Contact Centre Steering Committee

Thursday 7th April

The NOA Contact Centre Steering Committee, chaired by Ria Barnabas, Recom, and Martyn Hart, NOA Chairman, continued its focus on the creation of best practice at the April meeting.

The steering committee has decided that the best way to promote contact centre best practice is to produce a NOA endorsed checklist.

Drawing on the experiences of the group, the checklist will help others avoid the potential pitfalls when outsourcing their contact centre functions.

The release and checklist will contain the following information:

• Press release – NOA checklist / Index information

• Statistics from The UK Customer Satisfaction Index to be used to emphasise the importance of the contact centre and produce an eye-catching headline / introduction. The 5 brands ranked top under Telecommunications and Utilities are all outsourced..

• Checklist

• Steering committee contributors mentioned in the release. NOA, sourcingfocus.com, end-users, suppliers and analysts. Credibility to the paper etc.

The checklist will be created from the follow list of contact centre considerations. Certain subjects will be split into sub-headings at the next steering committee.

Client Considerations

 Strategy – company’s endorsing outsourcing

 Clear responsibilities – is there a job description – how /where they fit in the organisation

 End User customer engagement – who is responsible in specifying (how do you know the end users’ needs)

 Governance model and mechanism for change

Client When Assessing Suppliers

 Communications (backup) / trust

 Escalation

 Capabilities (also region) (to develop with the business needs)

 Costs

 Innovation

 Security

 Application Support

 Agents

 End User Profile analysis and Fit

 Sustainability

 Transparency*

 Case Studies*

* added at the request of the steering committee.

Attendees included: Ria Barnabas – Recom, Martyn Hart – NOA, Brian Hannon – Conduit, Iain Banks – Response, Tina Stanley –Teleperformance, Will Allister – Aegis Global, Steve Feeney - Genesys Telecommunications, Paul Corrall – sourcingfocus.com