The Agile Contact Centre Podcast

Dan Hill-Smith is the Chief Operating Officer at TSA Group  TSA Group is one of Australia’s leading specialists in outsourcing and CX consultancy and services. Dan on LinkedIn About us: Stories, tips and practices to help you build adaptive teams who are ready for any challenge. Please follow, rate and review. We appreciate all your support. Check us out here: https://www.theagilecontactcentre.com.au Please follow us on LinkedIn

In this episode we talk to Russ Murphy, the Director of Regional Service Centres at Service NSW.  Russ was a member of the team that began the transformation journey at Service NSW back in 2013. He shares the trials and tribulations of his leadership career and the approach they took from the early days of the very first service centre pilot to centralising services into their contact centres. Service NSW makes it easier to access government services for people and businesses across NSW. Service NSW is a NSW Government executive agency that joined the Department of Customer Service on 1 July 2019. We deliver world-class one-stop-shop services for customers, businesses and our partner agencies About us: This podcast is brought to you by The Agile Contact Centre. Stories, tips and practices that will help you create memorable experiences for your people and customers. We do this because our mission is to reinvent to contact centre by building adaptive teams who are ready for any challenge. Please follow, rate and review. We appreciate all your support. Check us out here: https://www.theagilecontactcentre.com.au Please follow us on LinkedIn

Scott Doyle has been on quite a leadership journey over the last 3 years.  This episode follows how Scott and the NRMA team have taken the disruption of Covid and used the constraints as an opportunity to take them to an even higher level of purpose driven leadership. And by listening to the needs of their people and customers they have created a new and even more successful operating model, with fully remote teams. Scott is the Senior Sales Manager, Contact Centres at The NRMA. The NRMA is an Australian organisation offering roadside assistance, advocacy for motorists and road-users, motoring advice, car servicing, International Driving Permits, travel and other services in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. It is a member-owned mutual company limited by guarantee. About us: This podcast is brought to you by The Agile Contact Centre. Stories, tips and practices that will help you create memorable experiences for your people and customers. We do this because our mission is to reinvent to contact centre by building adaptive teams who are ready for any challenge. Please follow, rate and review. We appreciate all your support. Check us out here: https://www.theagilecontactcentre.com.au Please follow us on LinkedIn

In this episode we talk to Brad Shaw, entrepreneur, CEO and Leader, who has had a significant influence on the careers of many, many leaders as a coach and mentor. Brad reflects on the traits that he believes creates the most successful leaders in a complex, ambiguous world.   Brad is the CEO at Livepro, a knowledge management company that provides solutions specifically tailored for the unique needs of customer service teams. So of course we get into the wonderful world of knowledge as well. Check out Brad on LinkedIn Check out Livepro on the web.  About us: This podcast is brought to you by The Agile Contact Centre. Stories, tips and practices that will help you create memorable experiences for your people and customers. We do this because our mission is to reinvent to contact centre by building adaptive teams who are ready for any challenge. Please follow, rate and review. We appreciate all your support. Check us out here: https://www.theagilecontactcentre.com.au Please follow us on LinkedIn

James is a stalwart within the Aussie contact centre market, he has seen a lot of change in his 15 years in the industry and shares with us his path to Director at SMAART Recruitment, his favourite tunes and a deep dive in the current recruitment market, how to think about the employee experience in your attraction strategy, and the key trends he sees over the next 5 years.  James authors the SMAART Best Practice Report which is Australia's premier benchmarking and insights report for contact centres. Find James on LinkedIn About us: This podcast is brought to you by The Agile Contact Centre. Stories, tips and practices that will help you create memorable experiences for your people and customers. We do this because our mission is to reinvent to contact centre by building adaptive teams who are ready for any challenge. Please follow, rate and review. We appreciate all your support. Check us out here: https://www.theagilecontactcentre.com.au Please follow us on LinkedIn

This time around we chat to Julie-Anne Hazlett, Manager, WFO Strategy at Call Design who is an inspiration, modest in her achievements, along with her teammates, the InternationElles, she played a significant role in campaigning for a Women’s Tour de France. The last time the Tour de France held a women's multi-day stage race was in 1988 but it returns again this July!JA talks to us about what motivates her to ride ridiculously long distances on a bike and how to overcome the inevitable set backs that come from embarking on this endeavour.  We also dive into her other passion, workforce optimisation, and she shares where she thinks we are headed with this function in a world with even more complexity than ever before.  JA on LinkedIn About us: This podcast is brought to you by The Agile Contact Centre.   Stories, tips and practices that will help you create memorable experiences for your people and customers.  We do this because our mission is to reinvent to contact centre by building adaptive teams who are ready for any challenge. Please follow, rate and review. We appreciate all your support. Check us out here: https://www.theagilecontactcentre.com.au Please follow us on LinkedIn

Luke Jamieson is a true free thinker who is building great experiences for employees, he personifies the mantra, do right by your people and they'll do right by the customer.  In this episode we learn about Luke's very diverse career backgrounds from baking to droving cattle! he talks to us about his journey to building world class EX-CX cultures and how he found a beautiful intersection between technology and social science, to bring game play to work. Luke is a multi-award winning leader, recognised as one of the top 25 EX-CX thought leaders globally.  He also has his own podcast called Boost, a variety show focused on elevating the employee experience and performance, available on streaming services everywhere.  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7uQf5vqcKJRhLVigw0gDUs?si=f844eb6084744a53 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/boost/id1614511337  Luke also authors a weekly newsletter called EX Rated, on you guessed it, the employee experience. We recommend subscribing here https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/ex-rated-6870934133271617536/ Follow Luke on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-jamieson/ If you are interested (and why wouldn't you be!) in learning more about Centrical and how they can help you build a world class EX-CX culture, hit them up here, https://centrical.com/?rid=v22gs-auz-brand-centrical&keyword=centrical&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=v22gs-auz-brand-centrical&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIxYf6p6mN9wIVgX0rCh2ikQBxEAAYASAAEgJ6l_D_BwE This podcast is brought to you by The Agile Contact Centre. Stories, tips and practices that will help you create memorable experiences for your people and customers. We do this because our mission is to reinvent to contact centre by building adaptive teams who are ready for any challenge.  Please rate Please follow, rate and review. We appreciate all your support. Check us out here: https://www.theagilecontactcentre.com.au  Please follow us on LinkedIn 

Introducing Hannah Gee. Among a myriad of other talents, Hannah is a partner over at our big sister, Neu21. This week we have been inspired and disturbed all at once by the new Apple TV+ series, Severance.  To find out what the fuss is about check out the opening sequence to Severance before you listen to the episode! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIp2J3zk1ho What does this alternate future of work mean, and who would take the option of severance, if offered?  We also geek out on opening sequences in movie and television and find the thread between this, and creating memorable experiences for your people and customers. Other sequences we mentioned: Ozark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJQxWhRIQE0 Sopranos: https://youtu.be/mJpNmYeooQE True Detective season 1: https://youtu.be/FxXRkqXfhYM True Detective season 2 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpQi_ZCBa6w Westworld: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc6xBFZbrTc You can also follow Hannah on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannahgee/?originalSubdomain=au

In part 2 in our mini-series on the employee experience we talk about the journey of a contact centre employee and how to think about the architecture.  We dive into expectations and experience, how Disney manage this and how knowing about the way we construct memories of experiences can help us build better ones. Peak end rule - https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory

We continue to see the impacts of the pandemic play out in weird and wonderful ways across contact centres.   So far we have seen cloud technology become the norm, greater flexibility that comes from WFH and now an ultra competitive labour market, a.k.a  the war on talent and the great resignation, which all points to the humble contact centre employee becoming the centre of attention. And it's about time! And what will this mean for digital servicing and the types of roles that exist in the future - will this be accelerated as organisations attempt to mitigate the impact of labour shortages by moving more and more interactions to digital.  And what will that all mean for the customer experience as AI manages more and more conversations, will chatbots begin to make sense? Stay tuned as we unpick it all and put it back together again.