Kevin Panozza, CEO of Engage talks about partnering with livepro and his views on the “New Marketplace”.
Q: Why the partnership with livepro?
A: “Everyone is now doing business in what I describe as the new marketplace. In this new marketplace customers want to be able to connect anywhere, anyhow, anytime with enterprise and they want the right outcome first time, every time.
So we describe our business as having two parts.
The first part is connection – and that’s taken care of by the fully hosted cloud based Genesys platform that we built using all of the tremendous experience and strength of Genesys and with the incredible IP and experience that comes having built more than 100 call centres in Salesforce over 15 years.
We use Liveperson, the proactive web chat tool to support the connection; this is all about allowing the customer to connect.
The other part of doing business in the new marketplace is content – what you have to say and the manner in which it is said. So at Engage we deal with the development of content through the training material we create and through the experience we have in creating a high performance workplace through employee Engagement such as the eight enemies of engagement and the eight champions of engagement.
But the actual content, the ‘what’ is said is largely left up to the skill and expertise of individual agents because companies depend solely on training to make sure that agents know what to say.
The logic of knowledge management to us is that it provides instant access for agents to see, find or discover whatever knowledge they require to resolve a customer issue. Having that capability on their desktop means that they will never be caught short, no matter what issue or question the customer raises.
It’s just complete common sense that arming agents with knowledge is an absolutely vital part of doing business in this new marketplace.
And that’s why we sought out a relationship with LivePro because we assessed the different knowledge management systems that are available in Australia and we decided that LivePro was actually the best product that we had seen. It was efficient, did the job really well, was easy to use and it seemed logical to us that when we went to a customer with an holistic story of connecting anywhere, anyhow, anytime so the customer can resolve their issue first time every time.
LivePro forms a very important part of the story we tell.”
Kevin Panozza
About Kevin Panozza
There are probably many stories of entrepreneurs starting small enterprises in partnership with large corporations subsequently enjoying significant success. Kevin Panozza is one such story; over fifteen years he created SalesForce, Australia’s largest and most inventive provider of outsourced sales and customer service solutions, in partnership with advertising agency DDB.
In January 2005 SalesForce was acquired by Salmat, an ASX300 company. SalesForce grew from 20 employees and one client, to more than 5,000 employees with a client list that would be the envy of any service company in Australia; the list typically includes the largest company of its type in each major industry vertical.
In mid 2008 Salmat SalesForce had more than 4,600 workstations located in state-of-the-art contact centre facilities in Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia; the company also has more than 1,000 contractors engaged in face-to-face selling, customer service and corporate representation around Australia. Each year thousands of people are inducted, trained or retrained, coached and mentored.
Much of the company’s success is attributable to the unique and stimulating work environment that has secured three successive ‘Best Employer Australia and New Zealand’ Awards in the prestigious Hewitt survey. -this is the first time any Australian company has been honoured with three consecutive awards. For SalesForce to win this award is paradoxical because the contact centre industry generally has a well-deserved reputation for offering low pay, boring and repetitive work that is undertaken in a rule-driven environment, and bland, sometimes even Dickensian, work environments. Typically it is a high attrition industry.
