Culture Class
Announcement posted by Culture Class 22 Mar 2012
Sydney based business, Culture Class, has recently established its new specialist service to contact centre providers and their clients, focusing on the quality of cultural and language alignment for offshore contact centres servicing the ANZ region.
Launched in February, Culture Class has designed ‘ANZ Rapport’, a five-day face-to-face course for adult learners working with Australasian customers from offshore locations. The course provides a solid foundation for agents, managers and trainers to understand Australian and New Zealand attitudes and approaches and how these can best be catered for in the context of both verbal and written service delivery.
The Australian owner of Culture Class, Sarah Staveley, is a customer service professional who began writing and delivering ANZ culture and language training for outsourced, offshore audiences during her nine years at Microsoft. Driven by a desire to see Australians and New Zealanders serviced with respect and to see the off- shoring experience as a successful exercise for both client and customer, Sarah explains, “Product and standard soft
skill training only represent a part of the training puzzle for offshore contact centres working in the ANZ market. And a good working knowledge of English is not enough to ensure excellence and satisfied customers because Australian and New Zealand English present distinct varieties of the English language.”
With so much negative press lately in the Australian and New Zealand media around offshore contact centre training techniques, ‘ANZ Rapport’ offers the real deal – an approach that avoids the well worn cultural clichs of the ‘gidday mates’, dingoes and meat pies, instead using precious training time to develop a mature overview of Australia and New Zealand, in terms of modern day culture and language and the flow on implications for customer service.
“Contact centre agents don’t need to speak the ANZ languages, but they do need to understand them to work with them effectively. Likewise, a mature grasp of the culture of multicultural modern day Australia and New Zealand is vital. At the end of the day, this is all about frontline staff managing productive conversations and outcomes that keep the customer coming back to the brand. It’s not rocket science, but there is a lot of work to be done,” commented Sarah.
About Culture Class:
Sarah Staveley founded Culture Class in 2012 to offer
specialist services in the areas of quality, cultural and
language alignment for offshore contact centres that
service Australian and New Zealand customers.
Sarah brings twenty two years of customer service
experience to Culture Class, with a resume spanning the
Financial Services and IT sectors and including
companies such as AMP Limited, Macquarie Investment
Limited and most recently nine years at Microsoft, where
she was Australia and New Zealand Customer Service
Manager for the last three years.
Throughout her career, Sarah has created and delivered
in-house training courses across areas such as quality
management, customer service, business writing, product
and technical issues and inductions.
Over the past decade, Sarah has created and delivered cultural and language training for offshore contact centres in a variety of locations across the Asia Pacific region.
More information: http://www.cultureclass.com.au