Our philosophy is to go beyond that which is expected, or requested, to deliver Unexpected Service experiences that customers will always remember. This philosophy, which we call Personal Accountable Service™ (PAS), is at the very core of our success and value to customers – delivering unexpected service experiences on a foundation of mission-critical service expectations.
MacquarieHUB: At the heart of our business success
Our customer contact centre, MacquarieHUB began operation in 2010. This serves as the central point of interaction with customers. While other companies are resorting to offshore strategies to reduce costs, Macquarie Telecom invested $5M in this state-of-the-art, customer contact centre located in Sydney. The talent management, measurement and operational processes of this centre are unique in many ways, including:
Domain expertise: customer service professionals or CSPs are hired for their customer service capacity and what we call the customer service gene rather than industry or technical experience. Staff are typically hired from outside of the call centre and telemarketing realm with the key qualification being sharing of their values with ours and the desire to be part of a world class service environment.
Training investment: in addition to the company's employee learning and development program, Macquarie invests, on average, $2,000 per customer service professional annually for external training. This investment is a key part of our MacquarieHUB Employee Value proposition and delivers a culture of continuous learning matched to an individual’s development objectives.
Real-time measurement: customer feedback is obtained and satisfaction measured in real-time. Call centre staff can see their individual Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), live. More than 1,500 customers participate in these monthly surveys with an average score of 4.7 out of 5 over the last 12 months. These surveys provide high statistical validity and rich information to identify and prioritise ongoing improvement opportunities.
Performance objectives: staff are measured by customer satisfaction, first-time-fix and one-contact-resolution criteria, not call volume or call length.
Cross-functional engagement: interdepartmental review meetings are held each morning to review, analyse and plan resolution of open tickets. In one year, the volume of open tickets has declined from 400 per day to fewer than 150 as of July 2011.
Single contact: calls are not passed around between departments, as CSPs take personal ownership of queries and complaints. Armed with technical, product and service knowledge and access to our Operational Support Systems (OSS), each CSP is equipped to effectively handle or to escalate issues quickly to resolve any customer matter. This single contact approach instils customer goodwill and eliminates the phenomenon where customers complain about the process of complaint handling.
Employee engagement: The Hewitt Survey measures employee engagement in the form of willingness to say positive things, stay with an organization and strive for excellence. MacquarieHUB achieved an engagement score of 74%, 20% higher than the telecommunications industry average.
