Neil Bates Email & Phone Number

Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand

Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand

Leading and enabling a team of customer focused Solution Architects across NZ to support 2degrees corporate business customers. The role involves working closely with key stakeholders such as Sales and Engineering to support our current customer base and provide solutions for new clients.

Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand

During this project (fixed term role) I managed the data network installation for the Waikeria Prison Development, encompassing the communications data rollout of Cat6 UTP cable to the new prison buildings. The project included data cabling for Production, Prisoner, BMS & Monitoring networks, along with AV and data cabinets into newly constructed buildings on a site adjacent to the current prison site.

Christchurch, Canterbury

Christchurch

Following the purchase of Snap by 2degrees and the subsequent re-branding, the company name has been updated. Responsibilities• Leading a team of Delivery Specialists & Project Managers to ensure corporate customers receive an outstanding level of services through the delivery process, reducing delivery timelines and improving customer focus.• Grow and implement a new team of Project Managers and implement a sales process for selling their time as a resource.• Manage & report on performance of the team, and reflect improvements to processes through data analysis.• Manage workflows and define / implement improvements across teams to improve delivery of services to customers.Achievements • Doubled team size in first 3 months, bringing on board customer facing Project Managers for the first time within the company.• Implemented sales pricing tool for quotes on Project Management, along with processes for confirming pricing and booking resource.• Implemented daily reporting for Provisioning team to provide clarity for the team on their workflows and performance, and monthly reporting on comparative team performance, work levels, sickness & leave, and performance improvements.• Developed a range of additional reporting within Business Objects to improve delivery experience and reduce deployment costs.

Christchurch

See 2degrees details

Riccarton, Christchurch

Planning and implementing change and improvement across a Christchurch based contact centre along with similar tasks with an offshore contact centre based in Manila.A team under me focused on reporting on contact centre performance, Workforce planning and improvement of processes and performance with a focus on the customer experience.Responsibilities• To drive the forecasting, resource planning, reporting and improvement activity across the fixed line consumer operations to ensure the delivery of exceptional performance.• Seek opportunities for improvement of process and customer experience to assist delivery on performance.• Scope plans for possible changes to the operation to ensure they meet with the financial goals and targets of the company. • Implement changes to the operation and drive all of the elements that assist in making the proposed changes a reality.• Work with stakeholders from other areas and senior management around projects, future planning and day to day activities. Achievements​• Introduction of a new work stream into Christchurch, including project management of the setup of office space, telephony and LAN installations, new skills / IVR routing, and staff hire & training as part of the amalgamation of Vodafone and Telstraclear. Not only was this all done over an 8 week period, but also over Christmas / New Year 2013/14.• Two month spent in Manila from the end of June 2014 to support and improve the operational performance of the outsourced operation, and assist in the successful introduction of a new work stream and expansion of operations.

Forecasting and rostering contact centre staff to achieve optimum delivery of service to inbound calling customers. Responsibilities• Creation of forecasts for call volumes into the contact centres. • Based on the forecasting, calculate the required resourcing and roster staff to be able to answer the predicted call volumes.• Take historic and/or forecast data to provide insights into the requirements of the contact centre into the future and performance views of the past.• Process leave requests from contact centre staff to manage staffing levels, and processing this to ensure all sickness, vacation and other leave is accurately captured.• Processing of all additional hours & public holiday work provided by contact centre staff to ensure staff are paid correctly and on time.• Coordination and implementation of business continuity plans to ensure efficient and effective operations during major outages, severe storms or natural disasters to ensure customers continue to receive service and staff are kept safe.Achievements​• Proficient in use of Genesys Workforce software including Configuration Manager and Configuration Utility. • Improved speed and accuracy of a number of tasks within the Queue Management role through creation of Macro’s. For example the Daily Performance email which was manually updated every morning with results from the day prior – my update now requires just a couple of minutes work for this where previously it could take 10-20 minutes each day.• Big picture and out of the box thinking allows me to find ways to overcome issues. A recent example was the introduction of the NPS score onto the reader boards in a method that is automated and updated every hour.• Excellent attention to detail to ensure the information provided from our team was not only accurate, but presentable as well.• Proficiency in Visual Basic programming for automation of reporting and regular repetitive tasks.

Refer details under same role name for Vodafone - role continued after sale of Telstraclear.

Managing a team of staff up to 13 in Telstraclear's Business Contact Centre. The team were split across inbound call answering and a back of house team looking after all electronic communications (emails, faxes and web) from business customers.Responsibilities• Managing a mixed Back of House (e-contact/Helpdesk) and Front of House team to ensure service provided to customers is of the highest standard and done so within agreed service level standards.• Managing sickness and performance issues from the first indications through to disciplinary action where required.• Encouraging staff to work towards and exceed their KPI’s and embrace the opportunities that were open to them to progress their careers. Achievements​• Consistently met and exceeded KPI’s set. • Involved in the set up of completely new processes for the Business Call Centre to use for different new scenarios, including an efficient process to receive, complete and monitor billing jobs, and a new Voice Verification Process for paperless contracts.

Christchurch, New Zealand

Responsibilities· Taking inbound calls from TelstraClear’s small and medium enterprise business customers. · Responsible for the billing of all orders run by the business contact centre for our network.· Training, coaching and mentoring.· Various administrative work & point of contact in the absence of managers.· Promoted to Business Team Leader in 2008. Achievements · Consistently met and exceeded any KPI’s.

Christchurch, New Zealand

Telecom NZ Ltd at the time. Account Manager for last 9 years and various sales and billing roles before that.