The slightest suggestion that Air New Zealand’s contact centre could up sticks and move to Manila is likely to be taken personally by those in charge of customer service. Indeed, general manager for direct sales, Leeanne Langridge, was incensed by a rumour being spread by a chain of travel agencies that our national airline might be sending some contact centre functions offshore.“Having consultants based in New Zealand is a key part of our brand strategy,” she says. “We get a lot of homesick travellers who phone the contact centre because they just want to talk to a Kiwi,” she says.In 2001 the airline moved the offshore centres that had been set up to deal with American and European inquiries back home, and it’s here they will remain if Langridge and contact centre manager Michelle Robinson have any say in the matter. Robinson has been with the airline since 1974 (she didn’t really want me to mention this, but at TR we think long service deserves recognition), and she is one of three managers leading the management team that includes 25 team leaders, 11 operational supervisors and one workforce manager. The contact centre is split across two sites for disaster recovery purposes, with around 250 staff based in the North Shore and around 150 in downtown Auckland. Staff numbers have shrunk in recent times due to the recession, with consultants that have left not being replaced, but Robinson says they have begun another recruitment drive. With the starting pay for a consultant around $36,000 per annum, it might be cheaper to employ consultants based offshore, but Robinson believes they would struggle to provide the required level of customer support. When an agent starts at Air New Zealand, it takes three months of training before they can handle a short-haul booking and six months before they’re allowed to deal with long-haul travel inquiries. Once fully trained there are many areas that consultants can work in, such as package holidays, loyalty programmes and helping online customers. Before the recession began to bite, staff churn was around 20% a year, but Langridge says a lot of this was due to internal promotion. As consultants become well informed about the airline’s products and services, they are often poached by other areas of the business. Some have gone to work at the corporate sales club Tandem, others to the airport floor, and some have become cabin crew. There are even a couple in the centre today training to be pilots, using their inside knowledge at Air New Zealand to complete the hundreds of hours of flying required before they can turn professional. Others, like Robinson, have no intention of leaving the contact centre. “I love the fact that it’s such a dynamic environment. Every day is different – it’s a real buzz,” she says. However, she notes it can be stressful, especially when a flight has to be cancelled and there are 300+ upset passengers to deal with. Langridge says it’s during the difficult times that having a New Zealand-based contact centre really pays dividends.“I can’t imagine what we would have done during the volcanic disruption,” she says, referring to the recent grounding of planes across Europe when the Icelandic volcano erupted. “My team rallied the whole weekend.” Due to the volume of calls, some stranded customers had to wait 45 minutes to speak to an agent. The airline sought to mitigate customers’ frustration by getting senior managers – including CEO Rob Fyfe – to record messages on the IVR thanking them for their patience and sharing updated information about the crisis. (For the record, the airline’s average handling time is six minutes, and the contact centre has a service level target of 70% with a current average speed of answer of 60 calls within 30 seconds.) Langridge, whose background is cabin crew, raves about the culture in the contact centre, but when asked how it is created and maintained, Robinson doesn’t have any magic formula she can share with TR readers. She says the most important thing is to back the consultants. If they have a discussion that ends with the customer taking his or her complaint all the way the senior executive, then as long as the consultant has dealt with the call in a reasonable way, they will not be reprimanded. “They should always feel supported,” says Robinson. She does, however, cite the brand values as being an extremely useful way of explaining to new consultants what’s expected of them and reminding old timers what it’s all about. “In the past we have had many mission statements and visions; however none have been as explicit and easily understood as our brand values,” she says. It might help that the brand values are carried across the business, with Air New Zealand being something of a leader in online marketing – creating websites such as ‘How Far Can I Go’, as well as using YouTube to promote the company. That ‘naked’ safety video has to date achieved over 5.3 million views, although the Cougar campaign on YouTube didn’t quite hit the mark. Still, it’s this willingness to experiment that has seen a whole division spring up at Air New Zealand which is devoted to managing customer feedback on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. This is separate to the contact centre, which continues to focus on the voice channel, although there are plans to implement ‘push to talk’, so that customers on the web can speak to an agent via the web portal rather than making a separate phone call.