Howsit! Over a month has gone since I made Durban my home, so this feels like a good time to give you an update on progress with the support teams for our sister brands, here in South Africa.

Here’s a question for you: what’s the difference between Technical Support and Customer Service? The answer here in Durban at the moment is, a lot!

We have separate teams, with separate managers, on separate sides of the building, delivering each role. Does this matter to our customers? Well yes, since these teams have distinct responsibilities – one answers billing queries, the other helps with broadband faults for example – you are likely at any time to have your call transferred from one department to the other. We know this sort of thing can frustrate customers and we know we can improve the experience.

Our customers expect their calls to be answered by someone who listens to their questions, understands them clearly and can communicate their response effectively. Regardless for the reason of our call, this is our base requirement. We are here to solve a problem.

In reality the only difference between the roles is knowledge – one might know their way around a computer, the other understands business rules for upgrades, downgrades and cancellations.
So our main focus at the moment is to consign this distinction to the past. Cross-skilling our team isn’t quick or easy, but we are making inroads having created our first mixed teams and are now training new starters in both areas. It would be counter productive to force this upon staff, so we are creating an environment in which it is encouraged and rewarded. Ultimately this will benefit our customers who will be more likely to have their issue resolved first time.

That’s not all that’s currently going on here though – just recently we celebrated our 300,000th Broadband customer with a gigantic cream cake:

The Customer Service team also had a fun day with prizes on offer for the best performers, best customer feedback and best joke. In the interests of taste I won’t be repeating any here!

Outside of work there was the small matter of the ‘Durban July’ recently which is Africa’s equivalent of Royal Ascot – everyone dresses up in their glad rags, oversized and overpriced hats and spends the day drinking in the sun, whilst losing all their money to the bookies. I’m pleased to report that my bank balance hasn’t quite suffered a terminal blow and no known photographs exist of my attire for the day

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This entry was posted by Nick on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 1:50 pm and is tagged with CSC, South Africa and is posted in the category Customer Services, PlusNet News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.