Leaders Talk: Do the Strong Execution for Make Things Happen

December 17, 2021 – Contact Center Associations of Asia Pacific (CC-APAC) in collaboration with Verint, presented Leaders Talk discussion with the theme “Digitalization in Financial Services.” In this leader’s talk, CC-APAC invited professional speakers of the contact center in the Asia Pacific. 

One of the speakers is Apirom Sutthinats, Contact Center Manager (Sales and Renewal Division), Roojai, Thailand. Apirom explained the challenge of digitalization and also the opportunity for financial services institutions. She said the challenge is they are really difficult to encourage and educate people. They are too difficult to tell everyone that online services were the best way to serve people for this time. This online makes flexible, and people can manage what they want anytime. 

She also shared that when the pandemic comes, she sees that the people’s behavior is changing. People are mostly more on their mobile phones and that is a mobile phone becomes the more essential into their life. Then, she advantages that situation now. They take the opportunity, such as improve a lot of customer experience, customer engagement, customer relationship, and also customer satisfaction. 

She also explains that people are not easy to adapt or accept this fast change, especially in this time everything is self-care online. “What do we need to do to handle these challenges, when we do change anything online?” ask her. Before we share with our customers, we need to prepare the training and ensure our staff clearly understand the rationale behind that change, such as what is the benefit to them? And also the benefit to the customer.

Same as another speaker, Apirom also gives tips to leaders to develop digital financial services. She said that leaders in the contact center are playing a really important law in business contribution, especially when it’s related to the customer. 

Therefore, leaders must be able to deal with any situation, such as paying attention to the customer, making what we doing currently better, and serve to the customer better. 

And also, as a leader, we always need to find a way to make our people work smart, minimize unnecessary work, and use technology or innovation to improve our contact center operations to work more efficiently. The last thing is execution. Not only plan and talk, but how strong our execution and action to make things happen. Therefore, she believes that everyone can make that change. (ANF) 

Leaders Talk: How to Build Momentum for the Leadership in Contact Center

December 17, 2021 – Interactive discussion initiated by Contact Center Associations of Asia Pacific (CC-APAC) in collaboration with Verint, with the theme, “Digitalization in Financial Services.” This event is invited four professional speakers from the Asia Pacific contact center. 

One of the speakers who was invited to this discussion is Novie Marlika. She is Vice President Customer Experience, OVO, Indonesia. In this discussion, Novie Malika said that OVO are contribute the solutions to this challenge, especially financial literacy and inclusion. Why financial services? Because she thinks, financial literacy is an important thing in the country for the economic process. “The challenge is always to find the right products and services that are easy to use, secure, and affordable,” said Novie. 

Novie also said that is why OVO particularly adopts the open ecosystem approach, such as being open to collaborating with other stakeholders. By doing this, Novie thinks OVO can expand from digital payment, also can over-like investment insurance bonds to meet the growing needs of the community with ease. 

Not only that, Novie explains that is basically on the challenges, but the way OVO sees the digital payment as a gateway to the larger digital financial ecosystem, whereby it is an opportunity for financial institutions. Then, “During these four years, I think, OVO has received a positive acceptance amongst Indonesian people and to the general public itself,” said Novie. She also thinks OVO is committed to continuing to bring financial literacy and inclusion through accelerating digital transformation in Asia.

Novie also shared tips for leadership development. She said that the main word for the leadership in the contact center is building momentum. Before building momentum, there are things that we need to do. First, we need to keep up with our customer’s needs. “What do we say by keeping up with this customer’s needs?” said Novie. We have to ask them to join our journey. Because it’s digital, we have to understand them, and we should make it easier for our users to understand. 

In the long term, she thinks when we keep up with the customer needs is not about how we reach the specific finish, but we need to create a higher purpose. And we also need to consistently adapt to the changing environments. 

When the pandemic comes, we need to send more people to work from home. Then, they can stay safe, but on the other side, we need to make sure our operations will be able to monitor and run smoothly. 

The last from this, we need to gain CSAT. Then, it’s not only learning the satisfaction level, but we need to learn the dissatisfaction level. Furthermore, we need to look from a bigger lens, such as from social media. We can see the satisfaction level that we want to achieve from all those activities, such as in terms of efficiency, in terms of operational excellence, and also can see are they achieved all the performance or yet. 

The second thing we need before building momentum is to set up our team for success. She said that whenever we will start something new, we need to give our teams a higher purpose, such as why we need to go there. 

Therefore, she said that we should help agents with the suggested actions, and they need to do some escalation. She explains that we also need to optimize our contact center with data analytics. Then, of course, “Improve ourselves and it makes sure that we’ll be able to help all the operations,” said Novie. As a leader, we have to stand by and make sure that we provide the solutions, even though we do not have the answers to that agent’s problem. As a leader, we don’t have all the solutions in the world for all the cases. But we can help all the team to drive a solution for us. (ANF) 

Leaders Talk: Have a Competences Before Starting the Digitalization

December 17, 2021 – Contact Center Associations of Asia Pacific (CC-APAC) present Leaders Talk discussion with the theme “Digitalization of Financial Services.” CC-APAC invited four professional speakers to the Asia Pacific contact center.

One of the speakers is Ridwan Nugraha, SVP, Customer Experience Center Head, PT Bank BTPN, Tbk, Indonesia. Ridwan explains what the challenges and opportunities during this pandemic situation are. He said that the challenge is how we can both create our unique value proposition. For example, the product is easier, smarter, safer, like finance for their daily activities via smartphones. 

The opportunities of this are very huge. He talks about the megatrends, for example, such as the smartphone penetration, internet penetration, and Indonesian population for the Asia Pacific is more than 270 million, and also this is dominated by the millennials. 

“So, I think it’s it’s quite promising that Indonesia is still an emerging country with very high potential for digitalization, as well as digital finance,” said Ridwan. He calls it of opportunity as well as, “Peluang sekaligus panggilan.”

At the end of the discussion, Ridwan shared some tips before starting the digitalization of financial services. He said that we should have competence. Competence means that we have strong knowledge, skill, and experience. We can earn it and also enrich it by navigating carefully. 

Furthermore, don’t forget to keep upgrading ourselves to stay relevant because he thinks that we can do it in various ways. The next is we can do self-learning or collective learning, such as joining the ICCA or the CC-APAC Awards. Then, the key is to keep on learning, be courageous, and be confident in all we do. 

And also, Ridwan said that contact center leaders work with others, they are not working alone. We should learn to lead by example. Then, we need to show good examples to our people, such as attitude, openness, and full accountability. “Don’t forget to keep fun at work, because the happy customers come from employees,” said Ridwan. (ANF)

Leaders Talk: 4 Things That Should We Do in This Transition Period

December 17, 2021 – In this Leaders Talk, the Contact Center Associations of Asia Pacific (CC-APAC) in collaboration with Verint discussed the “Digitalization of Financial Services.” We invited four speakers who are professionals in the Asia Pacific contact center industry. 

One of the speakers is Reni Septiana, Senior Vice President Center of Digital, Halo BCA, PT Bank Central Asia, Tbk, Indonesia. The discussion started by talking about the challenges and opportunities of digitalization for its company. Reni said that there are two challenges they are facing. First, namely internal challenges. This is related to the coefficient of user-friendly, secure, and safe digital services. The second is an external challenge, like dealing with customer acceptance who depends on all of the digital services we offer. 

Reni also said that there are still new opportunities that they can optimize, even BCA is during those hard challenges. “The digital banking strategy has enabled us to get the business opportunities in the middle of a fast-moving customer transition into digital banking transactions,” said Reni. 

BCA keeps developing and making innovations, especially digital best initiatives for banking transaction services, such as mobile banking. Furthermore, this digital banking transaction plan avoids physical contact in the transaction conducted through mobile banking, such as online account opening. 

Also, Reni shared her tips for starting the digitalization of financial services. The first tips are resourceful and innovative. What is the meaning? It means that we should digitalize all business activity, such as services, business processes, and customer relations. And also, we can automate and make it efficient through bottom-up innovations, such as local programming and big data. The second is implementing agile working because BCA has a motto. “We have our motto is from good to great and great to agile,” said Reni. 

And the third is to believe that stability and change is powerful polarity. Stability means ensuring that the current business model is solid, efficient, effective, and stable. Then, the change means implementing those changes, which is necessary to be more competitive in the future. Next, we can play roles as a leader, such as becoming role models, collaborating, personnel appreciation, agility, responsiveness, and looking forward to meaningful goals. And also, don’t forget empathy and persuasiveness. “Always humble and serve others,” said Reni. And the last one is reliable on growing people and extra miles. (ANF)

Leaders Talk CC-APAC: New Challenges of Digitalization in Financial Services

Friday, December 17, 2021 – The seventh Leaders Talk hosted by CC-APAC in collaboration with Verint discussed “Digitalization in Financial Services,” by inviting four professional speakers to the Asia Pacific contact center.

This discussion was presented by Andi Anugrah, Chairman of ICCA Indonesia. The first panelist is Reni Septiana, Senior Vice President Center of Digital, Halo BCA, PT Bank Central Asia, Tbk, Indonesia. The second panelist is Ridwan Nugraha, SVP, Customer Experience Center Head, PT Bank BTPN, Tbk, Indonesia. The third is Novie Marlika, Vice President Customer Experience, OVO, Indonesia. And the last one is Apirom Sutthinats, Contact Center Manager (Sales and Renewal Division), Roojai, Thailand.

The discussion is started by talking about the challenges and opportunities of digitalization in financial services. First, Novie Malika said that OVO are contribute the solutions to this challenge, especially financial literacy and inclusion. Why financial services? Because she thinks, financial literacy is an important thing in the country for the economic process. “The challenge is always to find the right products and services that are easy to use, secure, and affordable,” said Novie. 

Novie also said that is why OVO particularly adopts the open ecosystem approach, such as being open to collaborating with other stakeholders. By doing this, Novie thinks OVO can expand from digital payment, also can over-like investment insurance bonds to meet the growing needs of the community with ease. 

Not only that, Novie explains that is basically on the challenges but the way OVO sees the digital payment as a gateway to the larger digital financial ecosystem, whereby it is an opportunity for financial institutions. Then, “During these four years, I think, OVO has received a positive acceptance amongst Indonesian people and to the general public itself,” said Novie. She also thinks OVO is committed to continuing to bring financial literacy and inclusion through accelerating digital transformation in Asia.

There is another challenge that Apirom Sutthinats shared. She said the challenge is they are really difficult to encourage and educate people. They are too difficult to tell everyone that online services were the best way to serve people for this time. This online makes flexible, and people can manage what they want anytime. 

She also shared that when the pandemic comes, she sees that the people’s behavior is changing. People are mostly more on their mobile phones and that is a mobile phone becomes the more essential into their life. Then, she advantages that situation now. They take the opportunity, such as improve a lot of customer experience, customer engagement, customer relationship, and also customer satisfaction. 

She also explains that people are not easy to adapt or accept this fast change, especially in this time everything is self-care online. “What do we need to do to handle these challenges, when we do change anything online?” ask her. Before we share with our customers, we need to prepare the training and ensure our staff clearly understand the rationale behind that change, such as what is the benefit to them? And also the benefit to the customer.

Ridwan Nugraha explains what the challenges and opportunities during this pandemic situation are. He said that the challenge is how we can both create our unique value proposition. For example, the product is easier, smarter, safer, like finance for their daily activities via smartphones. 

The opportunities of this are very huge. He talks about the megatrends, for example, such as the smartphone penetration, internet penetration, and Indonesian population for the Asia Pacific is more than 270 million, and also this is dominated by the millennials. 

“So, I think it’s it’s quite promising that Indonesia is still an emerging country with very high potential for digitalization, as well as digital finance,” said Ridwan. He calls it of opportunity as well as, “Peluang sekaligus panggilan.”

The last, opinion from Reni Septiana. Reni said that there are two challenges they are facing. First, namely internal challenges. This is related to the coefficient of user-friendly, secure, and safe digital services. The second is an external challenge, like dealing with customer acceptance who depends on all of the digital services we offer.

Reni also said that there are still new opportunities that they can optimize, even BCA is during those hard challenges. “The Digital Banking strategy has enabled us to get the business opportunities in the middle of a fast-moving customer transition into digital banking transactions,” said Reni.

BCA keeps developing and making innovations, especially digital best initiatives for banking transaction services, such as mobile banking. Furthermore, this digital banking transaction plan avoids physical contact in the transaction conducted through mobile banking, such as online account opening.

At the end of the discussion, all panelists give their closing remarks and tips about the development of digital finance in Indonesia. Are you curious about want kind of tips that they are shared? Then, stay tuned for another article on the CC-APAC website. (ANF)

Leaders Talk: Realization What Is You Want to Achieve

September 24, 2021 – Interactive discussion initiated by Contact Center Associations of Asia Pacific (CC-APAC), Leaders Talk: Workforce Optimization in Contact Center, which invited three professional speakers in the Asia Pacific contact center.

One of the speakers, who was invited to this discussion is Aryan Sunil. He is Director Practice Backoffice and Retail, Asia Verint. Aryan also explained that optimization or workforce engagement management is evolving and has become very important, especially for the contact center.

This optimization concept is the way for us to develop them to be more engage in work. We must be able to determine the right number of people at the right time or look at the quality. That will have a lot to do with how we deliver better and faster results to our customer and in order to optimize the workforce in the company, we must consider the perspective from the employee’s side while trying to achieve what our contact center is. 

For example, a receptionist. Some people’s perspective of a receptionist is they job is just to answer the call, no one saw them that they were here for company business purposes. We don’t see them as a fancy calculation mechanism. We treat them well. They are here not to just answering the call, but they are here doing business and have taken a very remarkable journey. 

Aryan’s opinion of that strategy is sometimes we need to look at it from a third perspective view because we need to look at what matters to the center at that moment. Are we looking at cutting down costs or are we trying to increase our service because it depends on the stage of the organization? We may have to take one of those steps.

Workforce optimization integrates technology into a single point of management to increase the visibility of customer interactions, employee performance, and business processes. By analyzing all customer interactions, businesses can leverage insights to train their employees and streamline workflows to improve the overall quality of customer service.

Sunil Aryan also gives a summary and his opinion about today’s discussion. He said that the world is changing, and of course, vendors will try to bring something which will make your life easier. They are those who know your business better than you. The first point is you must realize that what is it that I want to achieve. The questions like, what is target to buy or target to fix a problem, please do not consider that solution.

None of these solutions work without a comprehensive. Sunil said that do the consultative approach with the person who needs to do it. That person who took a step forward to think of which solution needs to fix the problem.

The second point is, he thinks every one of us said that employees are the ones who give customer experience that they can be digital. Aryan said for example, all human beings always empower intelligent virtual assistants. Then, he asks a question to those bots. “Why is that answer different from what you are agent call center telling me or what is written on the website,” Sunil said. Then, don’t find these things in sight. He said that let’s have that as a unified platform. (ANF)