Touch 'n Go customer Careline Centre grabbed the most coveted Gold Award during the 9th Annual Customer Relationship Management & Contact Centre Association Malaysia (CCAM) Awards held at the One World Hotel, Petaling Jaya on the 10th October 2008. The award dinner was officiated by Dato’ Badlisham Ghazali, the CEO of MDeC.

This annual award is organized by CCAM, a professional body whose members consists of service driven organizations from the various service industries such as banking, telecommunication and shared services. This award is held to recognize high achievement, service excellence and best-in-class in the Malaysian Contact Centre Industry.

In previous years, the Gold winners in this national level award will be eligible to represent Malaysia in the regional level competition, competing with the best-of-the-best peers from Singapore, The Philippines as well as Hong Kong.

There are three award categories – Corporate, Individuals and Prestige awards. Contestants need to undergo a rigorous judging process in two stages. The first round of judging involves a nomination process and the completion and submission of a standard template. Those who made the marks will be shortlisted for round two and have to undergo an interview and presentation session to a panel of judges. Judges that consists of local and foreign industry experts will conduct a site visit to the contact center. Callcentres.net Pty Ltd, a Sydney-based firm is the official Chief Evaluator for this year’s competition.

A total of 17 companies took part in the competition this year. The heavyweights are brands like Maxis, Maybank, CIMB Bank, AmBank and also leading local and global technology and outsourcing companies based in Cyberjaya and other MSC-designated centres such as IBM, Datacom, Scicom and VADS.

In the Best In-house Contact Centre (under 50 seats) category, five (5) companies were shortlisted into round two and Touch ‘n Go created a surprise that night by winning the Gold Award and beat United Overseas Bank (Silver Award) as well as the

favourite - IBM Asean Regional Contact Centre (Bronze Award). Our Careline team believed the strategy they adopted had worked very well for us. Instead of dwelling too much on operational aspect, what we suspect most companies will do, the team focused on and presented from the angle of strategic importance of Touch ‘n Go Careline centre in delivering the overall company business objectives.

The positioning used by the team on the importance of Careline’s role in strengthening our service delivery channel is key to ensuring the success of our recent venture into the highly competitive retail business which will be the main growth engine for the company in the next 5-years. This could have been the main point which impressed the judges. The team also shared the various customer-focused programmes undertaken such as six-sigma process improvements, the huge investments in technology and human capital training and development in the past one year to improve customer satisfaction.

Winning this award after an eight (8) years hiatus (the last award won was Silver Award in the year 2000) has made the team very proud. Nevertheless, the team is cognizant that customers’ expectation will only increase from now on. They will, and rightly so, expect certain level of service standards from an award winning contact centre. There are a lot more works to be done to continue improving our service to exceed customers’ expectation.

The winning has uplifted our brand’s image and profile among the players in the industry. And for our customers, this award exemplifies our commitment to service excellence and they can expect a high degree of standards and professionalism when dealing with Touch ‘n Go, at the same level usually associated with the top brands, if not better.