Profile: Gail Saipani, Asteron
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Gail Saipani |
What do you do?
My key responsibility is management of the Contact Centre. Looking at opportunities to grow the contact centre and sales and retention of customers. For that to be successful, the focus is on developing a high performing team that deliver excellence.
What results are expected in your position?
Achieving Contact Centre service levels that ensure our customers have a positive service experience. Achieving sales and retention targets and managing the people, tasks and processes within an allocated budget.
What has been your biggest career highlight to date?
The growth and success of our contact centre at Asteron. I started at Asteron 6 years ago with 2 pods of people and three years later we had developed a contact centre with 28 seats that had diversified to inbound and outbound calls. For the last two years we’ve achieved first place in the Insurance Industry sector of the CRM Contact Centre Awards and been in the top ten overall.
What is the best and worst thing about your job?
The best thing is developing a high performing team and seeing the team achieve their objectives.
The worst thing is managing the changing generations. It means realising part of our workforce works to live, instead of living to work and therefore have different work values. It’s going to require a lot more thought about how we best manage them.
Any tips on how to get and stay ahead?
Remain passionate about what you are trying to achieve. When there are obstacles in front of you remain positive on how you and the team can overcome them.
How do you encourage loyalty with your staff and clients?
Staff – by understanding the ingredients that makes up loyalty. For us it is leadership, training and development, motivation through reward and recognition programmes, treating people with respect and empowering them to do a good job.
Customers – by focussing on the customer care aspect. We have undertaken a project to review all our customer communications to make sure they are customer friendly. We’ve also placed a real emphasis on instilling a customer centric culture within our company by encouraging staff to step into the shoes of our customers and to focus on providing a positive service experience for our customers and advisers. We also have a Customer Feedback Programme in place where we log all complaints, compliments and suggestions. We analyse this feedback to make improvements to our operation. It’s about having all these aspects in place so our customers feel taken care of because if we don’t take care of them someone else will.
What do you think employees want from their employer?
It differs for each employee. Some want respect and to be valued. While others are driven by tangible rewards such as pay, rewards and development opportunities. You need to ensure you tailor what you provide to each employee.
What does your company do for its staff that you feel is different from what other companies provide?
We focus on staff development. We have a Tertiary Study Assistance Programme in place. We work on achieving that balance between being focused on the work and having fun in a rewarding environment. We offer competitive pay and invest in the training and development of our staff.
What are the biggest human capital issues your industry is dealing with? …and what should be done about it?
Finding top candidates with the right skills and attributes to fit the roles. There just doesn’t seem to be enough of them.
We need to generate creative ideas to attract and retain high quality candidates. It would be good to have more forums and seminars that focus on this challenge so we can put in place new initiatives.
