Here’s something you don’t hear everyday: ANZ says increased call wait times will improve customer satisfaction.
Earlier this month it was widely reported that ANZ Bank was changing the focus of its contact centre metrics from simple call answer time to first contact resolution. This subtle but important change is designed to help improve customer satisfaction. How? With only an additional wait time of around 6-8 seconds at peak times, the belief is that they will deliver a higher rate of first contact resolution. This shift towards improving the customer experience is a huge positive step.
But what if these estimates are wrong? How quickly could ANZ change their contact centre operation again if needed, in response to customer feedback or market shifts?
If they were using a Public Cloud Technology platform, the answer would be only minutes.
Whilst the commercial benefits of Cloud are now widely understood, it’s the real time control elements that are gaining greater importance. Key operational elements such as Outbound Dialler Settings, IVR call routing, agent campaign allocation, adding new agents or changing scripts can all adjusted by teams working within the Cloud Contact Centre – in only minutes.
Within ipSCAPE, as we expand our business across Asia through local partners, we are finding that many Asian businesses see Cloud in the Contact Centre as a driver of competitive advantage – they can be faster to market with less cost and less risk.
In the Asian Century, Australia is becoming Asian too. Ross Dawson, a recognised futurist, entrepreneur and friend of ipSCAPE, recently posted some interesting statistics on Australia’s increasingly Asian demographic, which could start to explain why Australian innovators like ipSCAPE are gaining strong traction in Asia’s high growth economy.
Ross explains that: “In 1996, there were just over 800,000 Asian-born Australians, around 4% of the population, while 15 years later in 2011 there were over 2.3 million Australians born in Asia, over 10% of the population. Until fairly recently much of Australian immigration came from UK and Ireland, New Zealand, and Europe. While these countries are still strongly represented, now immigration is coming far from countries such as China, India, and the Philippines”
This growing Asian demographic is certainly helping ipSCAPE’s Asia expansion. We have teams which can provide local language sales, delivery, service and support services from Australia and increasingly in individual countries – all key elements for successful domestic market growth.
It seems that the movement of Australian services offshore into the Philippines continues unabated. A recent article by the Courier Mail highlighted that about 4,500 Queensland jobs went offshore to the Philippines in 2013. The same article stated that IT entrepreneur and outsourcing guru Scott Linden Jones believes that over 25,000 Australian roles were exported to Philippines-based outsourcing companies last year, and predicted the figure would soar to 50,000 in 2014, not counting jobs being exported to India or China.