If you ever wondered what it would be like to become a contact centre manager, in charge of 10, 50 or 500 agents, then this advice from Janette Watkin, contact centre manager at Fosters, is worth keeping in mind: “Take a deep breath because you're in for the ride of your life.

Watkin is one of eight members on the committee of the Contact Centre Institute of New Zealand (CCiNZ), a new industry group that officially launched in late July in a series of lunch events held in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Telecommunications Review took the opportunity to conduct a round table discussion with committee members before the first launch in Auckland.

Despite each of the members working for different organisations, in different sectors of the economy, there was an easy comraderie between them. This is because, as they explained, the only way to learn how to run a contact centre is by talking to other managers.

Tina Hilliam, Massey University: “You don't learn from others in your organisation because contact centre management is specialised; it's complex. “Which is the reason the CCiNZ was formed. Committee president Kathryn Star, PHONEplus, says it brings together a number of informal cluster groups that have sprung up around the country and which between them have around 250 members.

Contact Centres are already represented by the Telecommunications Users Association (TUANZ) but as Alex van Leij, TNT, explains, they have a different role to play. “TUANZ are very skilled at lobbying and at looking after telecommunication users as an industry, fighting for lower termination rates and things like that. Which is something that we don't do. So it is different.

Different, but not mutually exclusive. Star points out that people can be members of both organisations, and that the TUANZ contact centre committee was invited to the launch.So what information will CCiNZ aim to provide its members with?

Top of the list, says Star, is how to become financially savvy – learning how to talk in “the right language to CIOs and CFOs”. That is, being able to translate what the contact centre does – and the metrics used to measure customer satisfaction – into dollars and cents.

Star says managers want to know how to be conversant at the “P-L level” so they can show how they add value to their organisations and hopefully shrug off the idea that they are a cost centre; a misconception that committee members agree has dogged the industry since its inception.

“The mentality still exists in a lot of places: that it is a drain, especially now that everybody is talking about cost reduction and our biggest cost is labour,” says van Leij. “If we can do some of that financial modelling to say actually we're a revenue centre, it fulfils a need that a lot of people don't even understand.

Helping the fledgling organisation find its feet is Australian Teleservices Association CEO Michael Meredith, who was in Auckland for the launch.

His view is that in the current recession contact centres are being called on to “do more with less,” and investment is being made in technology to enable greater, more effective customer service.“Staff are being retained because six months ago you couldn't get staff, so the thinking is very much that in six months' time when the economy turns around ‘I'm going to need my contact centre, so I'll keep them',” he explains. “They're looking towards technology to provide productivity improvements with the resources they have.

All the committee members agreed that staff recruitment and retention – a nightmare for most managers a year ago – is no longer an issue. Ruth Turnbull, Mercury Energy, says they recently advertised for 12 vacancies and received 700 CVs.Star points out it is important to communicate to staff that their jobs are safe, because many are feeling the pinch in the current recession. “It's easy to underestimate how much people are really worrying about it, so you really have to put that positive message out, then people will talk,” she says.

“One of my staff said ‘I'm so glad you said that, my husband's lost his job, it's really important to me.'”At its essence, contact centre management is about people, which is why Star says another focus of CCiNZ is on “wellness practices”.“Contact centre people are caring professionals,” she says. “We're natural networkers; it's in our blood.

The innate ability to create empathy with customers is another reason why Meredith says contact centres should be viewed as a channel through which to drive new business. He says in Australia, research has shown that 86% of all customer interaction is handled by the contact centre and that there are 16 million calls a day to Australian centres.

He also points out that less than 10% of Australian agents are involved in outbound calling, so the challenge is to convert those inbound calls into sales. There is a big push across the Tasman for what's called a Net Promoter Score – that is, measuring how an agent is able to turn a satisfied customer into one that promotes the business.

The ATA has begun an accreditation scheme that awards contact centres bronze, silver or gold if they meet a rigorous set of standards. Meredith says the assessment is built around 42 different areas of the organisation and there are three levels of achievement. The centres generally take three months to prepare for an audit and the ATA spends a week at the centre during the process.

But no matter how well the centre strives to improve its service delivery, the spectre of offshoring to the Philippines, or India, or any country where wages are lower, hovers over the entire industry. Meredith believes there are plenty of large organisations in Australia with plans to offshore their centres, but these are on hold because it's a move that attracts too much bad press.

Turnball says in New Zealand, large companies that have offshored have tended to “dabble” in it; that is, deploy part of the customer service operation, for example Telecom's broadband service to the Philippines or Vodafone's pre-pay mobile phone service to Egypt.

But negative media coverage isn't only reserved for overseas contact centres; all the committee are aware that their industry needs to boost its public image. Star says most people underestimate the complexity of what is done in a contact centre, which makes it an easy target for criticism.“It's a transactional business. You can have high volumes of calls going through a call centre, thousands of calls a day, and you have one bad one and we're on the front page.

But despite the bad days, there wasn't one committee member who'd trade in their job for another career. Watkin says she's left the industry a few times, but she keeps returning, attracted back to the ongoing, daily buzz of running a contact centre.“Contact centres are the most complex environments you can work in and if you can manage that have faith in yourself, you can do anything.