Alastair Glass
Associate Director: Partnerships and Products
Datacom
Alastair Glass
What has been your business/work highlight of 2024 so far?
This is augmented by a series of specialist vendors with capability where the traditional CCaaS platforms may be lacking and an ecosystem that appeals to customers who want differing levels of control and involvement in the design and implementation of the platform. We have been really pleased with how the market has responded to the solutions and partnerships we have curated.
Who is your business hero and why?
Ross McEwan…former CEO NAB.
Ross has a long and impressive track record of turning around organisations and turning them around based on two critical elements: an absolute focus on the customer, how to meet customers’ needs and how we remove friction from the system…Ross championed the Contact Centre at every opportunity and reminding all areas of the business that the reason why the Contact Centre gets calls…is because you haven’t put enough thought into service design
Secondly, Ross had a laser focus on employee engagement, understanding what makes people tick outside work and working hard to make sure that everyone understood how their work every day contributes to a greater organisational purpose…its no coincidence that he has turned around significant organisations in both the northern and southern hemispheres…
What’s the biggest business mistake you’ve made and what did you learn from it?
The mistake was essentially a maths mistake in a WFM capacity plan that we ran to respond to Covid demand. The mistake miscalculated shrinkage and underestimated the number of people that we would need to respond to demand.
The mistake was relatively simple, the implications, however weren’t, and the associated leadership lessons were vast.
Firstly take accountability quickly and transparently…bad news doesn’t age well, getting the bad news out on the table quickly was lesson 1.
Lesson 2….protect your people. Make sure that they have the space and time to address the issue without blame. The leader has to create that safe space for them.
Lesson 3….step back from what happened, review without blame how the error happened and what processes or even culture needs to change to ensure that everyone has space to raise issues
Lesson 4…..Pre-mortems… rather than falling back on post mortems when things go wrong, run pre-mortems to predict those scenarios, involve a broad range of people, and predict issues and plan responses before they occur.
What’s the most inspirational book you’ve ever read and why?
Legacy: James Kerr
A fantastic book about the New Zealand All Blacks Rugby Team…you don’t need to know anything about Rugby to enjoy the book which talks about the critical cultural elements of the All Blacks that make them the most successful team in the world.
The book talks to the incredible and powerful link to Māori culture that provides for 15 Leadership lessons that are powerful, simple and compelling.
No matter where you are in your leadership journey I would challenge anyone to not read this book and have deep reflection on how they are led, and how they lead.
What’s the biggest challenge you face in your role in 2024?
Simply keeping pace with the market and ensuring we are clear on what are real, genuine, customer-focused solutions, and what are likely to become obsolete quickly. Customers rely on partners to independently guide and support them through what can be a very confusing and crowded market. Keeping pace with the vendors and their capability has been and will be our biggest challenge in the next year.
What technology will have the greatest impact on your business this year and why?
The implementation of AI-powered call monitoring has had a dramatic effect on our business not only in terms of the number of calls that we can assess, not only for the unique insights that it provides to where customer journeys can be improved but mostly for the positive impact on our people.
It’s possible to see the implementation of AI capability as a job reduction exercise, but our approach has been different: ‘Quality Monitorer…..meet Service Design Specialist’ same person, new tools different and more engaging job to not report data but to now use data to suggest and recommend changes to the customer journey and truly add value to our Customers and or organisation. We see it as a great blueprint for how AI can and should be embraced by teams, not feared, and how it can enhance and develop their skills rather than being seen as a simple job reduction exercise.