The Telecom Namibia management team was extremely concerned with the contact centre`s poor customer image and performance up to July 2000, which prompted them to take dramatic steps to improve their quality of service. The first steps taken were to upgrade the system and change the way of working, since processes and procedures for the operation of the call centre had not been revised since the inception of the contact centre in 1998.
With the assistance of the ATIO team, each problem area was defined and ironed out until a fully functional and profitable business solution was reached. Telecom Namibia has now seen a complete turnaround in their quality of service, company commitment and agent enthusiasm - not to mention more happy customers.
The call centre is the central point of all contact between Telecom Namibia and its customers. Amanda Timotheus, General Manager of Telecom`s Windhoek Business Unit, said: "The call centre is instrumental in fault management and is also used for processing service orders. All product and service information requested by customers is handled by the call centre agents."
The inbound functions of the Windhoek call centre are split into four categories, covering residential, business, corporate customers and account enquiries. These services are offered to the Windhoek region during office hours and then extended to the whole of Namibia after hours, offering a 24-hour service to all Telecom Namibia customers.
Full-time national functions of the call centre also include directory enquiries and value-added services such as TELEMAIL - an answering service provided to customers and FlexiCall which is a prepaid card service offered by Telecom Namibia. The outbound functions include feedback to clients regarding their queries and courtesy calls to gauge quality of service to ensure the desired service has been delivered to the customer.
To enable the fulfilment of these functions, agents and supervisors rely on a number of information systems. These include components such as ATIO`s CyberCall, the interaction management product, a billing and fault logging component as well as a voice logger playback module enabling Telecom Namibia to record interactions between agents and customers for agent assessment purposes.
Angela Houlis, ATIO Corporation Account Manager based in the Cape Town office, said: "Quality of service and reporting at Telecom Namibia improved tremendously since the introduction of the new CyberCall system as the system allows for more accurate measurement and controls. Queue times and routing times were identified as problem areas when ATIO first entered discussions with Telecom Namibia. At the present time they take on average 100 000 calls per month, which is double the volume of calls taken prior to the upgrade. Downtime of the call centre system is non-existent and technical problems encountered are minor and solved instantaneously."
The Customer Care Centre consists of 36 agents, operating as four competitive groups, reporting to five supervisors who in turn report to the customer care centre manager. Extensive training programmes have ensured that all the agents have become fully multi-skilled. Team building and incentive programmes are an ongoing process at the contact centre which is a significant factor for sustaining the motivation of all staff.
Planned future developments for this contact centre include establishing a user-friendly database of all the products and services offered by Telecom Namibia to enable agents to further improve in assisting with customer enquiries as well as increasing telephonic sales. An Internet and fax module will be added to CyberCall to give clients additional channels of communication with the contact centre.
The longer-term goal is to have a national contact centre, where all calls in Namibia will be routed to a central facility in Windhoek, ensuring the same quality service delivery on a national basis.
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