how do we change the game as we know what’s happening. Then, we can be ahead of our competitors. 

Then, all panelists gave their closing statements about what leaders need to do in this current situation. Deepak said, “If you’re a customer service person today, whether you’re an agent, supervisor, manager, or general manager, we are at a very momentous point in history.” He said that we’ve got never make customer service become the focus of the organization. 

Deepak explains that we’ve got an opportunity to leave behind our past and go into the future. He said earlier that the contact center is going to change it is no longer with a voice but it’s much more than a voice. We have a lot of information in the contact center that can support other parts of the business. And that is an opportunity if you are a staff and clever enough to understand that you can now be bigger in your organization, meaning you can help your organization better than obviously to help your customers better. This is the opportunity for you because this is where you will. If you don’t take this opportunity now you can lose it. 

In another closing statement from Pranay, he said that the first thing as leaders, we can take ownership because we are the value creator. The second is as we know that the speed of this transition now is accelerating, “if left unattended we can be irrelevant,” siad Pranay. Then, we need to leverage technology, such as machine learning, AI, robotics, or virtual agents who like to work on mundane elements. 

The last bit that leaders need to take care of at this point is how we engage and enable our people. It is important today for an organization to improve its employee strategy with the right tools or the right technology. This hybrid world will always stay. Then, as a leader, we should look after our people and leverage our technology. “And most importantly, go out there and be bold,” said Pranay. (ANF)