“High performance” could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. It can also be measured in different ways: in the contact centre setting, is high performance the friendliness of the agent responding to a call, the accuracy of the answer provided or the resolution of a call involving a very disgruntled caller?
COPC standards, to which Datacom contact centres adhere, define high performance in the contact centre as the ability to deliver benchmark levels of quality and service whilst at the same time continually driving efficiencies to reduce cost. Service is directly related to speed, which involves answering an enquiry in an efficient period of time, but it doesn’t overlook the quality of the solution delivered in favour of quickness. Quality is usually measured in terms of the correctness of the answer provided and whether or not it was the best solution for the customer.
I’ve found in my experience in the contact centre industry and in taking the COPC registered coordinator training course that achieving high performance in this outsourced environment involves a multi-layered approach. All the different disciplines and knowledge sets you need to guarantee high performance in the contact centre are interlinked and part of the same engine. Like any engine, if one small part isn’t working to the peak of its performance, the whole engine may run badly or not at all.
For instance, proper coaching of contact centre staff is crucial, but it’s only half the story. Alton Martin, a mentor of mine and the CEO of SPOT Consulting, says, “There are no bad people, only bad processes”. Having the right people is necessary, but so is having the right systems in place so those staff members succeed. Good outsourcing companies operating call centres will also analyse the data they get from their telephony and CRM systems, from aggregating the results of their quality monitoring and from their customer satisfaction surveys and really use that to find the root cause of an issue.
For instance, Datacom consistently monitors quantified performance by investigating at the operational management level to ensure we meet our targets and go through a formal process for any missed metrics. We also regularly audit all program performance through our internal team of COPC-registered coordinators who conduct full reviews against the requirements of the COPC standard bi-annually. On top of that, we also have our external COPC audits.
Datacom has seen quantified performance increase everywhere and the impact is reinforced by the great end-user satisfaction scores that we see as a result of adopting the COPC practices. We’ve also been able to offer many of our clients real reductions in total cost of ownership as a result of our ability to drive costs down without compromising service and quality. As a reduction in TCO while maintaining or bolstering brand reputation is a chief aim of many organisations looking to outsource, guiding high performance through COPC remains the industry standard.
Andy Cranshaw is a senior contact centre operations manager and performance improvement consultant with nearly 30 years of experience in the customer contact industry. He serves as the GM of Professional Services for Datacom BPO in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he has resided since 1997.
Andy started his career in 1983 as a telemarketing representative and graduated through various roles in contact centre operations in the UK, including team leader, data analyst, ops manager and head of training, before moving to the client-facing side of the business in 1993. A well-respected educator in customer contact and CRM, Andy regularly speaks at South East Asian conferences and has delivered numerous training courses for contact centre managers in Asia, Australia, the US and the UK.
The cyber security risks inherent in the Bring Your Own Device trend are ever-present and rapidly multiplying. Sometimes the threat comes from innocently logging into an unsecure wireless network. Other times, a phone is dropped on the sidewalk or left at a café where it may fall into unscrupulous hands. In other scenarios, employees knowingly compromise corporate data and put their company’s integrity, financial stability and reputation at risk.
So how do you allow mobility to sweep through your organisation’s doors without putting everything and everyone inside it at risk? Richard Byfield, managing director of Datacom’s Technical Security Services (TSS), says achieving a more secure Bring Your Own Device program requires organisations to:
• Centrally configure, monitor and manage smartphones and tablets
• Ensure mobile infrastructure, devices and apps start, and remain, in a trusted and compliant state
• Protect devices from corporate data loss while preventing security breaches and non-compliance scenarios
• Securely deploy and manage corporate apps, data and documents
• Mitigate the risks associated with devices operating in a compromised state or within an environment that could expose it to threat
• Address regulatory compliance and produce up-to-date auditable compliance reports
Byfield is speaking on Bring Your Own Device cyber security at a live panel for AusCERT2012, hosted and streamed by ZDNet, in Queensland beginning today and ending Friday. AusCERT event organisers handpicked expert speakers from around the world to discuss the various security risks related to mobility and the best solutions being used to mitigate them.
Read our other posts on mobility and cyber security:
Respecting Privacy: Keeping Data Confidential in the Cloud
Mobile Employees and Cyber Security Go Hand in Hand
A Bring Your Own Device User Policy Checklist
3 Steps to Managing Bring Your Own Device at Your Business
The Headaches Inherent in the ‘Consumerisation of IT’
Windows 8 is expected to be at our Australian doorstep in just five months. While the consumer preview and media analyses have produced varied responses regarding the look and feel of the new cross-platform operating system, there are several important benefits Windows 8 could bring to Australian enterprises and IT management in particular.
1. Applications look the same and are deployed faster
Enterprises using Windows 8 can get line-of-business applications faster and via the method they choose, such as locally on a desktop or through virtualisation or streaming technologies. And regardless of deployment method or the device being used, these apps will look and operate the same way. The ability to have applications run on both the desktop and mobile devices means enterprises can cut costs, as they will no longer need to buy different types of software for different computing environments. If you have questions about how these changes could affect your software licensing, contact Datacom’s team of licensing experts, who have deep knowledge of different Microsoft volume licensing agreements.
2. More productive employees, more streamlined collaboration
Because applications will now look the same across devices with Windows 8, employees will no longer need training or a period of time to get used to new software versions on different platforms. Staff should be able to perform tasks and access documents and projects in a seamless manner whether they are on a laptop or a tablet. Users can have the experience they want on the device they want, which stands to boost productivity, even when working at home or after work hours, and encourage collaboration between mobile employees regardless of location.
3. Better app management
IT management will be able to better control which employees can access which applications. This is a crucial ability to prevent employees from haphazardly downloading random applications from the new Windows 8 app store. IT management can restrict ability to download applications and also better customise desktops by deploying apps, including line-of-business apps, directly to PCs without having to use the app store. For those using Windows on ARM, Microsoft is offering a new management client that works with a cloud-based infrastructure so IT management can deliver line-of-business apps to mobile employees on their respective devices.
Read Datacom Investments Director Mark McWilliams' article on Windows 8, NBN and the Australian enterprise on ABC Technology.
Does your organisation have more than 250 computing devices, whether they are traditional desktop computers, thin clients or mobile devices? Are you considering transitioning to cloud in the near future? Do you need help managing other aspects of your IT environment?
If you answered “yes” to all these questions, the Microsoft volume licensing Enterprise Agreement might provide the most beneficial volume license to your enterprise.
Organisations that choose an Enterprise Agreement for their software licensing get purchasing discounts in addition to star treatment in the form of immediate software upgrades when new versions, such as Windows 8, are released, 24-hour technical support and access to other services such as desktop support that could benefit their overall IT strategy.
Obtaining a volume license through a Microsoft volume licensing Enterprise Agreement can solve the problem of having individual desktops with different software licensing, which could lead to compliance issues. The Enterprise Agreement streamlines and simplifies IT management by offering a single company-wide agreement. Your organisation might have 300 PCs, but this volume license allows you to manage them as one.
Datacom has also found in its experience that certain organisations can save up to 40 per cent compared to other licensing arrangements through an Enterprise Agreement. Plus, these enterprises gain access to a full range of Software Assurance benefits, which include immediate software upgrades and releases, user training and technical support. If you obtain your agreement through Datacom, you can also potentially gain access to our desktop deployment, desktop support and software asset management services. Additionally, you can transition to cloud and shift employees between onsite software and cloud under your Enterprise Agreement.
If your organisation started out with an Open Value agreement and is ready to grow past 250 desktops, Datacom’s licensing experts can help you make the transition to an Enterprise Agreement.
Software licensing is complicated. The difference between Microsoft volume licenses can be dictated by anything from having a single extra seat at your organisation to having a crop of employees working remotely.
For instance, the Enterprise Agreement is for organisations with 250 seats or more and offers attractive Microsoft volume licensing pricing while the Open Value agreement typically targets enterprises with between five and 250 seats that want more flexibility in the number of PCs they must license. Both can help your enterprise control costs while standardising software across all PCs to ensure continued compliance and include flexible pricing options plus Software Assurance.
Enterprises can obtain three different types of agreements through the Open Value license. The non–company-wide option is for enterprises that need to license servers or a limited number of client machines; the company-wide Open Value agreement offers a single platform option for rights to the latest Microsoft-licensed products, enabling enterprises to customise desktops with various software components.
For enterprises looking for increased flexibility in their licensing agreement, the Open Value Subscription allows the ability to scale the number of licenses they need as their number of seats goes up or down. You pay a lower fixed price for each of your organisation’s machines as long as you continue to use the software. And you can subtract or add licenses as your organisation’s business needs change. This licensing agreement also permits company-wide licensed products to be added to new client PCs at no additional cost for the year and provides extra cost savings in year one if you have current or older versions of licensed products running.
If you’re unsure of which volume license agreement is best for your enterprise, let Datacom help. We have licensing experts on staff who possess deep expertise in Microsoft volume licensing and can assist in designing a cost-effective agreement while providing value add in the form of desktop support.
Contact us today to find out how you can save money on select Microsoft software upgrades and purchases before June 30.
Are you ready for a seat at your organisation’s table, where you knock elbows with key executives and deliver a better enterprise IT strategy? If you’ve been imagining this vision for IT, I’m here to tell it’s possible. It just takes making yourself visible and continually engaging with the right people at your organisation to determine how your technology solutions can plug into the organisation’s overall plan to drive results.
Join them – because you can no longer beat them
The days of having more technical knowledge than everyone else in your company are over. The proliferation of personal mobile gadgets has made the workforce tech-savvier, to the point where employees are the ones lobbying for certain technologies so they can work the way they want, when they want.
You can no longer dig your heels into the ground – the only way to evolve is to embrace working with this more knowledgeable workforce. This evolution is a good thing; it allows you to become more strategic by road mapping programmes such as Bring Your Own Device. You will still be involved in the technical aspects of provisioning these devices, but you will also help lay out an overall blueprint for mobile solutions going forward.
Look past the short-term
Does your current IT management plan focus on keeping the lights on or does it align with the growth strategy of the business? Building a stronger IT department necessitates moving towards long-term business goals while balancing risk and C-level expectations. Research shows the most successful IT departments specialise in process management and qualitative skills, and focus on business results.
Imagine how strategic IT management goals can match up with overall enterprise goals so you can begin delivering on business outcomes. Assertively supply your input into the total business strategy and plan technology solutions where needed. Don’t forget that overall business performance measures and capital budgets should be aligned as well, in addition to risk management strategies.
Big-note yourself
The sad fact of Australia enterprise IT is that often the end-user doesn’t notice the material change or the value of the solution you’ve provided. It’s become your job to educate not only customers but the C-levels in your company and the marketing department so they can spread the word about what’s going on behind the scenes in the IT department. Demonstrate the value of these achievements beyond a revenue perspective; you may have provided a solution that allows a customer to do something in a tenth of a second, for instance, but if revenue has dropped, no one is listening. Show how improving system speed and usability will lead to improved productivity and, therefore, more revenue.
Show your face
In step with increasing the visibility of your hard work, another way to become a stronger asset to your company is by building relationships. Increasing communication and assertively pursuing sponsorship from executives and stakeholders will take you out of the back-office mindset and into a more dynamic discussion with your company. This extends to customers as well – you should find out what they want and need so you can begin building these aims into the business-IT strategy.
If you are not having customer meetings at the coalface, how do you truly understand the support you need to provide the business?
Be flexible
Transitions take time. As you make the move to become a more strategic asset to your company, be open to suggestions. Perspectives will likely change as the business-IT strategy unfolds. You will have continual meetings with the CEO, business unit heads and customers to solidify the most important objectives. Remaining open to this process will help uncover which business-IT goals are truly achievable and what it will take to execute them.
Are you ready to take your seat as a strategic business partner whose contributions are crucial to the business achieving its aims? Start the conversation with the key players now to turn your stronger, more strategic IT vision into a reality.
Peter Wilson is Datacom’s Managing Director of Systems for Australia and Asia. He helps ensure Datacom offers and fulfils technology solutions globally.
Peter strives to drive the success of the business across locations by strategically directing Datacom’s future. His vision ensures every Datacom location is equipped with the world-class knowledge and capabilities necessary to help enterprises transform their IT department.
Data privacy has officially overtaken security as the No. 1 cloud computing concern among Australian enterprises, according to research by Forrester Consulting. While it’s smart to be aware of privacy issues related to data that might be stored in the cloud, enterprises can alleviate some of these worries by choosing a local cloud services provider.
Australia takes privacy seriously
One of the reasons Australia was ranked No.2 in cloud readiness out of 24 countries on the BSA Cloud Computing Scorecard is because of its rigorous Privacy Act. These laws tightly govern how customer data and corporate records are stored, managed and accessed and require enterprises to ensure ongoing protection of customer information transferred into the cloud, regardless of where the cloud services provider is located. This means if information stored overseas encounters a privacy breach, there may be little recourse the enterprise has against the provider; the Australian enterprise also remains liable for the breach.
By storing highly-sensitive data for both the government and the enterprise in onshore data centres, Datacom warrants adherence to these strict local privacy standards and helps organisations fulfil their requirement to keep customer data private – key reasons why we were selected as the No. 1 Local Provider for IaaS by Longhaus.
Enterprises know where their data is
Many enterprises view data residency as very closely related to data privacy; the physical location of the data also determines which privacy regulations bind it. If a business puts Australian data in a cloud located in the United States, it has two countries’ regulations to adhere to. Some cloud service providers may also spread data between servers in several different countries in an effort to increase redundancy. A local provider enables enterprises to access, analyse, remove or add data immediately if they wish.
It’s not a cost issue
Earlier this month, Acting Victorian Privacy Commissioner Anthony Bendall advised against government agencies and enterprises becoming blinded by low-cost cloud computing services at the expense of weak data privacy and security standards. Datacom does not have this rush-to-market mindset with its cloud services. We have spent years honing them in both Australia and New Zealand to ensure they are robust, secure and adhere to their Service Level Agreements. We also provide managed services such as infrastructure support and managed print to increase the overall value of our cloud services.
It’s Privacy Awareness Week. For more information on how to take privacy seriously at your enterprise, visit the Asia Pacific Privacy Authorities web site. Follow #2012PAW on Twitter to join in the discussion.
Your mobile employees can now access sensitive company information on their smartphones. And so can the cybercriminal sitting in the next building over or on the other side of the world.
The trend of workforce mobility has led to increasingly savvy cybercriminals shifting their attention from attacking traditional corporate network environments to syphoning company data off poorly-secured employee-owned devices. The security gap has emerged for a number of reasons. Many enterprises don’t have the IT manpower to oversee a host of different devices after an organisation has hastily agreed to implement a Bring Your Own Device programme. There are also issues related to employees losing their mobile devices or using them to access corporate data on unsecure Wi-Fi networks. Downloading suspicious files or applications further increases the cyber threat.
These risks aren’t cause to shut the door on mobility at your enterprise, however. Ensuring your organisation uses the right security solutions and educates all staff about ongoing cyber threats are key ways to protect your corporate data and brand.
Mobile virtualisation, for instance, essentially allows IT departments to keep corporate data separate from the rest of the device. Staff can then remotely manage the device, issuing security patches and wiping sensitive information if a phone or tablet is lost or compromised. End-point security solutions and mobile device management allow IT staff to encrypt and password-protect data, limit the number of users with administrative privileges and select which employees gain access to which applications.
While the IT department will manage these solutions, you should ask mobile employees to commit to doing their part to keep company systems and information secure. Educate the entire enterprise on how the latest cyber security risks could affect the business. Require all staff interested in participating in a Bring Your Own Device programme to sign a user policy that includes requirements for setting and updating passwords, reporting procedures for when a device is lost, stolen or attacked and decommissioning guidelines.
If you’re concerned about the risks inherent in enabling greater mobility at your enterprise, Datacom’s Technical Security Services (TSS) can assess your current environment and develop a customised security solution. Staffed with security experts experienced in protecting corporations and government agencies, TSS can conduct application and network vulnerability assessments, intrusion simulation and research to ensure you are protected against the latest cyber security risks from all sides.
Datacom will be presenting on cyber security at the Trend Micro EVOLVE.Cloud event in Sydney and Melbourne this week. For details on the event, click here.
Mark McWilliams has 24 years experience in the technology sector and is a Director of Datacom Investments. Datacom’s specialist technical security practice, Technical Security Services (TSS), which provides in-depth advice and technical consulting to both public and private sector enterprises across Australia, reports to Mark. He has detailed knowledge across the IT spectrum from data centres through to governance, with everything in between. He has also worked with organisations that have varying needs from a security standpoint, including those with advanced requirements such as banks and government agencies. He has seen both good and bad security deployments and has strong views on how organisations should protect themselves in this interconnected world.
You're not the only one who has started making calls over the web, texting or using chat as your primary forms of communication. Nearly half of contact centres in Australia have now fully or partially implemented a multi-channel agent, which can come in the form of email, chat or video calls, according to Callcentres.net. We talked with Andy Cranshaw, Datacom’s General Manager of Professional Services for Southeast Asia, to learn what to expect with this multi-channel trend.
What are the emerging channels in this space?
“In technical support, it’s chat rather than email. Email is not a great medium for some types of technical support. Going through that process over email can be long: you send your problem, I send you a solution, you try the solution, and it doesn’t work, so you send me the result. Enquiries are best for email, when it’s nothing urgent.
We’re also starting to see social media used as a means of putting questions to a user community, and there are opportunities here for us to assist in providing answers. Regardless of the channel, Datacom guarantees its contact centre staff possesses the technical knowledge to answer everything from the most basic to the most complex enquiries.”
Are we seeing these technologies threatening to overtake phone?
“Not to the extent we thought we would. Ten or 15 years ago, people were predicting calls would diminish to nothing. The volume of phone calls that we take hasn’t really diminished significantly but volumes of email and web chat have increased.”
What do you see down the pike as far as emerging technologies?
“I think self-help options, online communities and forums and other forms of social media are increasingly going to be the first stop for people to find technical solutions. In that case, ‘click to chat’ options, which enable the user to connect directly with an engineer if they encounter problems, could really drive chat volumes.”
How are the skills required to handle a newer channel, such as chat, different from the skills needed to answer phone enquiries?
“In the world of tech support, the layers of technical understanding are obviously critical regardless of the medium. But then there is the ability to be able to communicate your technical understanding to another person and articulate it in a way the customer understands that’s very different when you’re instant chatting rather than talking on the phone. Most people use chat as a method of social communication – it’s informal, full of abbreviations and emoticons. In a business environment, you have to be able to type quickly, concisely and accurately. You also have to know what’s appropriate and what isn’t when it comes to chat.
At Datacom, we address this by recruiting the right people and adhering to the COPC standards of contact centre training so that all staff have the relevant skills to work in this evolving multi-channel environment.”
How long does it take to train staff on these channels?
"Training is not a big issue if you can recruit the right people in the first place. But when it comes to multi-channel environments, that’s not easy, particularly offshore where a person’s spoken English may be significantly better than their written or vice versa. In a two- to three-week training period, you can give staff a few tips and language skills to ensure culturally-sensitive and relevant communication, but the key is to recruit people who already speak and/or write well in the language they are going to communicate in. Datacom only hires contact centre staff with excellent language skills and cultural awareness, and we conduct quality assurance to guarantee a professional level of customer interaction.”
It seems there is a large challenge around workforce management with the multi-channel approach. How do you get around that?
“There are IT solutions such as multi-channel queuing. At the back end, the system will receive phone calls, emails, chat, and then it will distribute them to staff. So, if a tech support specialist puts down a phone call, the next thing that pops up could be an email.”
How does integrating a multi-channel approach affect the manager’s role?
“It changes how they schedule people and staff the centre. In the end, the ability to queue multi-channel interactions is one thing, but the implication is the centre must have someone sitting at the desk who can handle the call, chat or email. Regardless of how the changing multi-channel environment affects staffing and managerial roles, Datacom continues to ensure its contact centres decrease support costs, raise customer service levels and further brand perceptions.”
As Peter Wilson, Datacom’s Managing Director of Systems for Australia and Asia, mentioned in a recent blog post, building customer-facing software applications that clearly drive revenue is a way to enable more strategic IT. In an increasingly complex IT atmosphere in which collaboration across teams and clients is more prevalent, this can be easier said than done. One way enterprises can better monitor all phases of application development across locations is through application lifecycle management (ALM).
What Application Lifecycle Management Is
Application lifecycle management typically involves all the tasks involved in the development through to delivery of custom software applications. This includes workflow, data sharing, measurement and reporting across tools and processes. ALM can be especially helpful when it involves more than one delivery platform or pool of resources, such as when development teams are scattered across the country or the world. A mapped-out process gives better visibility around fragmented parts of the application development schedule that straddle various projects, but need to synch up at certain points to address multi-enterprise needs.
Datacom has its own application development team that can help create and manage software for the enterprise, integrate business applications and extend enterprise apps to mobile devices. We have experience building and operating customer-facing, revenue-generating software, including industry-targeted bespoke applications for the web and mobile.
Where Application Lifecycle Management Helps
Having a streamlined workflow process for developing software applications means the enterprise can track each phase and note which employee completed which task or edited a part of the application. If development teams are located in multiple locations, this reduces the risk of overlapping processes or having to rework part of the application, an inevitable cost savings for the business; bridging global teams also enables better collaboration. In addition, ALM helps the business better control the speed of delivery, as it can account for setbacks or delays in each phase of the development process.
How Application Lifecycle Management is Changing
A recent Ovum report is quick to point out that the latest application lifecycle management solutions do more than just track software application development from birth to delivery. These newer ALM offerings monitor application performance, security and the gap between development and operations and are increasingly becoming available through Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud platform delivery methods.
Another key area of rapid evolvement is mobile software development, particularly as Bring Your Own Device increases the use of smartphones and tablets in the workplace. Mobile device application development and enabling enterprise applications on mobile devices may require a different set of ALM tools that addresses the end user’s separate experience and behaviour on such devices. The latest ALM solutions can offer software development, device integration and field service support for enterprises that want to take their applications into the mobile realm.
Datacom relies on proven software development methodologies to manage the challenges around creating bespoke applications that range in maturity, delivery method and project schedules. Our team will conduct a readiness assessment to determine your business needs, use a multi-phase approach to ensure customer satisfaction and employ an agile, collaborative process to support change throughout the development lifecycle. We can also help deploy applications to tablets or laptops or deliver mobile apps to a mobile browser.