INTERVIEW: Kevin Panozza

Isabelle Oderberg: What sort of shape are you leaving the call centre industry in?

Kevin Panozza: It's a difficult question to answer, because most companies have their call centres imbedded in their business to deal with their customers, to clear out sales, to retain customers, deal with issues. And they are in, as far as I'm concerned, in this country at least, they are in a range of states which would begin at one end from excellent and go through to mediocre and frustrating at the other. And you would know that if you've tried to call companies to get something done.

Call centres can only be as good as the company will allow them to be. It depends how difficult they want to make it for their customers, but some companies for example, you'd buy a product or a service from them and then you try to deal with the call centre and some companies insist on giving you those IVRs (interactive voice response) to deal with which lead you through countless menus and you have to press one or two or three or four and to find the thing you want to do. Then you're left with a recorded message telling you that you didn't enter the correct option and those call centres are dreadful, but there are others that are extremely good.
IO: Many moons ago the discussion was about India and the sort of competition it would provide the Australian market. That still seems to be a recurring theme whenever the issue of call centres is raised.

KP: Well, I don't know about India. I think that there would be far greater likelihood of Australian companies exporting call centres to the Philippines.

IO: So the Philippines is a new force to be reckoned with now?

KP: Possibly, in the future. The off-shoring phenomenon that the US and certainly big parts of Europe have got to haven't occurred in Australia as yet. I would imagine that the problems confronting call centres today are many and varied, but in particular include staffing difficulties.

There's a lot of work around at the moment in this country and so it's very difficult to find good people and retain them, lots of competition. The whole issue around staff is they've got high expectations and maybe working in a call centre isn't everything that they want to do, so it's tough to hire people in this country at the moment. Costs are relatively high and I would imagine that there are companies who would be looking quite seriously at the lower cost environment of the Philippines thing, maybe India, but the Philippines is in our time zone.

IO: What other advantages does the Philippines have?

KP: Well, the Philippines typically deals with companies in the US. India typically deals with companies in the US and Europe. Some companies out of Australia have gone to India, but the Philippines accent is easy for us to understand and the quality of work being done up there is extremely high. It's a very big industry. I don't know exactly, but there are between 160,000 and 180,000 call centres in the Philippines now. Some very big companies are there, it's our time zone and the interesting thing about the Philippines is that most of the call centres operate at night, that is, our night hours because they're calling the US or speaking to people in the US. So, for Australia they're going to have the opportunity to pick up the best agents because I would imagine most of the call centre agents up there would prefer to work during the day.

IO: Are those markets a threat to SalesForce?

KP: Well, that depends on whether SalesForce decides to participate in the Philippines. So, for example, if the management of SalesForce is going to be running a business beside them, then there's no interest in being in the Philippines. But, if companies are moving their call centre businesses to the Philippines, then yes it's a threat. If SalesForce actually participates in the Philippines market, then it's not a threat, it's an opportunity. But I can't comment on that because I wouldn't be running the company.

It's been 16 years for me, so you know I'm not jumping over a moon that I'm leaving the company or stopping doing it, but I'm pleased to be doing something else and you can't do something for ever, can you? You've got to have a change at some point.

IO: Looking forward, I understand that at SalesForce you concentrated on building a positive culture for your employees and that this is something you are going to help other companies with in the future.

KP: Well, if they're interested! I may go home and find I have nothing to do for the next five years and I'll just watch television and maybe play golf.

IO: But you'll have a lovely culture while you do it!

KP: I will, but I'll be very engaged.

IO: You've said in the past that it would be difficult to reverse the positive culture at SalesForce, because it is so entrenched. To my logic this must work both ways – an environment that has a very negative atmosphere must also be difficult to change. How do you go about reversing a negative culture in an institutionalised environment?

KP: It's very easy really, a lot of people say it's very hard, but I think it's very easy. It takes a huge level of commitment from the management of the company and that is all! There's no culture in any company in this country that cannot be turned into a confident, engaging, high performance workplace if the people who run the business want to do that. If the people who own and run the business are totally focused on extracting profits at the expense of people, are totally focused on managing costs at the detriment of the environment and create a culture of competition and total focus on performance as opposed to all the other things that people need to be content in their environment, then it's the way it happens. But, if the management is smart enough, if they're clever enough to read the signs and look at the mounting body of evidence that highly engaged employees and highly engaged workforce culture leads to better customer outcomes and consequently, if the company's well managed, more profits and higher shareholder returns, then there's no issue. It's as simple as that.

IO: Do you think many companies would be willing to spend money, in a tight market, to address issues of culture?

KP: See, it's not about employees, it's about customers. Take your stock for example. If you have to deal with a company because you've bought something off them and reach a grumpy, grouchy, offensive employee who basically tells you that it's your problem and that how dare you even complain about it, it's just not an issue. You've encountered there a person who's got very low levels of engagement. They don't like coming to work, they have no sense of doing well for the company and they don't feel they owe the company anything, it's just a job. The net result of that is that you're likely then to take your business somewhere else. So whether you're in a boom or in a bust cycle, it makes no difference. In fact, in a recession a lot of companies do put a lot of focus on costs and they tend to run their business very cautiously, but there's a lot of evidence that during a recession it's a time of great opportunity. The smart companies can actually grow their market share in a recession because their competitors are taking their eyes off the main game ball. Therefore, if you're able to improve your sales capability and your customer service capability in a recession, the outcome could be when things return to normal that you've added a lot of valuable customers and you're doing better than your competitors.

IO: How exactly are you planning to take this message to the street? Are you going to do speaking engagements or consultancy?

KP: Oh, I hope so! I have already got a number of speaking engagements that I've been booked for. I've never charged anything for doing it, but I'm going to do what everyone else would do, I will find a couple of speaking agencies around the place, maybe overseas as well, and see if they're interested in me joining their ranks. I will ultimately get this book that we're trying to write out and as of today there's a website called Engagement Matters. The most tangible thing is the first of a series of training programs that we're building, called Quality Conversations.

IO: Is this a joint venture?

KP: SalesForce bought a company last year called A-Frame and they're an exciting, amazing company. They build the most wonderful online training programs. So, this is like an eight-and-a-half hour animated feature film, it's got a lead character and all of the material is delivered in a very engaging way. I've made an arrangement with Genesis through their university to go and talk to call centre operators all round the world, even the ones that I was bagging in your first question!

We've built some more online training around engagement and hopefully that leads to me being gainfully employed, but otherwise you can call me after six months and write an article about failed business entrepreneurs. (Laughs)