FOCUS | CSIA Quarterly - December 2021

December 2021 CSIA Quarterly

2021 Australian Service Excellence Awards Meet the 2021 winners, see the highlights and enjoy hearing the reactions from some of our service stars in our bumper awards coverage.

Jab on the job

A force for the future

Are employer lead vaccination programs vital to reopening and living with COVID

Belinda Burgess shares how Salesforce has been supporting their clients to pivot towards a future state through the pandemic

Find out more

Welcome to the Summer 2021 edition of FOCUS As the end of the year approaches, I expect many of you are looking forward to a break across the holiday season, whilst others will be preparing for peak time and anticipating the ongoing challenges of the pandemic.

In this bumper issue of FOCUS, we are celebrating service excellence in 2021 with a look back at the 2021 Australian Service Excellence Awards. We were delighted with your reaction to the Awards in October and once again I extend my congratulations to all nominees, finalists, service heroes, service champions and winners for your work in creating exceptional customer experiences.

And of course, congratulations to Service NSW (Specialist Support Services) for winning the prestigious Best of the Best.

Also in this issue, Belinda Burgess from Salesforce shares her insights into how Salesforce has been able to successfully support their clients during the pandemic, including how a future state approach has created outstanding customer outcomes.

We also hear from Eric Swift from ServiceNow about how employer lead vaccination programs are vital as we reopen, and learn to live with COVID.

Ravi Sarogi , co-founder of Uniphore states the case for Conversational AI to reshape both agent and customer experience.

And we’re delighted to showcase the reactions from some of our individual 2021 Australian Service Excellence Awards winners and service heroes.

I wish you all the best for Christmas and the New Year and thank you for your partnership with CSIA and your commitment to service excellence.

Jeremy Larkins Executive Director

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Contents

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News in Brief

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A Force for the Future Belinda Burgess shares her insights as to how Salesforce has been able to support businesses to pivot rapidly during the pandemic and how this is shaping businesses of the future

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2021 Australian Service Excellence Awards Special Feature : We are delighted to share the highlights of the 2021 awards including all winners, reactions and more

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Jab on the job Eric Swift ANZ President of ServiceNow shares his thoughts on employer lead vaccination programs as an enabler of covid normal

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Congratulations Service Stars CSIA brings you the reaction from some of the 2021 ASEA individual winners and service heroes to their success

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AI powered contact centres are game changers. Truth or Hype?

Ravi Saraogi co-founder of Uniphore explains how both customers and contact centre agents are the true winners when technology is utilized to its potential.

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Member Spotlight

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CSIA FOCUS

News in Brief Certified Customer Service Leader (CCSL) Program CSIA’s 2022 public training programs commence in April. The Certified Customer Service Leader program supports leaders seeking to build, coach and manage high performing customer service teams.

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April 28, 2022 9.30am – 4.30pm Digital Classroom $550 CSIA members $660 non-members

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Certified Customer Service Excellence (CCSE) Program

The Certified Customer Service Excellence program is designed to equip frontline customer service agents with the skills to deliver exceptional customer experiences and create a truly customer centric mindset.

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April 27, 2022 9.30am – 4.30pm Digital Classroom $440 CSIA members $550 non-members

FIND OUT MORE Book now

DECEMBER 2021

2022 Australian Service Excellence Awards The 2022 Australian Service Excellence Awards program will be open to nominations from February 01, 2022 with entries closing on May 31, 2022.

CSIA members and non-members are invited to participate in the program across both individual and organisational categories.

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Join us and learn about the International Customer Service Standard (ICSS) You are invited to join CSIA’s Executive Director, Jeremy Larkins and Lead ICSS Assessor, Steven Brett to learn about the Standard and how to apply the framework to your organisation through the ICSS certification process.

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March 23, 2022 9.00am – 10.00am Free Webinar

FIND OUT MORE Book now

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A force for future growth Navigating the COVID-19 crisis has been challenging for customer service organisations of all sizes, industries and staffing levels. In a short period of time, online enquiries and demand for non-contact services increased, and with them came a rise in customer expectations. Here we talk with Salesforce Regional Vice President of Service in Australia Belinda Burgess about how Salesforce helped businesses pivot their operations to navigate the pandemic with tailored contact centre and digital solutions for changed markets.

Many businesses had to rethink the way they operate over the past 18 months. What were the biggest challenges your customers and clients faced?

The pandemic’s impact was not felt evenly across all industries; many service heavy industries such as retail faced significant challenges as customer behaviour changed on an almost weekly basis. While manufacturers who previously had little end-customer contact found new opportunities to go direct, building new digital first capabilities. Overall 81% of decision makers said they accelerated digital initiatives.

How can Salesforce help organisations navigate these challenges with contact centre and digital solutions?

Accelerate digital transformation – Move voice channels to cloud-based digital platforms for greater agility and improve agent effectiveness.

Also, bring online chat and messaging powered by bots and backed with robust knowledge management capabilities.

Deploy automation and AI – Automate simple service enquiries to reduce caseload, easing cost pressure and making time for agents to deliver better experience in the moments that matter

to increase satisfaction. Make the chatbots available 24/7 as 83% of customers still expect to interact immediately.

Evolve the workforce – As customer behaviour shifts so does the availability of skilled resources and the desire for flexibility. Use tech to forecast and optimise resourcing levels and drip feed onthe-job training to ensure you have the right skills.

Unleash teams – Customers hate handoffs. Utilise collaborative service delivery to bring in expertise while retaining continuity. Swarm as incidents emerge bringing in departments and partners to the process.

Act on Insight – As channels come together analyse signals together to detect systemic problems emerging. See trends and opportunities for continuous improvement and close the loop back into sales and marketing.

How important is the need for workplaces to be agile and flexible, and for employees to be open to reskilling?

The skills required of agents are becoming broader and more complex than those traditionally associated with the role. Hard skills such as product knowledge and digital literacy are highly valued, agents act as trusted advisors with .

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necessary knowhow and cater to an increasingly online service landscape. Salesforce allows companies to move to a continuous training model, deploying micro-modules during gaps in the workday and validating the skills required to handle certain types of work before rostering.

This requires a change in the way companies think about workforce engagement.

How does Salesforce reward and engage their people to deliver the best outcomes for customers?

This starts with organisational alignment. At Salesforce we created a process to do this we call the V2MOM. It stands for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles and Measures. Employees at every level create a V2MOM and map that V2MOM to their team, and the company. This ensures staff can connect their personal actions and plan to company objectives and see their impact

According to the State of the Connected Customer report, 71% of customers have made purchase decisions based on the quality of customer service. What are your golden rules for delivering outstanding customer service?

Focus on outcomes – Customer service has a big impact on decision making but is not in itself the goal. Keep teams focussed on what customers are trying to achieve.

Single view of customer – It’s important to have service channels sharing the same views as the customer. I might start applying for a new mobile phone online and then pick up the conversation later on the phone or in a store.

Single knowledge base – Give customers your best information. Discover new solutions and make them accessible to all communication channels including self service through chatbots and search.

Automate easy wins – Once your knowledge base is humming make sure customers know it’s the fastest way to get help.

Team to win – Assist agents using AI to uncover the best information, next best action and access expertise by swarming on difficult issues using collaboration tools like Slack.

Salesforce has sponsored the ASEA awards for the past six years. Why is it important to recognise and celebrate the achievements of those working in customer-facing businesses?

Deploying technology alone does not ensure excellent customer service. An online form cannot show empathy the same way a human can; it does not know how long you’ve searched for an answer, and cannot sense how frustrated you are. And, with technology at our fingertips, consumers have developed higher expectations of customer service and those they come in contact with.

A human centric approach is so important, and why the individuals working in customer-facing businesses need to be celebrated and recognised as one of the most valuable assets of a modern customer-focussed organisation.

ABOUT SALESFORCE: Salesforce is the world’s #1 customer relationship management (CRM) platform. They help your marketing, sales, commerce, service and IT teams work as one from anywhere — so you can keep your customers happy everywhere.

Salesforce has been a partner of CSIA and sponsor of the Australian Service Excellence Awards for the last six years.

ABOUT BELINDA Belinda Burgess has more than 20 years’ experience working in global technology organisations. She is a passionate CX leader who leads the Service Cloud portfolio at Salesforce as Regional Vice President. Her current responsibility is to build upon Salesforce’s strong Service Cloud business across Australia with a dedicated specialist team that is customer centric and outcome focused.

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2021 Australian Service Excellence Awards In October we celebrated service excellence and recognised those organisations and individuals who have excelled in creating exceptional customer experiences

The 21st Australian Service Excellence Awards were presented on October 28, 2021 during our exciting online production that featured special guests, entertainment, prizes and all the awards.

CSIA was delighted to receive hundreds of submissions for the 2021 awards program including a record number of individual nominations.

Our judging panel of 35 members of the CSIA community selected 66 finalists across 18 categories, who presented their final submissions to the judges from July to September.

Produced and hosted by Michael Pope, the awards were broadcast live from a studio in Melbourne via an interactive Zoom meeting managed by AV1, with digital content and graphics created by the team from Dovetail Brand Management Joined by hundreds of people online, CSIA’s Executive Director, Jeremy Larkins congratulated the many people who had

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gathered with their colleagues across the nation to celebrate together stating, “this is the spirit of the awards this year”.

Customer Service Professional of the Year winner, Dominic Swampali described his award as, “a massive honour” whilst Customer Service Manager of the Year, Adam Bury said he was “shocked”. Bare Cremation’s founder, Samuel McConkey, said winning was “humbling” Janet Wilcox-Granger from Aussie Broadband said she was “stoked for the team”, and also congratulated CSIA saying “It’s such a great program by CSIA to recognise great customer service.”

The evening also included some fun with comedic company Laughing Matters as the fictitious customer service expert Dr Helen Bach and also featured magician Chi Han Yeo. The 19 award winners came from 17 different organisations with Service NSW and Centorinno Technologies, both winning two awards. Adam Centorinno, winner of Customer Service Executive of the Year described it an “honour to participate in the awards”, whilst Peru Dhakal from American Express and winner of Customer Service Advocate of the Year said she was “lost for words”.

CSIA is honored to host the Australian Service Excellence Awards program because it is all about celebrating the incredible work done every day to support customers. In the annual letter from the Prime Minister, Mr Scott Morrison notes that the Awards finalists have “made a real difference in the lives of Australians”.

We look forward to hosting next year's program and hope to return to a black-tie gala dinner presentation in 2022.

“Its such a great program by CSIA to recognise great customer service”

Find out more

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Thank You CSIA would like to thank everyone who contributed to the 2021 Australian Service Excellence Awards including our partners, judging panel, creative team, producers and of course all the wonderful nominees and finalists.

And a special thanks to…

PRODUCER & HOST Michael Pope

EVENT DEVELOPMENT & GRAPHIC DESIGN Creative Director Marcus Gibbs

Project Management Jackie Gordon

Video Animation Rad Young

Graphic Design Michael Reid

STUDIO & PRODUCTION Studio Director Catherine Vanderwolf

Technical Director Dylan Batterham

Vision Operator Dario Barbosa

Audio Cory Hoyling

Camera Matthew Jenkins

Autocue Operator Andrea Bunyevich

Zoom Director Hayden Woolridge

Finalist Communications Jackie Gordon

Additional Material Rob Caldwell

2021 ASEA PARTNERS

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WINNERS

Individuals

Customer Service Projects

WINNERS

Organisations of the Year

Customer Service Teams

WINNERS

Contact Centres of the Year

Best of the Best

Congratulations to Service NSW – Specialist Support Services team for being crowned the 2021 Best of the Best.

The Best of the Best award is presented to the organisation with the highest overall score across all categories.

Bushfires, flood, covid- a standard day at the office when working with Service NSW. This gold standard team inspired the judging panel. With a vibrant and fast paced culture, the focus is always on making the customers life easier, amidst very difficult circumstances.

The judging panel was impressed by the demonstration of the understanding that best practice customer service is underpinned by an empathetic, close knit, customer centric team who always want to listen first. A positive customer experience is this team's highest priority, and that’s underpinned by a 94.6% customer satisfaction rating.

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Jab on the job Pandemic response is changing the role of employers Small and large businesses alike are looking toward the future and are hoping for the economy to reopen as quickly and smoothly as possible. Eric Smith, Vice President and Managing Director for ServiceNow Australia and Newland writes that high vaccination rates will be key.

The world’s biggest workflow challenge to convert vaccines into vaccinations has brought employers to the front line to drive the pandemic response effort. With more employers and governments now requiring employee vaccinations as a condition of work or office reentry, employee access to vaccines will become critical.

Australian employers are taking guidance from new directions outlined by Minister for Health Greg Hunt to be able to vaccinate their employees at work. The COVID-19 Vaccine Administration Partners Program is set to transform offices and warehouses into vaccination centers.

DECEMBER 2021

Why vaccinate at work?

Bringing the jab to the workplace can be beneficial to both employers and employees.

People want to feel safe when they go to work.

No one wants to worry about a colleague's vaccination status while trying to do their job.

Vaccinating at work can create ease and convenience for workers by making appointments more accessible.

For employers, this offers a chance to help employees in a practical way—with the added benefit that some uncertain individuals will feel encouraged by seeing their colleagues get the jab. It’s no surprise the Business Council of Australia has described the move as “a no-brainer.”

Workplace vaccination centers are expected to play a significant role in Australia’s path back to normal, with the government estimating that between 1 million and 1.7 million people will be vaccinated this way, reports the Australian Financial Review. This approach will be essential for reaching the national plan of vaccination rates above 80%.

But, with vaccinations coming to the workplace, businesses face challenges of how to operate and organize employees.

The technology imperative Vaccinations are fast becoming the norm in professional settings. Qantas, Virgin Australia, and Deloitte Australia have already introduced varying rules requiring workers to be vaccinated, and organizations such as Woolworths have committed to vaccinating their employees.

These new requirements are expected to be effective in quelling future outbreaks, relieving pressure on healthcare systems, and minimizing future disruption to the economy.

Technology will play a key role in managing how we keep teams and workplaces safe. Solutions that are simple and seamless and that empower workers will be required. Vaccine management software is readily available for businesses and should be considered now. These solutions make vaccination scheduling and certification easy in a trusted and secure way.

Leading global businesses have taken steps that organizations can learn from. NTT Data, a global IT services company headquartered in Tokyo, joined a workplace vaccine program to vaccinate all its employees in Japan. With the right software in place, the company was able to build the vaccine

reservation, reception, and management system in only two weeks, creating a seamless and efficient experience for employees and administrators.

As vaccine management evolves, it will be crucial for businesses to be able to store and organize vaccine-related data. This will enable employers to have easy confirmation and assurance of the vaccination status of employees and to manage any exceptions— such as individuals who can’t be vaccinated for medical purposes.

The path back to normal As workplaces reopen, employees are concerned about their health, their privacy, and the of ease of doing their work. Business leaders are looking for ways to balance these issues in a trusted and secure way. Uber, for example, has embraced Safe Workplace applications to reopen its global offices while supporting employee health and safety.

Vaccine requirements in some workplaces appear to be here to stay. It's integral that businesses do all they can to support our path back to normal. For many, this will involve embracing the rollout of vaccinations in the workplace and new policies and systems to keep teams safe. By ensuring the right, readily available tools are in place, businesses can support this important task with minimal disruption to operations and their employees.

Learn how ServiceNow helps businesses reopen with confidence.

Eric Swift Vice President and Managing Director Australia and New Zealand (ANZ).

ServiceNow

ABOUT ERIC Eric Swift joined ServiceNow in April 2021 as vice president and managing director for Australia and New Zealand (ANZ). He's responsible for leading the digital workflow company into its next phase of growth. Eric joined ServiceNow from Microsoft, where he served in many leadership roles over the last 20 years.

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Congratulations Service Stars The 2021 Australian Service Excellence Awards saw record entries for the individual categories, with organisations striving to recognise those people who have worked so hard for their customers throughout the pandemic. CSIA spoke to some of the 2021 winners and services heroes to hear their reactions to their success.

Andrew Khalil – Winner – Customer Service Leader of the Year I was truly humbled and honoured to have won the ASEA Customer Service Leader of the Year Award for 2021. I’d like to sincerely thank the CSIA for this wonderful recognition along with acknowledging all the management and staff at Wilson Security Australia who have been so supportive of me over the past 6 years and in all endeavours of our work together. I’d also like to thank all my valued customers,

mentors and professional associations of past, present and future, for entrusting me with their business, for our shared vision of success and ongoing mutual achievements. In winning and representing this award, I hope it encourages everyone to always do their best, with care, compassion, integrity and professional duty of service excellence for their customers and that I can continue to be of support and inspiration to them in the pursuit of achieving and exceeding their own aspirations and expectations in work and life too. In winning and representing this award, I hope it encourages everyone to always do their best, with care, compassion, integrity and professional duty of service excellence for their customers and that I can continue to be of support and inspiration to them in the pursuit of achieving and exceeding their own aspirations and expectations in work and life too.

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Tony Meier – Service Hero – Customer Service Advocate of the Year It was very exciting to be named Customer Service Advocate of the Year Service Hero at the 2021 ASEAs. With the challenges the world is seeing, it has highlighted the importance of caring for our customers. Getting it right for our customers first time, every time is what we strive for at the Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) and we do this by putting our customers at the very centre of everything we do. Being nominated, having the interview and then attending the 2021 ASEAs event was a very positive and fun experience. The celebrations and recognition have continued which is truly wonderful. I'm so grateful to be celebrated.

Special thanks to my amazing team and TMR. Thank you CSIA.

Peru Dhakal – Winner – Customer Service Advocate of the Year I was extremely ecstatic but also really humbled to have won the award. The win, in some regards, verified that the values that I have engrained in myself to commit to delivering exceptional customer service are really working, and also instilled a stronger desire to continue and exceed that commitment in future.

Chinnu George – Service Hero - Customer Service Professional of the Year I must say to get nominated in the top 5 in my category itself, I consider it a huge achievement and recognition of my efforts. So winning the hero title is a big plus and a significant milestone in my career. I feel very motivated and this is something I will cherish forever.

Adam Centorinno – Winner - Customer Service Executive of the Year I am humbled and honoured to be chosen to win the 2021 CSIA Customer Service Executive of the Year. An award like this is not a solo effort. The efforts of all our team members to remain focused and deliver an excellent customer experience everyday in our lockdownaffected environment has been inspiring.

Service excellence has always been the hallmark of CT ever since I started the company in 2006 from my parents’ garage. Even though we’ve now grown to over 160 staff members, I am immensely proud of the organisational culture we have built at CT and how we continue to have customer service at the core of all we do.

Adam Bury – Winner – Customer Service Manager of the Year It is a great honour and privilege to have been nominated in the CSIA Awards celebrating and recognising service excellence, and to have won Customer Service Manager of the Year.

Customer service is a profession in its own right and I am so very proud of this award

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AI-powered contact centres are game changers.

Truth or Hype?

Ravi Saraogi, Co-founder and President of Uniphore APAC shares how Conversational Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a key role as businesses look to streamline operations while delivering new and transformative experiences Conversational AI helps contact centres in many forms – from powering intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs), analysing calls in real-time to summarising calls for agents. AI-powered contact centres have long been a reality, especially for the financial, telecommunications, business process outsourcing (BPO), and ecommerce industries during the pandemic.

While we have seen an extreme acceleration of AI adoption in the past year alone, we will continue to see new and exciting applications being adopted that will truly change the enterprise. AI is part of a much bigger picture; it is meant to “power” the entire front and backend operations and augment agent capabilities for improved productivity and employee experience.

Understanding AI-driven capabilities before and after calls

According to key findings from a COVID-era survey, there is still a strong preference from Australian consumers (54.5%) to speak to a live agent when reaching a company’s call centre.

Despite this, many may not know how AI-driven capabilities can deliver in-call alerts (real-time insights), guidance and real-time automation of repetitive agent tasks all while the agent is being co-piloted with AI. For example, in the recent “2021 CX Divide” report, 39% of Australian telco customers suffered longer than expected wait times, and 42% had to repeat their issue several times as their call was transferred from one agent to another. AI-driven features can play a pivotal role in improving customer service.

For every query, complaint and call that comes in daily, contact centres collect an abundance of

real-world data and live training. This allows AI led tech to learn about customers more intimately, making sense of what a customer prefers, identify patterns, uncover hidden relations, and systematise customer data – before a call even starts. All these go into making the entire customer request comprehensible for human agents to know when to take timely action.

AI also drives real-time automation of repetitive agent tasks including after-call work summarisation, call disposition, promises management and more. By leveraging AI and natural language processing (NLP), human agents can reduce time and effort spent on summaries for reporting, and obtain granular insights on calls with increased accuracy.

Customer interaction analytics is the new digital oil

Millions of hours of customer conversations are recorded year after year to fulfil quality standards, training demands, and compliance objectives by contact centres. All this data is hardly ever analysed or even drawn upon for humans to take action, which is why many do not realise its powerful potential. If 100% of the data from calls, emails, chat transcripts, social media and other customer interactions were turned into valuable information, imagine the infinite value and customer service proposition that businesses can unleash.

Recorded data can be deciphered with the use of customer interaction analytics. By analysing conversational data after every interaction, businesses can discover root causes that lead to

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customer dissatisfaction. With sentiment analysis, the programme is able to determine key phrases, trending topics and even emotional states based on the conversations the customer has with the agent.

Customer interaction analytics can also highlight any issues that require immediate attention. It can pre-emptively discover ways to reduce customer churn, failed sales efforts, and repeat contact rates and ensure first contact resolution. All this can directly influence enhancing the customer experience – and agent experience – which will ultimately improve overall satisfaction.

Employees are indeed a company’s greatest asset Businesses will have to increasingly examine the entire customer experience (CX) journey from a holistic perspective. AI should aim to empower customer journeys, marketing efforts, and employee training. While new technologies can power contact centres, businesses must ensure that there is still human presence on the backend to ensure solutions are being implemented to meet customers’ end goals.

This includes empowering agents to foster realtime customer care through empathy and authenticity.

According to Nate Brown, Chief Experience Officer at Officium Labs, building relationships

with customers can only be achieved through mission driven CX. During his session on Conversations That Matters, a podcast for contact centre professionals, he said that business leaders have to “show and demonstrate an organisation’s values through CX and its employees, to communicate a brand identity authentically. One cannot separate brand proposition, culture, employee experience, or customer experience – it’s a journey that should be continuously forming.”

The idea of achieving a fully AI-powered contact centre should not be thought of as the end goal. Business leaders should see AI as a powerful tool to help them achieve exceptional CX on the front-end and superior DX on the backend. Technology can reach its optimum potential when a human agent can act on the actionable insights it draws. It is only beneficial if it improves agent productivity and wellbeing, and it is simply only needed if it makes humans’ lives better. More businesses need to see the process as a holistic one and combine all their efforts and investments to achieve an improved experience for all.

Ravi Saraogi Co-founder and President of Uniphore APAC

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CSIA Member What was your first role in customer service?

First Customer Service role was with American Express as a Customer Care Professional. Great education to work for an award-winning customer focussed organisation.

What is the best of advice you’ve been given?

Definitely the Platinum rule. Go beyond thinking that great customer service is treating the customer how you would want to be treated, treat them how they would like to be treated. For that you have got to get to know them and personalise the experience.

Marisa Marconi National Manager Business Direct Daniel Lister Westpac Banking Corporation

Team Leader for Customer Disputes Team Aussie Home Loans

What is your proudest achievement in customer service?

My proudest achievement would be getting to be a Team Leader. All of a sudden had the chance to share in the positive experiences of many more, through an engaged team all committed to providing nothing but the best experiences for their customers.

What is the best thing about working in customer service?

It's the thrill of going beyond those expectations, genuinely being able to impact someone's day. Possibly even turning a negative situation into a positive one, a win for the customer.

What was your first role in customer service?

My first role in customer service was as a teenager serving customers in our family clothing business on a Saturday morning in country Queensland. Like all the Grandkids, we started on paperwork, then graduated to processing a sale on the registers. The ultimate job was to speak to and assist customers. I was taught by the best – my Grandfather.

Adam Bury Team Manager IT Service Operations SusanCity Blain Townsville Council

Head of Engagement & Marketing ANU Enterprise

What is your proudest achievement in customer service?

There have been many proud moments in my career. I love a big project. Invariably, the high points for me are when big projects culminate in improvements in the customer journey.

Big projects I've grown from include reimagining a website based on user needs, working on a start-up that met customer needs, and rebuilding a Customer Relationship Management system that enabled many people to connect with customers. Those are the moments I look back on with pride. .

What is the best thing about working in customer service?

Sharing, responding and growing from the customer's voice will never be out of fashion.

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Spotlight What was your first role in customer service?

At the ripe age of 16 I became a page boy at The Sheraton Park Towers In London, which set me up for a great learning curve into a career in customer service What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Always do your very best as ineffective or non-existent customer service delivery can and will be detrimental to any business.

What is your proudest achievement in customer service?

Became the National President for Australia, Oceania Director and International Ethics Committee member for Les Clefs d’Or a prestigious organisation of hotel Concierges from around the world who’s objective is to always strive to deliver the highest level of professional service to his or her customers. And of course I was privileged in becoming the Australian Hotel Association Gold Winner Employee of the Year.

Elvis Soiza What advice would you give to a person starting in their customer service career?

Always take customer complaints seriously and treat your customers as you would want to be treated

Qld - Customer Solutions Manager The GPT Group

What was your first role in customer service?

Working as an assistant to the Marketing Manager of the Ballan District Health & Care hospital many years ago. This role really opened my eyes up to the world of customer service in a professional setting. It also highlighted how important customer service and providing excellence in all roles that have a customer touchpoint is.

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

This would have been from a leadership course I completed through Moorabool Shire’s Leaders Program in 2014; "Begin with the end in mind”.

What is your proudest achievement in customer service?

Every moment I can provide excellence in customer service is a proud achievement for me however the highlight to date would have to be assisting Australian Unity Healthcare IT department in winning the 2016 Service Excellence Award for “Service Excellence in A Small Contact Centre’ Award.

What is the best thing about working in customer service?

The interactions with the customers and seeing them satisfied after each encounter

Daniel Emmerson User Support Manager APAC Region Tribal Group Pty Ltd

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Level 2 383 George Street Sydney NSW 2000

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