Who is first contact?

The brand name first contact is the trading name for Page1 Ltd, formed in April 1989 by a group of investors wanting to take advantage of new opportunities arising in the telecommunications industry from deregulation of the radio bandwidth industry.

Page1 Ltd became the first privately owned paging network in New Zealand.

Today, through growth and acquisition we are now a truly multimedia contact centre.

Through our ISP, WebWorld we also offer Web Design and Hosting packages, an excellent alignment to many of our contact centre solutions.

At first contact we work with you to combine the best of the human element with the efficiencies of technology to get both working for you and your customers.

Each business is different. What works for one, might not work for another. There's so many horror stories about call centres; excessive hold times, agents not understanding customers needs or not answering calls at all! How do you decide that a call centre is the right option for your business?

The ultimate great experience is when your customer does not just enjoy doing business with you, or is even amazed by what you can do for them on one or two occasions, but when they see that what you can do for them is critical to their own success. When this happens, you will not have loyal customers, you will have business partners.

When you have got the basics right and created an organisation that people like and enjoy doing business with, then you can aim to delight or 'Wow' your customers.

The secret to delighting your customers is to look for problems they would love you to solve, but cannot reasonably expect that you would, and then when you do, you will knock their socks off.

Having a customer is a privilege. Without them, your company would have no revenue and your staff no pay cheques. Yet human nature being what it is, we tend to focus on the tasks we have to complete and see customers as being a distraction or even a nuisance because they take our time and our energy. Even people who have nothing to do but look after customers can fall into the trap of seeing a customer with a special need or difficult problem as someone who is stopping them from serving other customers. And customers with a complaint are seen by most of us as a threat, someone to be got rid of quickly.

It is common to hear senior managers exhort their staff to “delight” their customers by exceeding their expectations when the reality is the business falls a long way short of even meeting their customers' expectations because they cannot get the basics right.

Customers want results - not excuses, justifications, explanations or even apologies.

Ironically, it is not that difficult to create a great customer experience because customers do not want much! Studies report that customers simply want fast and friendly service by someone who is knowledgeable. They would also like the service to be personalised because, not surprisingly, people do not like being treated like one of a mass.

Team Leader

Kathryn oversees the staff training and quality assurance within the call centre. Kathryn has facilitated a QA program within First Contact which optimizes attainment of KPI’s.

System Administrator

Debbie has been part of the First Contact team since 2002. As the System Administrator, she is responsible for all of our technology, including telephony, internet and all computers and servers.

Team Leader

Carmen joined the team at First Contact in 2005. With over 12 years experience in managing multi-functional contact centres, she has worked with a large number of customers from a wide range of industries.