Our Story

TMC provides comprehensive outsourced business support – the business support partner for every industry, regardless of product or service.

We handle the complexities of inbound and outbound customer contact requirements through our New Zealand based call centres on a 24/7 basis, working while you sleep. We answer the calls, route the messages, triage the emergencies and come up with the functionality and other services that glue everything together. Most importantly, we do it by creating customised processes that unravel any company conundrum and rebuild it in the form of a sustainable solution.

Yet, these are not the secret ingredients in our recipe for success – it’s the harnessing of technology and great people to solve operation pain-points and deliver measurable outcomes for business. While the combination of technology and great people might sound like a no-brainer, in reality, it is a highly considered balance of both process and culture that has seen us become what we are today. It has taken years of refinement to get this balance just right.

But to recall our business at the beginning of Alex and Heidi’s involvement in the company is to tell an entirely different tale…

Alex Del Brocco and Heidi Glynn acquired The Message Centre (now reborn as TMC) in 2005 with the hope of solving another business problem: the handling of the around-the-clock contact requirements of their labour hire service for health and hospitality industries. As fate would have it, The Message Centre soon became the business beast that would demand all of their attention.

It didn’t take long for Alex and Heidi to realise the massive potential in The Message Centre, which is potential others had failed to notice. Such foresight is a quality unique to TMC’s leadership team, and one we have not only applied to our own business operations but also to that of our clients. Alex and Heidi know how to be smarter and make better business sense even when the way forward may not be immediately apparent.

As part of the evolution of The Message Centre into TMC, Alex turned his attention to assessing the technology that drove the company. He invested heavily (against professional advice) in the implementation of a new, fully customisable platform that integrates into any business.

His ambitious mission gave rise to Octopus™ – the most adaptable platform on the market – that now powers all operations right across the TMC network through its many ‘tentacles’. Octopus™ is the artificial genius that enables us to intelligently problem-solve with seemingly limitless potential, offering full transparency through an interactive client portal, and real-time reporting and analytics.

Concurrently, Heidi concentrated on nurturing our people and culture. While technology was one solution, she knew – thanks to her background in psychology – that identifying the right people and then matching those people to the right clients was the formula that would really see the technology and our business outsourcing support solutions come into their own.

To achieve this end, Heidi implemented a process of psychometric, evidence-based recruitment, which is a fancy way of saying all people at TMC would be behaviourally assessed based on specific traits such as customer service abilities, attention to detail, motivation and so on. This process ensures the right person for the right campaign, as well as a more comfortable fit for employees when welcomed into the TMC family. This is also symptomatic of our ‘hire perfect first’ approach that ensures clients always get the people they wished they’re hired themselves.

The Message Centre was restructured from the ground-up – leaving no stone unturned – even physically changing premises to Heidelberg to consolidate a company-wide attitude of starting afresh. Along with the many incremental changes introduced, a natural attrition occurred that reached its zenith in 2012. This was the pivotal turning point. That’s when the TMC you know today came into its own.

We had the technology in place, which gave us the tools to fly, but – most excitingly – we were starting to see how important our people had become in making our business work better. Our technology may be automated but our people are not robots ­– they are the organic ingredient that creates the magic. We also take pride in always being great to deal with, as formal or as casual as the clients and situation dictate, which is a breath of fresh air in an industry heavily dominated by process, systems and the all-too-often illusion of efficiency.

With everything now coming together, our onshore and offshore capability was established to offer a wider resource pool to find the best possible candidates. Staff retention rates soared to 83% with a diverse and experienced leadership team emerging, supported by highly trained agents through specialist QA and upskill programs. Consequently, clients started coming to us through positive word-of-mouth, with reputation now cementing us as a leader in the field of outsourced business support.

Complementing our great service, clients knew that they would also be able to minimise costs through our usage-based pricing model. And this extends from the smallest of clients up to those mobilising nationwide workforces and triaging emergency situations, including the development of communications strategies and the  handling of sensitive information for the aged care sector during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Our initial branding of ‘The Message Centre’ has now been well and truly usurped by our model as a full business support service. Our processes – and those of our customers – move as a harmonious part of a greater whole, rather than against each other. Nothing is a problem because, when we take on a customer conundrum, we take it on as our own, jumping in boots and all. As far as we’re concerned, we’re an extension of our customers – we’re in this together.

TMC has the support services that make better business sense because we enable companies and organisations of all shapes and sizes to get out of the daily grind and focus on what they do best. TMC is the business support partner with the right people and technology to make all the difference.