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Speakers 
 Debbie Allard,
CRA Manager,
St. Luke's Nursing Service
Working within the Call Centre industry since 1996, previously with Suncorp then Citibank as Compliance Manager and Team Leader.
Commenced with St Lukes Nursing Services as Central Referral Agency (Call Centre) Manager in November 2004.
Major focus on coaching and development of staff, and the automation of processes to make full use of technology.
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 David Andersen,
Head Customer Contact Centres, Service Delivery,
NRMA Motoring and Services
David Andersen is currently Head of Customer Service Operations at NRMA Motoring & Services. In the last 3 years David and his team have been instrumental in streamlining call centre operations from 5 sites to 2, have upgraded technology platforms and have grown sales quarter over quarter. P
rior to NRMA, David was with WorldxChange Communications through Telecommunications Deregulation where they grew a $200 million business literally overnight and before that was with FedEx managing multiple projects in the Asia Pacific theatre.
David has been managing people businesses for the last 16 years and genuinely believes Customer Service Representatives are the voice of the customer.
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 Malcolm Angell,
Manager Member Service Centre,
Citistreet Australia
Malcolm has worked within the Contact Centre Industry for over 10 years and has significant experience in all aspects of Contact Centre set up and management. He has held Call Centre management positions with the Brisbane City Council and Brisbane Institute of TAFE. Malcolm has managed the CitiStreet Member Service Centre since June 2002 and has seen it expand from managing calls for a single fund, Sunsuper, to become the primary point of telephone contact for 5 superannuation client funds.
Under Malcolm’s leadership, CitiStreet was named as the ATA National Call Centre of The Year (under 50 seats) in 2003 whilst Malcolm was named National Call Centre Manager of The Year.
Malcolm completed post-graduate studies in Customer Contact Management at Griffiths University in 2002 and is currently Vice Chair of the Qld Chapter of the Australian Teleservices Association (ATA), the peak professional body of the Call Centre Industry throughout Australia.
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 Réal Bergevin,
Author,
"23 Steps to an Effective Call Centre" & "Call Centers for Dummies"
No one can deny that Réal Bergevin leads the Call Centre industry in Canada. He is the holder of prestigious awards and directorships, is head of the largest privately held outsource service provider in Canada, and is a celebrated author.
It was being exposed to people that believed in a “systems” approach to management that sparked his belief that nothing is more important in a call centre than to understand the implications of your actions. Knowing that “highly controlled” system of management can become a harsh working environment, Réal envisioned a culture of honest, dignity and respect built on a foundation of company beliefs and values to co-pilot his efforts to improve.
In 2004, Réal was appointed to the inaugural board of the Canadian Customer Contact Centre Council. The Council is one of 39 federally funded, not-for-profit organizations made up of organizations, labour representatives, provincial industry associations, educational institututions and other organizations providing services to (in this case) the customer contact centre industry. The Council’s mission is to contribute to the health and prosperity of the customer contact centre industry and its workforce.
Réal is author of 23 Steps To An Effective Call Center, 2nd Edition 2005 - a comprehensive step-by-step guide to building efficient and profitable call centers and Call Centers for Dummies, 2005.
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 Greg Bubke,
Manager Customer Relations Centre,
Australia Post
Greg Bubke has managed the Australia Post Customer Relations Centre at Milton in Brisbane for over two years. The facility is part of a national network of Centres. With a combination of inbound and outbound calling, the centre is uniquely placed to add value to its internal and external customers.
With the support of senior management, Greg has pursued a range of initiatives to grow and develop the staff of the Centre to develop direct and indirect revenue channels within its day to day operations. His previous experience in Finance and Sales has assisted in these opportunities.
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 Mr Antoine Casgrain,
Head of Customer Contact Centre,
St George Bank
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 Victoria Chalmers,
Project Director,
Health Contact Centre, Queensland Health
Victoria Chalmers has a Bachelor of Commence and a Graduate Diploma in Library and Information Studies.
She is currently the Project Director for the Health Contact Centre Project with Queensland Health (QH) and has previously held positions in the areas project management, information management strategic planning and information technology investment planning for QH and other Queensland Government departments.
Victoria has been involved with the development of health contact centres at state and national levels for the past five years. She has 15 years experience in the human services industry and has performed a range of information management roles within the disability and health sectors for both public and private organisations.
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Ms Joanna Diakodimitriou,
Call Centre Manager, Telesales,
Unilever
Kicking off 17 years ago in retail sales as a junior assistant, sales have become my passion.
Contact Centres were revealed to me in 1999 after joining St George Bank, what a change from retail, I couldn't see the people I was talking to! Quickly moving from Operator to Team Leader, Supervisor to Call Centre Manager my experience has come from various industries in the Contact Centre world including Banking and Finance, IT Distribution, Local Council and FMCG.
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 Kathleen Ellerman-Bull,
Director of Counselling,
Kids Help Line
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 Kym Eveleigh,
Program Director,
Call Centre of Excellence
Kym is the owner and director of the Call Centre of Excellence program. Kym has extensive knowledge of the Contact Centre industry having held various positions from CRM to Contact Centre Manager for over a period of 15 years.
With such a strong industry background Kym has been able to reach out to the potential employers with a firm understanding of their requirements and needs.
Kym's vision is to provide the call centre industry with a bank of job-ready employees while at the same time providing new skills and opportunities for the disadvantage job seeker, the mature worker and women re-entering the workforce.
Kym's passion for the Industry has proven to be a valuable asset in achieving the outcomes for the Call Centre of Excellence project, which has become a shining example of the Contact Centre industry, government agencies, community services and services providers all working together in true partnership style to achieve a common goal.
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 Jason Flanagan,
Director Customer Relations,
BT Financial Group
Jason Flanagan has been with the BT Financial Group for 12 years and has been in his current role as Head of Customer Relations since April 2004.
Previously Jason held various roles in the organisation ranging from Internal Audit Manager, to Margin Lending Finance and Operations, Business Unit Head for Margin Lending and Product. Prior to BT, Jason trained as a Chartered Accountant with KPMG, being with the organisation for 6 years.
As a qualified Chartered Accountant and having a Finance background, Jason has had a broad ranging general management background across all areas of the business. Coming from a position as a known business leader in the Margin Lending industry into the role as Head of Customer Relations Jason has brought his general management skills into a specialised customer service segment of BT of which there are 280 people.
During his time in Customer Relations, Jason has had to refocus the business coming through integration to deliver on the customer experience and manage employee expectations in a cost effective, efficient and scaleable manner.
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 Jennifer Gomez,
Customer Contact Centre Manager,
Crown Limited
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 Barry Hardy,
Manager, Global Contact Centre,
Air New Zealand
Barry is a long-time Air New Zealand employee who joined the company as part of a commercial training programme as his first venture into the workforce.
This “clerical apprenticeship” entailed a 3-year journey through the many diverse areas that make up an airline. Following graduation, Barry’s “sales bent” resulted in him pursuing the face to face interaction of front-line sales for a number of years while the playing of rugby, cricket, and badminton was of more importance than career aspiration.
Senior management positions held in more recent years are again very diverse, including Manager Cook Islands, Domestic Airline Revenue Management Manager, Pricing Manager, and Sales and Distribution Manager. Barry’s current role as Manager Global Contact Centres sees him have responsibility for more than 550 staff and about five million customer contacts per annum.
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 Courtney Johnson,
National Training Manager,
Fonezone
As National Training Manager of Fone Zone, Courtney brings more than 20 years international business and people experience with him.
With a career that has spanned 20 years with various international organizations, Courtney has worked in marketing, people development, business development and in general management.
During his career, Courtney lived and worked in the United States, Germany and Australia.
From 1990 to 2002, he was a business advisor consultant to numerous multi national organisations in Australia and the US, specialising in customer service, staff development, marketing and people management. Some of the companies he has consulted for are: Centro Properties, Warner Bros, Kenney Australia, Masterfoods, Universal MCA, Jones Lang LaSalle, Westfields, AMP, Sanitarium, just to name a few.
Courtney has been an active member of numerous business associations including the Australian Institute of Marketing and Australian Institute of Training and Development.
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 Mia Lander,
Managing Director,
Knowledge Space
Mia Lander has been passionately involved in the Customer Contact for 18 years. Starting in the industry to support herself whilst studying, she was bitten by the bug and stayed ever since. Having worked through the ranks, Mia’s greatest challenge to date was to plan, implement and operate a call centre answering calls from 52 countries with 25 countries.
After a successful career working across operations in Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Singapore, Mia is now the Managing Director of KnowledgeSpace. Leading a team of training and consulting professionals, her clients include companies from the Insurance, Outsourcing, Government, Manufacturing, Insurance, Retail and Automotive industries.
A former PricewaterhouseCoopers executive, her insights into developing and motivating sales and service staff have resulted in achieving real bottom line gains for her clients.
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 Chris Lejmanoski,
Manager Customer Acquisition and Retention,
Homeloans Ltd
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Chris Luxford,
Director, Contact Centre Technology,
3D Networks
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 Graham Maloney,
National Manager,
Centrelink
Graham Maloney is the National Manager for Centrelink Call, one of Australia's largest virtual call centre networks.
Over the last six years he has implemented a variety of human resources and technical initiatives which have helped transform Centrelink Call into a high performing group.
Previously he held senior positions in a number of service delivery, change management and HR areas.
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Virginia McSweeney,
Call Centre Manager, DIO Service,
Suncorp Metway
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Mr Michael Meredith,
Executive Director,
Australian Teleservices Association
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 Ms Janelle Nisbet,
Managing Director,
Progress Training Systems
Janelle Nisbet has a background in managing and leading teams in three highly competitive industries. Throughout her successful career working with teams in the banking and finance, stockbroking and telecommunications areas, Janelle was known as someone who can bring out the best in her people. Her corporate experience includes nine years in the fast paced, ever changing contact centre industry where Janelle and her teams were recognised with 10 industry awards for excellence. Janelle specialises in the areas of coaching, creating and leading high performing teams. Her award winning people development skills have created great demand for her in many organisations as a trainer of leaders and coaches, as well as a motivator and inspirer of service excellence.
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Ms Karen Poole,
Head of Sales & Services,
CommSec
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Mrs Julie Pritchett,
Manager,
Maroochy Shire Council
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 John Redpath,
Director,
Queensland Now
Born in Hamilton, New Zealand, John Redpath spent the majority of his professional life within the Tourism Industry on the Gold Coast in Queensland.
John saw an untapped opportunity to establish a brochure service within the Tweed & Byron Bay region, which then lead to the publication of Infomaps. Infomaps soon became the most used tourism information document in South East Queensland, with a distribution of over 3 million copies to date.
John has now shifted his focus to the development of a comprehensive Accommodation Directory, which resulted in the acquisition of Queensland Now in May 2004.
Since then, a lot of effort has gone into the development of a superior online booking engine as well as customer communication and service within the reservation call centre. The success of both online and personal booking service has lead to the expansion into areas outside the Gold Coast, across Queensland and New South Wales. The business concept incorporates online accommodation directories and booking services as well as a reservation centre, which has grown by almost 50% in the last 6 months. With John’s vision and contribution, a sound business model ‘HOWZAT’ has now been established which allows franchising possibilities in the near future.
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Ms Robyn Reilly,
Associate, CSBA,
Customer Service Benchmarking Australia
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 Paul Salvati,
Manager, Integrated Contact Centre,
Smart Service Queensland
Paul Salvati has worked in Management positions within the Contact Centre Industry for well over a decade in addition to roles in Human Resources, training and workforce planning.
He has worked in local, state and Federal Government call centres as well as in the private sector. Paul’s current role involves managing the 100+ seat Smart Service Queensland contact centre in the Queensland government.
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 Tina Schembri,
Former Senior Manager, Workforce Planning and Analytics,
Westpac
Tina Schembri has specialised in workforce management for over seven years, across several different organisations and is widely regarded as a thought leader in this space across the industry. She has a passion for workforce management and has shared this in presentations at conferences, workshops and training in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Tina has taught workforce planning and analytics subjects for the Advanced Diploma of Call Centre Management in both Sydney and Melbourne.
She has been published many times and is an advocate of workforce management principles across various aspects of an enterprise, not just in contact centres. Tina is currently heading up Workforce Planning & Analytics at Westpac a department of more than 50 Analysts responsible for workforce planning, scheduling and contact quality across five contact centres as well as the workforce planning for over 600 branches around Australia.
Tina has also worked with many other organisations including, the National Australia Bank, Medibank Private, Telstra, Vodafone, Air New Zealand and the Ambulance Service of Victoria to provide workforce management solutions that reflect the different needs of each business, it’s values and it’s objectives.
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 Vicki Shields,
Head of Australian Call Centres,
ANZ Banking Group
Vicki Shields is Head of Australian Call Centre for ANZ (Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited), one of Australia’s leading banking and financial services groups. The Call Centre is responsible for inbound servicing for consumer products and services, Internet and Phone Banking and Internal help services. The Call Centre role fulfils 3 passions Vicki has - delivering the very best to customers, creating inspiring environments for people to excel and being at the leading edge of change.
While working fulltime Vicki completed an MBA from Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand and became a Fellow of the Institute of Insurance and Finance.
Vicki is a member of the Genesys Global Advisory Board, a founding member of the Chief Customer Officer Forum, a member of ANZ’s Chief Executive Group and a new board member with Ronald McDonald House Monash. Vicki was recently awarded the ICSP National Outstanding Customer Service Award 2004.
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 Tony Stuart,
CEO,
NRMA Motoring and Services
In September 2003 Tony Stuart was appointed as Chief Executive of NRMA Motoring and Services.
Since joining the organisation Tony’s focus has been on driving the company to a financially sound position. Last financial year he delivered the company’s first operating profit in five years while remaining focused on delivering excellent member value and on the company’s promise to be the motorists’ champion.
Previously Tony was the CEO of Sydney Airports Corporation Limited, following its corporatisation. Tony was responsible for ensuring that Sydney Airport provided Sydney with a successful Olympic gateway, with the airport acknowledged for its part in delivering the “best Games ever”. He was also responsible for helping deliver a successful privatisation outcome, when Sydney Airport was sold by the Australian government in June 2002 for $5.6 billion – a record price for an Australian privatisation program and also the world’s largest airport trade sale.
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 Nancy Tichbon,
Director of Customer Care,
Virgin Mobile (Canada)
Nancy Tichbon is the Director of Customer Care for Virgin Mobile in Canada. In this role, she’s responsible for managing the entire call centre and continually inspiring her team to deliver outstanding customer service, in true Virgin style.
A Virgin veteran, Nancy joined Virgin Mobile Australia in 2000 as Customer service manager. In Australia, Nancy was responsible for designing and implementing strategies to reduce the cost to serve, increase customer satisfaction and drive both customer and staff retention. Previous to this, Nancy was an Operations Consultant where she was responsible for setting up the call centre at Virgin Mobile Australia and also the call centre for the National Australia Group in the UK.
Overall, Nancy has over nine years experience in the customer service industry having started her career as a customer service representative in 1995.
Following this Nancy held various call center roles including Team Leader for a UK based mobile provider; Operations Manager for Xerox technical support and Call Center Manager for the UK based outsourcer Merchants.
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Lyn Trewenack,
Managing Director,
ST Squared
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 Sharron Walsh,
Service Delivery Manager, Business Transformation Services,
IBM Asia Pacific Delivery Centre
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 Lindsay Woodland,
Executive General Manager,
Ergon Energy
Lindsay Woodland is the Executive General Manager, Customer Service Ergon Energy, a major Australian electricity distribution and retail business based in Queensland, providing electricity to some 660,000 customers.
Prior to Lindsay’s appointment to this position some 12 months ago, he was engaged by the organisation to manage their marketing function as General Manager Marketing. Lindsay has over 15 years experience in senior marketing and sales related roles with several service based organisations including AGL (General Manager Marketing and Residential Sales), Telstra MobileNet (a variety of senior marketing and product management roles) and Yamaha Music (National Marketing and Sales Manager Music Products).
Having worked primarily in marketing and sales roles, Lindsay brings a different perspective to managing the Customer Service function at Ergon Energy. Lindsay’s goal at Ergon Energy is to drive the organisation toward achieving their vision of becoming a world-class, customer driven energy business. This involves building operational capability to deliver outstanding customer service and transforming the culture within the organisation from being asset focussed to customer centric, where the customer is at the heart of every decision. Lindsay has a Business Degree majoring in marketing and is an Associate Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management.
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