Service at the Sharp End

2007-06-07T17:31:00.000Z

SATSE: Introduction

Service at the Sharp End: Making Contact Centres Work

Or, how to survive in a world of change with too little budget, too many staff, too much complex technology, tight deadlines and revised briefs.

About

Rob Innes has worked in contact centres, marketing and technology for 20 years. In that time he has made and taken calls, selected staff, briefed teams, run training programmes, changed processes, implemented computer systems, devised integration methods, prepared analysis and metrics and developed business cases for large contact centre projects. In that time, Rob has worked with clients in Financial Services, Telecommunications, Hospitality, Education, Government, Consumer Goods and Automotive. Rob has helped developed consumer and business to business projects covering acquisition, service, retention and reactivation. In this time, Rob is honest enough to own up to quite a few mistakes, includng a couple of absolute howlers but has learned an enormous amount about what it takes to deliver fantastic service to customers day after day after day. Having worked with Vodafone, Citibank, Ford and HM Government, Rob has built many successful contact centre projects and is keen to pass on his experience.

This book is about sharing tips and techniques, advising on what works and what doesn't, seeing past the obvious to the unexpected sources of value and risk in contact centres, demystifying technology and highlighting practical steps that can be taken to lift an average contact centre to a great contact centre and to lift poor service delivery to fantastic service delivery. Things like:

Which metrics are most important for improving service levels?

How to manage change that impacts on staff

How to retain good staff

How to recruit staff for specialist roles

How to give individual customers a personalised service without over-burdening your IT department or tying your advisors in knots

How to keep the buzz going, day in, day out

How to reduce the number of hand-offs between teams and increase the number of calls dealt with at first point of contact (first call resolution)

This is above all, a can-do book and is focused on taking what really works, what actually works at the sharp end - the busy contact centre - and making it happen in the most engaging and effective manner. Fundamentally, the contact centre cannot operate in isolation from the business. Consequently, this books looks not just at the ways to improve contact centre operations, but how to best organise the entire business to create the best possible links with the contact centre - embedding the contact centre right at the heart of customer strategy.

On the website there are downloadable forms and checklists, tools and tips mentioned in this book that you can take and straightaway make a difference to your centre.

This book is aimed at both contact centre professionals and business professionals who support a contact centre or who devise the campaigns and projects that run through contact centres. It will also be useful to professionals who are involved in IT, service delivery, customer marketing or sales. It will also be useful to people looking to advance a career in contact centres.

Rob lives in Edinburgh, UK with his wife, daughter and rabbit.

Introduction

Right from the word go I want to lay my cards on the table. I like call centres. Call centres are a force for good in allowing masses of customers to efficiently interact with various parts of the enterprise. The modern call centre, or contact centre, to be more accurate since email and other types of traffic are handled there are here to help and largely they do a great job. There are always options to improve, challenges to be overcome, new regulations to incorporate but to a large extent, call centres have successfully moved millions of transactions from poorly resourced branch offices to large well resourced regional centres. Perhaps waiting in a call queue is less than perfect, but it beats standing in a queue outside a branch in the rain.

2007-06-07T17:30:00.000Z

SATSE: Part 1: Conversations with Customers

If salespeople are the eyes of an organisation, the contact centre is certainly the ears. It's often the first place to appreciate a change in consumer sentiment, perhaps due to competitor promotions or difficulties in your service provision. Advisors in the contact centre talk to a large proportion of customers each day and are very well placed to learn what is working and what isn't. Similarly, since lots of customers are calling, it's a great opportunity to reinforce the brand values of the organisation, through the efforts of your advisors.

Chapter 1: Making Contact Centres Listen to Customers

Listening to customers is one of the key roles of contact centres. But is the organisation listening? Too often information available to advisors in contact centre stays in the contact centre. This could be about delivery problems, availability problems, pricing challenges, competitor activity, in fact all aspects of your customer engagement from your branches to your website will generate calls which are opportunities to learn. Often the organisation has analytics capability to capture this knowledge and distribute around the business and from them, increasingly sensible decisions can be taken about products and services, pricing and promotion, delivery and servicing and remarketing and recommendation. However, this happens haphazzardly and this book is about how to improve the use of valuable information gained through contact centres.

One Erlang or Two? Sizing the call part of the contact centre

Honey, I srunk the contact centre! Shrinkage and Occupancy

Sizing the contact centre - email, mail, other traffic

Queues and routing technology

Contact Strategy development

Chapter 2: People. People Everywhere

With interactive web activity, self-service IVRs, supplier extranets and the like, it's easy to imagine that the demand for contact centre staff is falling. Actually the opposite is the case. Employment in the sector continues to grow and the first thing you notice in a contact centre is not the technology, it's the people. They are a fantastic resource that create the amazing buzz of contact centres. Managing large amounts of people, especially large amounts of young people can be challenging. This writer has experienced amazing behaviour, at one extreme an empowered advisor leaving the contact centre, drawing personal money from an ATM, driving to an airport and giving the money to a distressed customer who had called regarding a lost ATM card, before getting onto a flight. At the other extreme, advisors selling drugs to each other in company time, using the company intranet. From the good to the bad, people are everywhere in contact centres and the successful management of this resource means the difference between great performance (and great service) and indifferent performance (and poor service).

Implant Managers

The other day I saw a great ad on the side of a telephone box. Katie Price, aka Jordan, is advertising new children's books. Before I go any further, I want to say hats off to her for doing something worthy and this is not a "kick the bimbo" joke, however, the agency responsible for the ad have photographed her from the waist up (that's an important point in this story - get a picture into your mind) holding two books above her head. The text in the ad (copy to anyone in the marketing industry) reads: "Katie Price's New Ponies". I mean, really. The "ponies" are the books, however, given her track record with implants and the shot used in the ad, it's not a huge jump to take a second meaning from the ad.

Implant Managers in contact centres does not involve any surgery. Thankfully. Implant managers are representatives of the brand that the contact centre is handling calls for, where the calls are taken by an outsourcer - a specialist organisation that runs contact centres on behalf of one or more brands. Often, brands place managers into the contact centres of their outsource partners to provide in situ advice, guidance, escalation and direction. This is especially true of complex projects, high profile projects or projects undergoing a large degree of change. The implant manager might be there full time or part time, for a bedding-in period, during new product launches or full time. Some projects may demand a team of representatives to work onsite with the outsourcer for an extended period of time.

Over time, implant managers start to become part of the team but the start of the relationship can be uneasy. Outsourcers tend to have two views on implant managers. Firstly, that they are the spawn of the devil and are there to spy on the operation, interfere with matters nothing to do with them and generally bend contact centre managers out of shape. Another, perhaps more healthy, view is that implant managers are a sign of committment form the client and that their presence is a fantastic opertunity to learn more about the client (if you're smart about it, political stuff not just product and process stuff). The implant manager is there to help improve outcomes, for customers, the project, and the outsourcer. Having worked with large, demanding clients in a previous life, I have had the pleasure of working with two particularly fine implant managers and one complete nutter. To be fair, I've worked in contact centres with a couple of certifiable people, one hard case from a client in ten years of working with implant managers is not bad. Later in the book I will talk about one of the certifiable staff we employed and how a mad and dangerous person slipped through a very strict selection process. But for now, back to implant managers. It is important for the contact centre manager to realise that implant managers have to be managed and that whilst openness is fine, there need to be some rules about access and dealing with staff. If an implant manager starts to comment on individual staff member suitability, watch out. Trouble brewing.

Five tips for implant managers

Be humble - you have power, don't be obvious about, everyone just thinks your a git or desparately insecure if you wield power

Request information sufficient to ensure the SLA is on track but no more. The outsourcer has resourced the campaign to the requirements of the SLA and no more. IF you want more, review the SLA and allow the outsourcer to propose new resources. Some flexibility on both sides is, of course, helpful and expected in a postive working relationship, but don't take advantage of any flexibility shown

Be a champion for the project - manage issues, communicate success, demonstrate capability. The outsourcer will jump through hoops for you if you help their PR, consistent with delivery on the SLA

Meet the staff. The only way to really understand a contact centre, the only way, is to listen to calls, observe transactions, talk to advisors. Doubt anyone who visits, doesn't listen to calls and then offers opinion. Consistent with driving the SLA, if you observe any glitches in service from the wider organisation that impacts on your project, communicate this back to the organisation and find out if it is slated for development, etc. Feedback on stuff like this is likely to improve your relationship with the advisors. Get to know them but don't tell them how to do their job, refer concerns to the programme manager or training manager, and avoid being personal. Refer to transaction handling rather than people wherever possible

When socialising with staff from the outsourcer, try to be the first to put their hand in their pocket. Don't accept hospitality beyond reasonable business activities. Remain professional and honest. And never, ever, ever get involved, er, romantically with a member of staff from the outsourcer. There is zero discretion in a large contact centre and EVERYONE will know by 9.05 the next day.

Five tips for working with implant managers

Be open - this is your best opportunity to understand what's really going on and to shape the client's view of your business

Don't hide things about the operation of your client's business - if it comes out later and you didn't disclose it, the shit will most definately hit the fan

Disclose sensible. Don't blurt out "WE LOST SOME DATA". Make sure you understand the dimensions of the error - did it definately take place? what is the impact? is it customer visible? and make sure you know what rectification will take place and what you can learn to avoid it happening again?

Follow-up - don't leave any issues outstanding, get them aired, onto a schedule and traffic them as you would any other items on your to do list. Make sure any committments made and followed through, and that they are notes as dealt with. Arrange regular meetings, daily catch-up, weekly planning, monthly review, etc. and avoid dealing for every run of the mill incident contempraneously otherwise you will bend yourself and your managers out of shape

Create some ground rules for day to day engagement - systems access, bringing other staff to site, talking to advisors (talking is fine, telling is not)

Recruit from Within

The first time that I promoted someone within the business to a senior position, I hadn't thought that it was a big deal. We have an opening, this person is capable and keen, let's do it. My boss at the time, a strange little man what we reffered to as NWTTP, was of the opinion that we should bring someone in from outside but time was an issue so we went with the internal choice. It turned out to be a great move, which NWTTP acknowledged. What happened, the really cool thing that happened was the effect on other staff of seeing "good career prospects" in action. Easy to say at interview but harder to do. In contact centres, there is always going to be a degree of staff attrition (and this is not a negative, unless you have 10% of staff leaving each month) and later in this chapter I'll talk more about retention and attrition. By demonstrating that forward career progress is possible, general staff attitudes got a bump up. Progressively, we moved to skill-up more and more advisors and when team leader, coach, trainer, super-agent positions came up, we actively encouraged progress. In another firm, we had a data entry temp who became one of our lead developers over a period of about seven years. I can tell you that this creates HUGE loyalty and buy-in. ISSUES TO DISCUSS: Since attrition is real, promotion oppotunities regularly come up. Dealing with changing team formats is never easy. Giving people new skills can take time. Moving from a colleague to supervisor can be a strange transition.

Dealing with Change

Keep on Rocking in the Free World – Neil Young

The contact centre is generally a place of change – new products to talk about, new campaigns, new offers, etc etc. These “slipstream” events roll into the day to day operations plan without worry. The changes that cause difficulty are things like legislative/regulatory changes, major systems changes, team structure changes, major role changes (adding a sales element into a service based team, for example). All change types deserve special attention as each has its own dynamic.

At a really fundamental level, people resist change. Not because we are against the elements contained within one particular change programme, but because we are not good at handling uncertainty and ambiguity. Despite seeking diversity and creativity in working roles (in addition to money, obviously), we get used to working within boundaries. The boundary creates a safe environment within which we can learn the role, develop relationships with those around us and relax into our job. It’s one less thing to worry about. Developments which affect these boundaries, this state of harmony that we have achieved, tend to generate an emotional respose. That’s the root of the problem. Our disaffection with change is not because we don’t like the layout of a new computer screen, or we don’t like the features of a new product (though our objection to change may manifest itself as “feature disappointment”). Change causes an illogical, emotional response. Few are the workers who shout “Yipee, my role is changing again, how exciting!”

Five signs that emotional responses are likely

The project committee have not visited the contact centre

Terms of Reference have been written with little or no input by anyone in the contact centre

There is a history of tough (i.e. failed) change programmes

There is more than one project sponsor

There are more than three objectives for the change, or that the objectives do not relate to contact centre outcomes - i.e. the benefits lie elsewhere but the pain resides in the contact centre

Because it is usually imposed (rather than evolved from the team), it is usually controlled (an external manager/team has been recruited) and information about drivers for the change and impacts of the change have already been decided, change is something that we set ourselves up to cope with rather than jump on board with.

Change is usually presented to us rather than something that we participate in from the start. This is different to how many other things in our lives work. Don’t like your house, start decorating. House too small, move house. Fed up with being unfit, join a gym. Any of these situations can turn out to be stressful, but it’s a different kind of stress. This is stress that we are initiating and we are active participants in the whole of the process. Organisational change is not like that. Organisational change is often something that has been decided elsewhere and is being imposed on us. The boundaries of our role, our work environment are under threat. That’s why we kick-off defensively when confronted by it. The change may turn out to be positive and enhance our working environment. It may create new learning opportunities or new skills to be acquired that will lead to a better paying role. But all of that is a dim, distant flicker of a light, like next summer’s holidays when you go back to school in September. Right now, when the change is announced it’s a potential threat and we treat it as such.

So objections to change are generally emotionally based but often articulated in semi-positive manner – “the customers may not take to it”, “it’s quite complicated to communicate on the phone”, “I don’t understand the new system, can we get more training”. All of these are most commonly disguised fears coming to the surface. Sensibly people don’t run around screaming “they’re changing the systems again, run for your lives” and so they embed their fears into comments on features of the change. Rather than diving for cover when their boundaries come under threat, staff are more savvy and know, pretty much, any fool who screams “THIS IS SHIT” is not likely to make forward progress come bonus time. So the fears, the uncertainty come out in a different way. And that usually is negativity attached to one or more features of the change programme. This can be quite sophisticated and often take on at least a veneer or credibility about protecting the organisation and seeking only to ensure that the change programme is successful (“whilst vital, it is important that it’s done right”). Examples of this can be using very complex exceptionals to see how the new process copes and if the change architect has not thought of that particular exception, suggest deeper flaws in the programme or another classic is linking – this is where a dependency is created betweeen the current approach and other departments / divisions / processes / suppliers etc and indicating how difficult this change may be on these players if the change goes ahead. In a technical environment, change can be especially hard as there is the extra test of Keeping the Show on the Road – kind of like changing a tyre whilst you’re driving down the motorway – keeping the current plates spinning is a reason to delay / weaken / circumvent change programmes. Finally, there is the dear old customer. What will this really do for them. If the case is not proven, expect trouble at mill.

It is important to stress that in a contact centre, people are not being obstructive just because they don’t like you. You must understand that psychology of what’s going on and understand the difference between change that we initiate ourselves and change which we have little or no control over that impacts upon us. The contract between employer and contact centre staff may state “and other duties that your manager may require from time to time” but this means nothing for those affected by change.

Negative comments or actions from contact centre staff are designed to delay and obstruct the installation, to give more time, to cling to the status quo for longer. They have not seen a compelling picture of a better future and consequently their emotional response is taking over. It should be clear that if this is happening in your organisation, you’ve got a problem. The root to solve this problem is two-fold. Firstly to address the feature objections and manage concerns through workshops, demonstrations, consultation sessions, though, let’s be honest, that horse has long since bolted past a wide open stable door. And that leads to the second thing you can do: learn from this episode and embed consultation into the very first phases of future projects.

Presenting details of a change programme is what some managers think is “communication”, having heard that the secret of change management is good communication. These people are, of course, wrong, the secret of change management is “no change”. If you must have change then separate change into mandatory and development. Mandatory is stuff like, reduce costs or we go out of business, or dealing with a legislative change that requires immediate action. Development change is process improvement, evolving positioning, offers, technology, services to provide some additional novelty, functionality, efficiency or other benefit that can be delivered to customers, donors, voters or whoever your organisation’s community is.

Five tips for Initiating Change in the Contact Centre

Be humble

Listen to calls with the team, rather than from recordings, remotely

Get advisors and team leaders involved early

If the benefit is for another business area, say, shipping or business decision making, articulate the change in contact centre terms and not in shipping terms - rather than "improving address quality for shipping manifests", use "how do we lift our data quality levels"

Don't impose, consult

What is “No-Change” Change?

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change, Dan Quayle

No-change is the state of continual evolution. Of developing an environment where product changes, intranet content, customer types, system upgrades, role changes can all be slip-streamed into the teams in a positive, ongoing way without creating an emotional response. If consultation is a constant and a means of the organisation truly listening to what customers are saying (and contact centre advisors really do have something big to contribute there), then it is less likely to be an event, something out of the normal, but rather just part of the fabric of the contact centre.

To the JFDI consultant, consultation is an inconvenient stage that delays and discolours their otherwise perfect picture of the how the project rolls out. However, consultation (and lots of it) is actually a fantastic solution to project delays and can really sharpen the detail of the plan. Result of consultation: improved project outcomes.

How do you design consultation in? Well, the first thing is not to make change an event. Try to embed change into the regular operations plan for the contact centre. Rotating people between teams, cross training, varying shifts, exposing people to new systems to learn, etc. Try not to talk of a “change” at all. Some changes are mandatory – e.g. legislative changes that impact your industry or impact all organisations, for example, changes to data protection legislation. In that case, everyone has to get on with it, but usually with legislation you get plenty of advance notice. Get the teams involved in designing solutions – no group of advisors when consulted regularly ever suggest process steps or systems changes that make their life harder. They go for shortcuts, straight lines, no hand-offs, more autonomy – usually things associated with improved outcomes for customers. And if bonuses are tied to improved outcomes for customers, it’s a fair bet that advisors will pretty quickly figure out how to speed up processes. There has to be processing speed balanced with compliance (but how about that being another dimension of the bonus calculation). Bonuses are all about rewarding the real outcomes you want, not the simple outcomes that are easy to measure – time on systems, calls handled, etc.

Advisors therefore can be a great resource for figuring out solutions to obstacles. However, when you start the consultation process, you can open the flood-gates. Then you end up with seven hundred suggested system changes that will take three years to make and generate negligible value. You have to balance consultation with contributing to outcomes. Advisors can be involved in this if they have all of the dimensions of a problem, but often they don’t. But if they know that there are four things that need to change, there are 50 days of systems development resource, what is the best use of those days to improve, say, product uptake rates and reduce the number of calls that cannot be answered at the first point of presentation. If bonuses are oriented towards these factors, consideration of solutions will tend toward the practical and the effective rather than the interesting but uneconomic.

Who should run change? Well again the trick here is not to make change an event. Don’t have something that people say, oh no, here we go with another team of consultants asking dumb questions, listening the four calls then thinking they know the job. Better to embed a change dimension to staff roles, such as trainers, supervisors, managers. Some specialist help may be required, but consultants dropped in from above are about as welcome as a fart in a space suit, as Billy Connelly observed. Taking the change event off the table and making team structures and activities focus on changing process elements, such as updating training materials, documenting and distributing short-cuts, improvements, etc. can lead to an environment that is comfortable with change (or as comfortable as people that are emotional can be). There are so many solutions for self-publishing now – team based solutions such as wikis can be a fantastic resource if they are seeded and regularly used and updated.

Embeding change practice does not mean change for change sake, but if there is new content around the service/product offer then get that shared on a regular basis. This is easier for contact centres that operate in content rich environments, e.g. publishing, telecommunications, tourism, healthcare, etc. but if you are imaginative, you can always find content even in static environments such as utilities (developments in renewables, examples of sustainability, new initiatives for power transmission, even updated TV advertising or TV content that reflects concerns/developments in that industry. Having daily briefings is a great opportunity to share ideas and getting the team focused on change, as a background concept, an ever-present factor in modern business.

If you need to do big change, get some project management expertise. However, don’t fall into the trap of many organisations – getting project managers to do the work of managers. This writer recently experienced a very large technology function in a global banking organisation where project managers (nearing 1000 at the last count) were being asked to manage better use of existing software tools. Not looking for which software tools the organisation could invest in to best address a need, they had all the tools but were not using them a) consistently and b) to their potential. This is absolutely not a project management issue. This is a management issue.

Motivation - The M Word

I saw a trade advert by a contact centre outsourcer showing two attractive young people in a hot, distant land looking all relaxed, tanned and happy. The perfect picture of a summer holiday. The advert was designed to position the outsourcer as an informed supplier, taking time to understand their client requirements by sending their staff to directly experience the product that the contact centre is supporting (in this case a holiday company). The idea is great – the better staff know the product or service, the more they can relate to how actual customers will feel. Honda similarly insist that contact centre staff experience their new vehicles so that they can engage more positively and knowledgeably with customers.

Getting to test drive a new car is likely to greatly overcome any boredom with day to day operations. However, having advisors test drive cars each and every day is unlikely to generate positive outcomes for customers. It’s easy to create involving one-offs. Roadshows, product launches, special training blitzes, etc. But what do you do the day after? Well, the answer to that is complex and does not mean that the roadshow is a bad idea. Motivation in contact centres is not a value that can keep on rising (but it can certainly keep falling). The way to view it, is about maintaining motivation at a level which generates positive customer outcomes at a sensisble economic level. In that light, 100% customer satisfaction, zero leavers and 100% attendance are not the goals. 100% customer satisfaction is impossible to achieve (and that way lies madness), some attrition can be a good thing (see next section) and a small amount of absence will be easily catered for by the daily resource plan. If money is not restricted then every call can be answered within 15 seconds, and advisors handsomely remunerated so that every conversation is a complete pleasure, like a chat with a new friend with no limits on their resourcefulness, alacrity and downright happiness. However, money is a scarce resource, and in times of scarcity, rationing is present. That means, accepting that 90% of calls answered in 20 seconds is good enough and losing 1% of calls is acceptable. The rationale for this statement is a cold hard look at the economics of answering that last 1% of calls – it requires a huge increase on staffing, disproportionate to the benefit that answering the calls brings. No organisation sets out to lose any calls, however, if you want your advisors operating at more than 40% efficiency, then you will compromise somewhere. Economics will dictate to what extent to ration “telephone handling resource”. You want advisors to be busy (but not frantic) most of the time. What does that mean in practical terms? Well, something like 35 to 50 minutes of talk time per hour. Any more than that and you will break your advisors (and probably employment laws) less than 35 minutes and they will get bored.

Most certainly run roadshows, introduce new products to the team, get their opinions, give them samples but don’t expect a long run pickup in motivation levels (however you measure that, and a proxy is best – customer satisfaction levels, first call handling %age, etc. as “motivation” itself is impossible to measure). It’s like running sales promotions for a grocery brand’s market share. The promotion gives the product a bump in its category but after the promotion, the brand returns to it’s long run market share level. Same with advisors, regardless of how much effort goes into “Pizza Madness Friday”, don’t expect the gain to last much past the following Tuesday once advisors have had two full shifts of dealing with awkward customers. That’s life. The idea is to keep things going. To keep the show on the road. To give enough variety, often enough (but not too often – economics! And you must be able to establish that people are there to do a job and that specials are just that, special. Not part of the day to day). Mixing up motivation events is best:

Mixing scheduled and unscheduled stuff

Mixing directly work related and team fun related

Mixing money (and proxies – gift vouchers, for example) and non-money rewards (time off works VERY well)

Mixing media – video, tactile (if the product supports that), presentations, find out by doing, etc.

Motivation is not something that people can rate themselves on a one to ten scale. Motivation is a state of mind and you either are or are not. Trying to measure motivation is like trying to read tea leaves. Motivation is easy to recognise. Staff that are motivated behave in ways that are common between all motivated staff - they have an inner smile and this presents itself as positive behaviour like ethusiasm, encouragement to others, flexibility, eager for learning, innovation and high productivity. Clearly these are positive attributes to have in a customer service environment and anything that helps to give people a sense of motivation is to be encouraged. Good pay might do it. A great environment might be do it. There are many aspects but one of the most important is being part of a team.

A Sense of Team

Of all the hackneyed sports team manager expressions - "a game of two halves", "at the end of the day" and "losing two early goals was not in the plan", the one that is useful here is "I wouldn't want to single out any one individual, it was a team performance". Quite. Teams made up of superstars perform well only if the superstars perform as a team. Poorly organised stars come second to well coached and disciplined average players who cooperate as a team. In the contact centre, teams are a vital structure. Both in terms of structure for communication and organisation and more importantly as a unit that staff can associate with and feel a sense of belonging. Carson McCullers book "The Member of the Wedding" talks of a need to belong. Important for a 12-year old, it's vital for advisors. Contact centre performance depends on teams working well. Good team dynamics can create very positive outcomes: reduced absence, longer tenure, higher customer service ratings, whereas poor team dynamics are linked to poor service levels, poor attendance and higher attrition. It cannot be emphasised enough how important creating and mainting a sense of team is to individual and group performance.

Maintaining Motivation over the Long Term

If we accept that everyday cannot be a special surprise day, how do you keep motivation going along (not increasing, but not falling either). This is down to the following factors:

Team and a shared sense of purpose

Work diversity and autonomy

Rewards

Stability and Advancement

With one out of these four working, motivation is unlikely to be high, but with three out of four working, motivation is likely to be high. Remember, motivation is not something that can be directly measured. It's not like taking someone's temperature, you have to look at proxies - outcomes that are affected but the level of motivation in the centre, for example, absence, service levels, etc. The better the organisation performs on these four factors, the better the motivation is likely to be. For example, staff may work in a great team and feel secure in their role but if the role is stultifyingly dull and the rewards are poor, don't be surprised if motivation is not as high as you would wish. I've lost count of the number of times my ex-colleague Nick Price said to clients who had complained about staff attrition: "When you recruit for your call centre you are looking for interesting, intelligent people who are good at getting on with customers, get a sense of achievement from helping people and then you put them in a tightly controlled environment and ask them to repeat the same task ten times an hour, seven days a week. What did you expect would happen?" This is the dilemma of recruiting for contact centres - if you find sparky people who are good to talk to on the phone, they probably don't want to operate in a restrictive environment. The trick is to bring the four quadrants together and normalise wide variations between, say, rewards and autonomy. Giving people the ability to take some control of their environment, giving them variety, ensuring that there is little or no insecurity over their position, giving scope for developing their career, being able to earn a fair return for their efforts and letting them work within a fun team that promotes individual efforts, shares team success (and failure) and has a strong sense of purpose. That's what it takes. Oh, and if it's a shitty office to work in, you have make an effort to really clean up and make everything work. Environmental factors don't improve motivation but they sure can hurt it. If you have all of this you are on the road to a fantastic contact centre.

Super Agents! Subject Matter Experts and escalation

Subject Matter Experts are not the geeky kids that get kicked around at break by the cool kids. They are people how have a degree of specialisation in a complex environment. Typically, 80% of queries that present in a service environment are represented by 20% of the different query types. In some environments, e.g. financial services, travel, technical support, the 20% can have a very long tail with some very complex queries that are unusual and in a large contact centre a typical advisor will not encounter these queries sufficiently frequently to be competent at answering them. This is where Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) come in. They take the complex situations, either through escalation from a colleague or directly from an IVR/ACD queue or perhaps from a dialled number uniquely identified for particular queries. The organisation of SMEs can be very formal - 1st, 2nd and 3rd line support is a particularly formal method of maximising the return on expert knowledge in a support environment. Here, the 1st line support advisors are there to handle the simpler (but no less worthy) queries that come in and act as a filter / information gathering point for 2nd line support. The 2nd line support team would typically be smaller than 1st line and may be geographically remote, perhaps run out of a separate organisation (1st line outsourced, 2nd and 3rd done in-house). In less formal environments, SMEs may be a team resource or may be a floor resource with several advisors being an SME on different topics. The advisor management system has a list of skills matched to logged-in and available advisors which makes it easy to facilitate the escalation.

A lessons learned database, either as a wiki, intranet, knowledge base, ops manual, whatever, is a fundamental resource for SMEs and to operationalise knoweldge to streamling and push more and more queries out to more and more advisors (many reasons for this - more expertise across the floor means more chance of a customer call finding someone able to answer the call and also for the advisors it means more diversity in the role and as an organisation, it is learning and these learnings can be structured into training for new starts so that performance has a good chance of improving over time).

Matching Staff to Projects

Recruiting for secure positions

Attrition can be a good thing

Introducing Management from External Source

What can you tell from a recruitment ad for advisors?

Chapter 3: Delivering on Promises

Remember Johnny Rotten? John Joseph Lydon, lead singer of the Sex Pistols, and later Public Image Limited. Of course you remember Johnny Rotten. One thing you may not know, Mr Lydon closed the last ever Sex Pistols concert, in San Francisco with the phrase, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" Quite sublime. What a great phrase, and links neatly to the reaction many people must have when service goes bad. Thankfully, contact centres are generally pretty reliable and service failure does not actually occur that often. Sometimes outcomes as defined by the contact centre manager may be different to that defined by customers. For example, if a customer asks a bank for a larger overdraft but credit rules cause the request to be knocked back, that can't be the fault of the contact centre. Don't shoot the messenger. But the customer wants to do just that. This is an asymmetric view of the same data and is probably irreconcilable.

Contact centres are very much part of the connected enterprise and integration with other divisions is essential to effective service delivery. Often promises made in the contact centre are delivered elsewhere. Advisors need to have confidence that a promise made is a promise delivered. How do you make this happen? What are the short and long term problems if this connection fails?

Compliance

Quality Assurance

Back Office linkage

Regular Data Feeds

Reporting to the Business

2007-06-07T17:29:00.002Z

SATSE: Part 2: Customer Experience Management

Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories - those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost. - Russell Baker

Regardless of the purpose of a contact centre project, be it selling subscriptions, helping patients to diagnose an illness and potentially escalate to hospital, increasing credit card balance or checking if a vehicle is ready to collect after a service, the customer experience is paramount. A poor experience for the customer usually results in poor outcomes for the organisation. Poor outcomes can be longer call durations, lower sales, more complaints, higher levels of re-calls, whatever. It's often a vicious circle - poor service delivery leads to inefficiency which leads to lost calls & recalls which leads to more load which leads to even lower service. This leads to frustration for both customers and advisors. On the other hand, if the experience is good, outcomes tend to follow. This improves the experience for customers and advisors and the metrics just keep getting better. How do you ensure your centre does more of the latter and less of the former?

Chapter 4: Serving for Success

A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat - P J O'Rourke

All contact centres provide a service. It may not always be smooth, but service is at the heart of all operations. Success in service delivery means different things to different people. For example, in the case study that follows, success for a Redundancy Helpline is not about "average handle times", "first call resolution" or other efficiency based metrics, it's about high level customer outcomes - number of customers re-employed within 90 days. In that kind of environment the government agency sponsoring the activity is more interested in the contact centre's contribution to higher goals and success depends on the extent to which the contact centre meets those goals. For another application, say in a busy travel agency or holiday company, at certain times of the year, there will be large peaks in call traffic and managing the scare resource (advisor time) is paramount - delivering the very best advice as efficiently as possible. A key metric here might be what percentage of customers can be persuaded to "self-care" on an extranet during busy times without impacting average order values, for example. Success, therefore, is a factor of your situation and this chapter will look at practical steps that can be taken for success, however you measure it.

Complaint handling

Stultifying standards-based approach - if it says 72 hours, we're bloody well going to take 72 hours - that's NOT service

Customer Selection - why it's right to deliver different service levels to different customers

Staff rewards

Self service augmentation and promotion to customers

Chapter 5: Content Personalisation

Sometimes it can be hard to just keep things running smoothly (see chapter eight for the challenges of Keeping the Show on the Road) but in today's marketplace, personalisation is one of the keys to service differetiation (along with service excellence and innovation). Serving out the same experience to each customer is simply not good enough any more. Customers are different. Each one has differing needs of your business (and contact centre) and represent different levels of value to your brand. Treating everyone the same is a poor marketing decision and a poor commercial decision. Without knowing in advance what will cause individual customers will call, how do you personalise the service? If ten customers are waiting in a queue, who should you serve first? The answers to these questions can be surprising and customer insight can allow quicker service delivery whilst improving customisation.

Personalisation as a source of differentiation

Commercial rationalisation

Using one channel's results to feed another channel's activity

What to personalise?

Chapter 6: Segmentation and Targeting

In God we trust, all others bring data, W. Edwards Deming

A key facet of any direct marketing strategy is segmenting customers into discrete groups that can be separately identified. For example, in a mobile phone company, one group might be contract consumers who spend more than £100 per month, or pre-pay customers who send more than 400 texts per month and have more than 12 people in their calling circle (number of discrete people they call regularly). You can attribute customers to groups (or segments) simply, by taking one dimension of customer data say, average monthly spend and ranking from low to high, then, split into ten groups, either by volume or value (deciles) to give ten segments that can be tracked and measured. Perhaps a more useful (but more complex) tool is clustering to identify a series of variables (spend, length of tenure, location, age, acquisition source, for example) and determine customers who are alike across a basket of different attributes. Whichever method is chosen (and we will discuss segmentation in more detail later) it gives a basis for starting to target different groups of customers with different offers or routing different customers into different service streams.

Chapter 7: Is There a Relationship at the Heart of CRM?

One of the great delusions in marketing, in fact probably the absolute greatest delusion in corporate communications, is Customer Relationship Marketing. CRM has been used to justify all kinds of nonsense in the past and to delude marketing managers across the world that they have a "relationship" with their customers. Bollocks. Unless you run a corner shop in a small rural village and you know every customer by name, you don't have a relationship with customers, you have a series of transactions. Customers just don't think of a series of transactions as a relationship. A relationship is two-way mutually giving - mother to daughter, friend to friend, but what we have with brands is one-way service delivery. For a very small number of brands, think Nike or Playstation, for instance, some consumers may value the brand association as something special and worthy and valuable and cool. If Harley Davidson can create an image for a community of customers that is powerful enough for these people to revere the brand and even carry the brand logo onto items of clothing that didn't originally carry the brand, or even tattoo the brand onto themselves, they have achieved a status to their community that few brands can match. Anyone seen a customer proudly showing an MBNA tattoo or sewing a Persil logo onto a favourite t-shirt? No, thought not. CRM needs to be handled very carefully and the advice of this author is to remove the troublesome work "relationship" and label the task honestly for what it is, Customer Management.

With Relationship out of the way, we can start to discuss honestly some of the weird facts around managing customers - your most loyal customers are likely to be either the lowest spending, or spend an equal or higher amount with a category competitor. Later in this chapter we will look at how achieving your service objectives can be efficiently accomplished whilst providing a great service to the majority of customers. Note, the last sentance particularly does not say "all" customers. I will return to this later.

For not-for-profit contact centres, CRM was always a strange word to use (although the components - databases, analytics, communications management, customer modeling, and others have real value) as their outcomes are measured in very different terms to commercial contact centres. Health care authorities, for instance use a concept of Quality Adjusted Life Years, which essentially is a way of allocating scarce resources (money for hospital beds, drugs, surgical interventions, extended term care, etc) to cases that are most deserving with certain minimum limits on provision. Or take charities, where fundraising is important and aspects of a commercial approach will be present - you want to raise as much money for the minimum outlay - however, the dynamics might be different, for instance if your centre is staffed with volunteers.

This chapter is not about me railing against CRM vendors, far from it, CRM applications and technology can be tremendously helpful in delivering great service. This chapter is about what really works in a live environment and how customers just don't view their transactions as a relationship. And as contact centre or marketing processionals, neither should we.

Consider your personal dealings with your bank. Is that a relationship? It's certainly not like a relationship with a friend or family member. Try this test: Dear Bank, I have banked with you for four years and never gone over my overdraft limit, now I've lost my job and I'm sure I'll get a new one in two months or so, please lend me £10,000 to cover my expenses till then. What response will your loyalty get you? No way, that's the response you'll get and fool if you think you'll get anything else! The bank's not here to support you, to protect you, they exist purely and simply to profit from you whilst they deliver a service. They are not interested in taking a risk on you getting a job. And why would they! For sure banks can improve their customer handling and realise that they are merely shops for money, but they are still shops - you wouldn't go to Tesco and ask for two months of groceries and I'll pay you back when I get a job. Similarly, don't expect that from your bank. Your "loyalty" in the past is not a factor in their decision making. The sooner we all realise this, the better. Banks absolutely correctly will lay out the terms under which they wish to do business - we may not like it, but hey, deal with it. Just, don't call it a relationship.

At These Prices, Everyone Needs Toner

In the late 19th century Evanston, Illinois, nicknamed "Heavenston" by Frances Willard, was a Methodist-minded town, so pious that the town fathers, resenting the dissipating influence of the soda fountain, passed an ordinance forbidding the sale of ice cream sodas on Sunday. Some ingenious confectioners, obeying the law, served ice cream with syrup but no soda. This sodaless soda was the Sunday soda, and became so popular that orders for "Sundays" crossed the counter everyday of the week. When objection was raised to christening the dish after the Sabbath, the spelling was changed to Sundae, and so developed one of America's most characteristic dishes. - William Lyon Phelps

In many converstations with customers, the advisor has an objective that involves extracting something from a customer - usually money, information or a committment. Sometimes the customer will comply directly. Other times not. A key influencer is: Does the customer accept the basis for the call? If not, success is a long way away.

Not all objections are created equally. Often an objection is actually a delaying tactic or a way of not dealing with the truth. Example: Advisor:"Would like to buy one of our widgets?", response: "I don't use the widget anymore". This may be the case, but for the customer it's an easy way to close off this line of questioning (or so they think)

In an episode of Friends, Pfeobe takes a job as a tele-marketer selling Toner to office supply managers. On her first call she gets an objection to her offer of Toner - "I don't need any Toner" comes the reply. "At these prices, everyone needs Toner", says Pfeobe. The customer then responds "I don't need any because I'm going to kill myself today". To great comic effect, Pfeobe then looks in her script for the "overcoming the sucicide excuse" section. Clearly none exists, but this is not unlike how sales calls proceed.

Designing responses to objections

Rebuttals is the term sometimes used for a response to a customer objection. "It's too expensive" - "ah but we have an easy payment installment plan". The skill in designing rebuttals is to understand the buy process and how customers typically experience the product. Usually the 80:20 rule applies, where 80% of objections will be clustered into 20% of the reasons, so you get some that come up time and again and some that are uncommon. Price is often a big objection. The manner of the advisor is key to gaining customer committment and overcoming objections.

The Idea Behind CRM

What Relationships mean to Customers

Customers never see themselves in a relationship with a bank

Customers might see themselves in a relationship with Harley Davidson, but few other brands qualify - test #1 How many customers have Capital One tattooed on their shoulder?

Sensibly using CRM to make the operation effective and commercially viable

Sensibly using CRM to delivery a customer experience that encourages more of the outcomes you want

Understand exactly who you are set up to deliver a great service to

2007-06-07T17:29:00.001Z

SATSE: Part 3: Keeping the Show on the Road

When the lights go out in a contact centre it can be very bad news for the entire organisation. For example, imagine a Live TV Fundraiser, what happens to donations if the contact centre systems fall over? Advisors being left to tell customers "Sorry, our systems are down, can you call back" is hardly satisfactory. What if you can't even get through to an advisor? Contact centres are so fiendishly complex that failure can happen at many points - telephone lines, database systems, commercial power supply, back-office systems, building security systems, etc. etc. Many of these items can be duplicated or beefed up for resilience, so for example, you can run your database on a cluster of servers so if one server fails, the cluster remains viable and service continues. Similarly, the telephone lines (more likely digital fibre links) can be duplicated to take separate routes into a building, from different "points of presence" on the supplier network and be configured for network level resilience. For small contact centres, the services available for redundancy and continuity are more sophisticated than you might expect and don't have to cost the earth. The key to Keeping the Show on the Road is good planning. This section expands on "planning" to key steps to take to ensure that the customer experience is consistently good.

Chapter 8: Technology

Here's an example of why technology is great. I'm writing this, May 30th 2007 and I get a rollover on my RSS feed panel from Google Desktop that catches my eye. It's a note from Bloomberg - "Wayward California Whales May Have Ret...". I'm intrigued. At the time of writing this was published some 27 minutes previously. So I click through and right there is this fantastic story of a 45-foot humpback whale and her 25-foot calf who have drifted 70 miles off course on their spring migration to Alaska. On the US Pacific coast, heading north, the whales got as far as San Francisco, decided to turn 90 degrees right and enter San Francisco bay and head up the Sacramento river to the Port of Sacramento. I'm not making this up, (see http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aGxLoaddlZoM&refer=us) but it gets better. I quote directly from the article:

"By May 20, they had reached a dead end at the Port of Sacramento, northeast of San Francisco. They turned downriver, then spent more than a week stalled in the fresh water. Their unwillingness to head back to the Pacific frustrated rescuers, who tried to drive the whales homeward.

Scientists fired on the whales with water cannons, played sound recordings of an Orca feeding on a whale and even car- alarm noise to try to force them toward the ocean. Eventually, the whales headed downriver on their own."

So far, so good, but what's this got to do with technology? Well the article continues:

"During the rescue effort, more than 2,600 suggestions from the public poured into a special e-mail account set up by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

One e-mail suggested using helicopters to harass the animals downriver, while another proposed building a fake whale with an outboard motor to lead them to the Pacific. A Navy dolphin squad might be able to guide the whales home, according to one e-mail. And a psychic asked to read the whales' minds."

"Building a fake whale with an outboard motor". You can't make this stuff up. Bernadette Fees, a deputy director with the California Department of Fish and Game said "There have been some real interesting folks who've contacted us." Oh yes indeed Bernadette. My point is, whales go off track, a government agency gets 2,600 emails with suggestions, it's picked up by Bloomberg and I'm reading it 27 minutes after publication, one-third of the way round the globe. Never has there been a time in history when so much was available to so many, for such little effort. Want to see photos of bush fires in California, want to see funny TV ads archived on YouTube, want to make free telephone calls around the globe, ... well, somehow we have engineered a connected world that allows all of this and more. And we don't even bat an eye. It's like, oh yeah, I was on the New York Times website last night reading about ... Amazing what we can access and amazing that we are not stunned by it all. It's not like we've been doing it for 20 years!

So, technology is all around us and most of it, and this is the really clever bit, is slipping into the background - releasing the benefits but hiding the features - just letting us get on with communicating.

In contact centres, an unbelievable amount of technology goes is in play moving voice and data around the centre, screen-popping information from advisor to supervisor in milli-seconds to save us from repeating ourselves. The instant screen pop, moving a screen worth of customer data from advisor to advisor as a call is put on hold and transferred, used to be really clunky. Now it's a click of a mouse. Adviors starting in call centres don't go "WOW, Did you see that!!!!", they just get on with it as one more unremarkable thing the technology can do that helps them get on with their job.

Without technology, contact centres do not exist. It is a technically very advanced environment and providers innovate and upgrade relentlessly. After people, technology is the second largest cost in contact centre and at the establishment of the contact centre, aside from building the contact centre structure, you likley will spend more on technology than anything else.

Technology in contact centres, because of the capability, is necessarily complex. With complexity comes confusion and expense. It is the land of TLAs - Three Letter Acronyms, for example, ACD, CTI, PBX, WTF, what? I made up the last one, but how many people can tell? This section is dedicated to unpeeling onion layers - getting to what is important about technology with the complexity getting in the way.

KTSR

Legacy Integration

CTI, IVR, ACD, Call Recording

Root Cause Analysis - Verint

PBE or Hosting

Chapter 9: Project Management

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future - Yogi Berra

Many times in contact centres, particularly at the start of a new project, the most common project management methodology seems to be JFDI. Not a term from Star Wars lore, but a pithy statement of just getting the job done (use your imagination). Sadly, JFDI whilst useful if you need to get the lifeboats launced, is sub-optimal and leads to great wastage.

Planning in a contact centre might involve many people - marketing proposition teams, retail or field staff, team leaders, technologists, external partners, trainers, etc etc. Something of that magnitude requires more than a to-do list and a winning smile - real discipline is needed, from establishing clear project objectives to being rigerous in setting timescales to proper testing. Skimp at the planning stage and the risks go sharply up. One of my favourite quotes about project management is "I'd rather fail three months into a two year project rather than fail three years into a two year project".

BDUF / Agile

MOSCOW

Involving the right people in the project

Chapter 10: Living with Risk

It doesn't do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations if you live near him - J.R.R. Tolkien

Risk Free doesn't exist. There is always risk. No project in a contact centre is without risk but most risks can be anticipated for, mitigated and used for learning. In that regard, risk can actually be a positive. But what realistically can you do if the power fails? The key to dealing with this risk is to have thought about it before you need to actually deal with it. That's the key to risk management - running through scenarios, creating mechanisms to identify risks (particularly early warning measures), defining communication links for different risk occurences, risk mitigation and recovery and planning best defence for an allowable cost.

It is important to factor in an allowable cost as budget is a scarce resource and allocation of resources in an environment of scarcity always involves compromise. It is no bad thing to understand the difference between coping with 12 hour power outage for £1M or coping with 72 hour power outage for £100M. Your circumstances will determine your investment in risk mitigation & recovery resources.

Successful risk recovery depends absolutely on planning, so that's where we start. Firstly, what kinds of risks might a contact centre face? The risks fall into three categories:

Commercial - is the plan / process economically viable

Operational - is the plan / process efficient

Technical - is the plan / process do-able

For Commercial risks, we are looking at the economic viability, will the planned cost savings be achieved, will the cash flow support the investment, will this create costs elsewhere in the business, is this risk/reward arrangement reasonable?/p>

For Operational risks we are looking at efficiency factors - can we support 24/7 operation, how will service delivery be impacted by a postal strike, how can we maintain service levels with higher staff absence, can we train all advisors before the new release of the new product catalogue?

For Technical risk the underlying capability of machines and processes is being questioned, can we support 200 more users, can access control cope with more home workers without impacting system performance, can a server upgrade happen in core hours, what happens if a router fails?

The David Tortolano Zwanzig Schilling Trick

Quite a few years ago myself and three friends went to a small Austrian ski resort called Neiderau. One member of the party, David Tortolano distinguished himself in two ways: Firstly, eating more bananas than the rest of the party combined, in fact, two or three times as many bananas as the rest of the party and secondly, for a little bit of flirting with a waitress over dinner. It happended like this: At the end of our evening meal, our waitress arrived with the bill and we started counting out our cash. David aggregated the cash and counted out the amount due. He then added into the pile a 20 Schilling note (this was many years prior to the introduction of the Euro) as a kind of tip. I say kind of as it was really a device to have some fun. As he passed the money to the waitress he managed, through sleight of hand to make the 20 Schilling note disappear and then reappear as he ran it through his fingers. Quick as a flash the money is there, then it's not. And then with a winning smile, and if anyone ever had a winning smile, David Tortolano had a belter of a winning smile, teased the young woman to figure out which hand the note was in. Now at this point, the next step is critical. Does the young woman accept the tease and make a guess? The restuarant is pretty quiet so there is no pressure from other tables. She has time. The rest of us, David's cousins Mark and Dana and myself are sat motionless, silent but excited with anticipation. The tension has to be released soon, and it is, as the young woman takes the money minus tip, gives David a withering look and smartly about-turns, leaving David to open his right hand (as I recall) to reveal the note but only to the waitress's back as she cuts through the tables to the bar. David looks shocked. We laugh. Crashed and burned.

And that's the thing with uncertainty, it could have gone the other way. She could have smiled, perhaps guessed where the money was, but she didn't. What could David have done differently to secure a different outcome? Well there may be many ideas, for example, 'don't be making fun of me when I'm working you tourist-pig' might be some advice to try? The thing is, we can never know what it would take for that outcome to be reversed, because you can never live the other line - once a choice has been made, you don't get to see how it would have been if the choice had been different. Sure David can try the Zwanzig Schilling Trick again, on other people, on other nights, and the outcome may be the same or different (rejection and misery or acceptance and fun). But critically, the original event can never be replayed. This is a risk dilema, because there are many opportunities for learning and for improving the chances for future outcomes, but as David will tell you, you can't have time back.

Organisational learning is a process that uses rejections to better inform future decisions. You just have to hope the the learning opportunities don't kill you. It's all very well for a channel swimmer to learn that the distance turns out to be too far for them and get pulled out into the boat crewed by the swimmer's support staff, but what if there's no boat? You've learned something, but it's kind of comming too late to be useful. Fly in your Chardonnay, to say the least. That's way we plan. That's why organisations invest time and effort in scenario planning.

Identifying Risk

Project, Operation, Commercial Risk

Recognising Risk and dealing with it

Business Continuity

Chapter 11: Running a Contact Centre in 137 Easy Steps

This is all about the practical, nitty-gritty detail of running a contact centre, from developing training materials relevant to the process, important points for team briefings, what to listen for when you're listening to calls, developing systems for advisors, how to interpret contact centre metrics, etc.

They say you can never be too thin or too rich. Is Keira Knightley too thin and not rich enough? Who cares, in contact centres, you can never spend too much time developing staff. I know this article looked like it was heading for celebrity-mag territory, which might have been fun (if vacuous), but hey, this is a book about contact centres and some of this content is going to sound dull compared to Paris Hilton selecting a new brand of shoe. The title on the cover should have alerted you to the likely direction. So, staffing a contact centre. Let's she what worthy stuff we can find.

It really is true, you can never spend enough time developing staff. There are several reasons for this. Firstly cross-training. This allows a wider team of people to gain skills to complete a wider range of transactions. Why's that a good thing? Well, for one it gives more resilience so that if customers call with specific questions there is a better chance of finding advisors who can answer correctly. It's also good because the more advisors who are trained across multiple skills, the easier it is to meet service levels as you don't need to worry about ring-fencing resources in case calls come in about a specialist, in times of staff shortage or peak load, you will achieve higher usage rates (and hence more efficiency) as the level of cross-training increases.

Secondly, with today's products and services being increasingly content-led - take mobile phones, 10 years ago there were fewer devices and they could do less. Now there are hundreds of devices, most with cameras, able to view TV, receive email, browse the web. The complexity is increasing and training provides advisors with more current information, enhanced skill and confidence fielding more questions. It's great for confidence becuase it reduces the number of times an advisor needs to check a fact, refer to a colleague, escalate to a supervisor or hand-off to a subject matter expert or another team. These are all drags on efficiency and affect advisor confidence which dirctly translates into service performance.

Thirdly, advisor satisfaction. Holding roadshows, seminars, training, coaching, etc. adds variety and substance to a role and gives confidence that an individual is developing their skills to improve their future job prospects, and to aid them in doing their job better. This creates good outcomes: lower absence, lower shrinkage and longer tenure. Retention of good advisors is so important - the effort and cost it takes to find, recruit, induct and train a new person to the level of a leaver is very expensive. Calculate the full cost in your centre and you will quickly see that advisor retention activities have an incredibly high return on investment. Losing advisors in the three/four month period is particularly expensive as that's the point when they really start to become useful having spent the first 100 days or so learning the job. If they then leave, you've thrown away several thousand pounds - go do the addition yourself. This is often a hidden cost in contact centres.

Fourthly, for service development. Advisors who are used to learning new topics and used to new content, are better at accepting ... new topics and new content, so when you roll out new projects, guess what, teams that regularly get briefings on changes deal with change much easier. A public sector environment where a job changes little in three years is a hard place to introduce change compared to a fast moving centre, all other things being equal. Change is always difficult but if staff resist all changes, then it's really tough. And resistence to change builds up barriers and resentment and creates negative energy in teams. This translates directly into to negative outcomes - longer wrap-up times, higher absence levels, longer wait times for customers, etc. So the more appropriate training, the more engaged the advisors, the easier service management becomes.

For all of these reasons, training is hugely important to improving outcomes. It can be more impactful than a small increase in staff rewards.

Scheduling

Recruitment, Induction, Training, Development & Retention

Team structure

Briefing in Projects

Service Levels - Measurement Performance and hitting targets

Coaching and Performance Management

Knowledge sharing and escalation to Super Agents / SMEs

Maintaining knowledge bases and feeding back to training sessions

What challenges do "no paper, no pens" environments create

2007-06-07T17:28:00.000Z

SATSE: Part 4: Putting it All Together

This part of the book is all about rounding out the customer experience and the operational capability to create an efficient, effective centre that consistently delivers a great service? How would you recognise such a centre? What would you look for? Check five items from the following list:

low staff absence rate

HR too busy doing exit interviews to look at the absence rate

team areas dressed to support their products / roles

acres of desks, each identical and none personalised

staff using intranets, wikis, custom systems to access, gather and distribute new information

advisors competing to see who has the most Post-It notes around their monitors

notice boards covered in recent photos from team activities

notice boards covered in rules and regulations

coaches and trainers delivering training with high quality materials in a smart, comfortable room, separate from the calling floor

advisors checking facts from photocopied materials at their desks

Anyone who selected any of the even numbered options, go to the bottom of the class. Those who selected only odd numbered options, well, that was obvious wasn't it? The thing is it's easy to spot a bad centre but it's actually much harder than stated above to spot a great centre. There is a quote about happy families and sad families - happy families all resemble themselves but unhappy families are miserable for all their own separate reasons. This is like contact centres - good ones resemble each other but bad ones are bad for a hundred different reasons.

One thing you should have picked up from the above list is there's no 'f' in team. Often the problem in bad contact centres is there's no effing team. Being in a team does not mean you belong to a team. Good managers understand this distinction (as it's huge) but poor managers think "you're in my team, act like it and don't let the other team members down". Yes, I understand, but No! Absolutely No.

So, once the team's in place, what else needs to come together. Well only 136 other things!

Chapter 12: The Keys to the Kingdom: Personalisation, Innovation and Excellence

Right, the centre is running well - technology is stable and serving the business processes well, staff absence and attrition are low, transaction volumes are within predicted levels and so service levels are consistently hit. What next? How do you really deliver a fantastic service to customers? It's about where organisations can realistically achieve competitive advantage. In previous ages (as long ago as 1987) competitive advantage could be achieved and sustained through superior distribution, geographic monopolies, single access to sources of production, etc. Largely, these are now gone for most businesses. Unless you own the only banana plantation on an island of people addicted to bananas, that have no nutritional substitutes and where the importation of bananas is prohibited, otherwise it is very likely that the modern world has brought competition, and bunches of it.

Outsourced manufacturing and distribution, easy sourcing from low cost locations, selling not tied to areas close to branches, digitisation of assets, etc, it's now much harder for one business to monopolise a market and in many markets the barriers to entry have been removed. Many companies that sell products, we might call them manufacturers, don't actually own any of the assets responsible for production. They just own the IP, the brand and the distribution channel. These factors have changed economics markedly. Never mind regulation and consumer power. In this environment, there are two main routes you can take - efficiency - become the lowest cost producer and survive on lower margins than your competitors through more efficient operation or take route two: adding value. It is possible to be a low cost producer and add value but it's not possible to be the lowest cost producer and also add value (as you've taken out all extra resource that can be the source of that value to achieve option one).

Adding value can be done in three key ways: Personalisation, Innovation and Excellence.

Chapter 13: Integrated Marketing Communications

There are many people who argue that by creating enough opportunities to see, customers will get the idea and flock to your product. That is one view and it has some value, however, in my opinion, in today's hyper competitive marketplace, repeating yourself is not enough. It's like the old joke of British people on holiday on "The Continent" if the locals don't understand your English, talk louder. Just as no-one goes to "The Continent" anymore, no-one who works in customer communications should credibly propose simply repeating what you just said. Customisation is key and it needs to hang together across channels. Consumers sample a product or service in so many ways, across channels, TV on a mobile device, video from a website, social networking sites, etc. With these communications options, even plain old email is starting look long in the tooth, never mind direct mail or inserts. The simple fact is consumers expect to be able to experience a brand in multiple contexts and if the communications are not integrated, the user can so easily experience something better. Contact centres have a critical role in IMC - allowing dialogue to build across channels and being a key source of new information to be leveraged across others.

Campaign management across channels

Creating a sense of flow across channels

Database Management

Chapter 14: Advanced Customer Management

Ever see Gattaca, the 1997 film starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Jude Law? It's about genetic programming and a society filled with Valids (those with selected DNA and born/created in-vitro) and In-Valids (those without the good DNA and born naturally). The film tests our view on ethics and how far genetics should be used. It's purposfully exagerated in the role of genetics to create optimal human beings. By the way, the name of the film, GATTACA is a a code sequence of DNA using the four letters representing the four DNA nucleotoid bases. So what? Well, Gattaca, though distopian in outlook, crafts a world of excellence through engineering and creates a uniformity in the Valids that is unsettling.

Fortunately, the world we (currently) live in does not engineer human beings to this extent and we have the wonderful variety and richness of current society. Bright, foolish, solvent, broke, permissive, troubled, caring, lecherous, inspired, needy, greedy, weedy, whatever. The great unwashed. Us. In all our vivid separateness.

Sadly for marketing and communications professionals it is not possible to create one product, package it in one way, offer it through one location and price it at a single level and hope to cover the wide masses. Perhaps once there was a world where one type of phone was sufficient for everyone, where TV finished at about midnight on all channels (that's all three channels), where a shampoo existed in one format for a decade without sprouting twenty brand extensions, where shops closed on Wednesday afternoon, where cars didn't have ipod connectors (or CD players, or remote central locking, or websites to promote them, or GPS locators for emergency services, or air conditioning, or their own TV channel - 884 on Sky for the Audi Channel, by the way). Where is this place? Where is this consumer desert? Well, it's right here, circa. 1982. That's right, 1982, not 1882. The diversity that surrounds us and penetrates our lives with more involving and interrupting media options than any previous generation is a recent event. Very recent.

We can easily forget that what we see around us with ads appearing in computer games, millions of people generating avatars in SecondLife, video blogging, tiny chips attached to products like razor blade packs to record their journey through factory, distribution to store and onwards through check out, RSS feeds, DVRs, On Demand Television, is a very, very recent development. Marketing tools have evolved but some date back to pre-history (1982). It's just not credible to market a product or service as per the eighties (though it would be nice to bring back the lemon tank top that I wore to my first job interview in the Eighties, thinking I looked every bit the Beau Brummel).

Marketing and communications today have to deal with more diversity (both in terms of SKUs and distribtion) than ever before. How do we evolve our customer handling to take care of this diversity? How do we make sense of the masses of data that can now be generated from marketing? How do we manage a dialogue with a customer that starts "I'm calling about the letter you sent that directed me to the website where I saw the offer that mentioned the product that I ordered and picked up in store and I'm calling you about because it's not what I saw". Eh? This section will try to create a workout for our customer handling techniques to cope with the demands of life in 2007.

Anticipating Needs

Progressive Disclosure of Information - JIT data

Chapter 15: Outsourcing, insourcing, resourcing, offshoring. What?

The case for outsourcing

Reasons for outsourcing: resources, skills, independence, someone else to blame

Scope of outsourcing

When would you insource and how does that work?

Resourcing an outsourcer - like Honda, making them feel part of the extended enterprise

What to offshore? By product, by task or by customer segment?

Auditing potential offshore sites

The langwage barrier

Clutural fit

Managing offshorers

Chapter 16: Contact Centre Support Organisations

In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) provides a great contact centre solution called NHS Direct. This is a 24x7 operation to act as an initial port of call for non-emergency health queries - should I worry about this three inch growth on my arm? Probably. The service is provide across a network of small centres across the country and is staffed by medical professionals who are able to do remote diagnosis and suggest an escalation (and pre-alert the health care facility that you are inbound or reserve an appointment in hospital with a particular physician at a nominated time) or suggest an OTC drug course or perhaps a referral to a GP (family doctor) in the near future. It's a useful peace of mind service and saves off work doctors getting endless calls about head colds. Furthermore stuff that is troublesome but not worrying for a patient might set the alarms going for a health professional and swift escalation can be actioned.

This is a great example of a contact centre providing good outcomes that cannot directly be measured by call stats.

What about help for contact centre professionals? What is the equivilent service for people running centres, large or small? Well there is no one service - Contact Centre 24 does not currently exist, however there is a wide range of organisations out there who can provide help. In large organisations, several questions can be answered elsewhere in the enterprise but for small and medium sized businesses, where do you go for help?

Some organisations such as the CCA (Customer Contact Association, formerly the Call Centre Association, a much more honest name) present as a one-stop shop for help ... for members. But there are many, many others that merit consideration. A great deal of information is available on the web, want to find out what ITIL V3 says about customer management services? Check the web first.

Industry associations are a good place to start - The Direct Marketing Association has a wide range of information on customer contact management and also usefully covers regulation and compliance in dealing with personal data.

Business associations like the Chamber of Commerce or Federation of Small Business offer newsletters, online forums, seminars and legal advice lines - access to which can be particularly useful in a contact centre environment - many people, many opportunities for staffing issues, therefore many opportunities for employment law to trip you up. What's the proper consultation process for laying off a team? What do I do different if I have to make two out four trainers redundant compared to if I make all four redundant. Hopefully this is not a situation you have to face but trust me, a visit to your local employment tribunal is not how you want to spend two days of your life. I have and it was painful (for both parties).

If you operate in an area that covers regulated activities, such as financial services, the regulator, the FSA in the UK, will have precise requirements on who can do what to customer data and who can advise versus order-take. Compliance here is a serious matter and requires specialist advice.

If you operate a centre that covers, for example, childcare, you may have to vet staff through a service such as Disclosure Scotland, or an equivilent service and they can provide advice on recruitment plans.

If you need legal advice, separate from that provided by an industry association, look for a commercial firm that has specialist partners in Employment Law, IP/Technology Law, Privacy and Information Security Law, etc. These are the areas that most commonly come up, aside from regular business matters such as Contract Law or Property Law, etc. Some legal firms provide valuable information free of charge. Stop. What, a lawyer not charging £192 per hour in six-minute time slots? Surely not. Well, http://www.out-law.com/ is a fantastic resource provided by legal firm Pinsent Masons. They run seminars and provide online advice and resources for steering a course through legal issues surrounding IP, IT and Ecommerce. Oh, did you hear the one about lawyers - "what to do you call ten thousand lawyers nailed to the bottom of the ocean ... ?

Most marketing associations have some interest in the world of contact centres as communicaitons are central to both. Some like the Institute of Direct Marketing have more of an interest than others and they offer particularly good advice through seminars, publications, newsletters, etc on how to best manage customer communications. They also provide huge amounts of training, much of which impacts contact centres. As a fellow of the Institute I should declare an interest, but aside from my support of the Institute, I feel sure that an independent view would concur. Please visit www.theidm.com for more details.

Providers to the contact centre industry can also be a useful source of information, though the majority of their advice is geared to how to get the best out of their equipment or software, though, if you have their equipment or software, that's probably what you want of your supplier. Orgaisations such as IBM, Avaya, Accenture, to name but five, have great detail on their web sites covering current products and services, industry trends and opportunities for business improvement. OK, I know there were only three companies in the previous list, not five, but hey, got to check that you're still reading - this section contains loads of useful stuff!

2007-06-07T17:27:00.001Z

SATSE: Part 5: Future Directions

It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future - Yogi Berra

"Who the hell knows?"

So said Edie Falco, who plays Carmella Sorprano in the TV The Sopranos. With refreshing honesty, let's be honest, celebrity comment is not known for the truth, Falco told Reuters in April 07: "Who the hell knows?" answering a question about what happens next after the demise of The Sopranos which ran for six series. As with careers, so with marketing, communications and technology. Woody Allan has a great expression and a personal favourite of mine: "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans for the future."

So if it's all so difficult, why bother wondering? Terrible things might await us in the future. Prognosticate at your peril. Well, peril does not scare me, in fact, I embrace peril, I yearn for peril. And so, fixing a safety helmet to my head and proudly displaying my boy scout badges on my chest, I plunge into the future. To examine the trends and bring forth a view (and many may challenge it) of how service delivery will evolve over the next few years. For the sake of keeping this relevant I'm taking an evolutionary approach rather than a revolutionary approach to the future, so no flying cars in this book, but even evolving what we have today may well seem pretty revolutionary.

Before looking forward, I want to look briefly back. Can you remember the first time you heard the word 'blog' or the word 'podcast'? Couple of years ago? Perhaps a small, small number of you can go back four years, but that's the point. Four years. We have photobloggers and videobloggers, mainstream TV programmes like BBC Breakfast doing a daily breakfast podcast. For the vast majority of us it didn't exist four years ago. It's a true phenomenon. A publishing milestone. A great, great moment in history - thought, type, publish. Not 'thought, type, look for a publisher, get fed up, give two fingers to the establishment, return to work in the call centre'. No, think, type, publish. Now. And millions of people are doing it. If that can happen in four or so years, what can happen in the next four, never mind the next forty. Flying cars anyone?

Chapter 17: Service Technology Options

Moving to IP

Video Contact Centre

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence - you may snigger at the phrase and place it next to other great oxymorons, such as "airline schedule", "unbiased opinion", "political science" and "People's Republic of China". "Business Ethics" is another good one. Whilst I can see the joke, for business often presents itself as effort without intelligence, there is another meaning to the phrase. That being "the collection, organisation and distribution of business facts to improve decision making". The facts might relate to current stock positions, stock refresh rates, stock-keeping unit (SKU) growth rates, for example, where data generated from the business operations are used to record progress against targets and to make decisions about future activities.

Management Information (MI) is another common (and related term) found in call centres. BI is perhaps a more technical source of information for managers, relying on what can be measured and is focused on actual performance. MI is a wider term for intelligence (including opinion and estimations) that might inform management decision makers. For the purpose of this book, I am going to assume that BI is a subset of MI in that the representation of facutal information can be used as a key input (but not the only one) to management decision making. That said, the terms are often used interchangeably. I cannot count the number of times a client has asked for their MI, when what they actually mean is BI, but there you go.

Business Intelligence has some common attributes:

metric - the name given to a particular measure of BI, say, abandon rate, call duration, etc.

aggregation - taking large numbers of transactions together to create more representative figures, for example, average call duration

granularity - being able to look at different levels of detail, for example, first call resolution percentage at across the floor, or by team or by agent

filtering - setting criteria to reduce the volume of transactions studied to those of interest for a particular purpose, such as, average wait time for calls placed before 9.00am

calculation - often some core data is used to calculate new pieces of data, such as percentages or averages which are better at highlighting variance in data observations

exception - if some event happens, report it, such as if abandon rate exceeds 2% of calls presented, report it

compliance - showing a target and an actual performance for a particular metric, say average handle time, which was expected to be four minutes (the target), but the actual for the period being measured was four minutes and thirty seconds, or a variation of plus 30 seconds, or 12 1/2 per cent

The point of BI is to inform, to allow better decisions to be made and ultimately to improve some business driver - customer service, profitability, etc. The value that BI has to the business manager is the extent to which it aids their decision making. A few years ago, I had a very cynical MIS (Management Information Systems)lecturer who told a story, possibly apocryphal, of two managers in a large corporation who receive their copies of the monthly MI, delivered in paper form (this was well before MI systems developed dash-boards and online query tools). One manager immediately bins the heavy report but the other says "I find it much more valuable" and proceeds to remove the elastic band from the papers, retains the band and bins the paper. The managers had clearly discounted the monthly MI as being too cumbersome to be of any use. Of all flaws that MI can have, this is not the greatest but it is a bad one - it's as much use as no MI. The worst sin, however, is inaccuracy. This can be very serious as interpretations made from incorrect data can have a devastating effect on business performance.

Generating too much information is a fault either of poor MI design or of user request overload. I once had a client that asked for a monthly dash-board - a quick snapshot of business performance in the contact centre. To start with the dash-board had one page with four quadrants, each representing a key metric graphed out for legibility and with room for a brief comment underneath. Over a period of six months, this "dash-board" evolved from one page to twelve pages. A twelve-page dash-board. Talk about oxymoronic. The eleven pages that followed the original page were filled with large grids of data and were text heavy. The last page contained an explanation of some of the codes that appeared in the previous pages. Despite the client being one of the very best to work with, in this regard, they had gone completely nuts and gone overboard to the point that the dash-board was not fit for purpose and met none of the common attributes of a dash-board: brevity, simplicity or clarity.

Software as a service / hosted applications

Chapter 18: Modeling & Customisation

I like golf. Playing it and watching on TV. Doubtless many others do too. I also like skiing, but not watching it on TV. I'm sure many others do too. What about enjoying golf, watching golf, enjoying skiing, visiting cities, photo-blogging, keeping rabbits, reading The Onion, The Economist and The First Post, visiting America and Italy and trying to make the perfect salsa. Starts to reduce the number of people like me from millions to, possibly just a few. We're all like this, there's lots we have in common with people but we are also very individual. For a call centre, this presents a problem, how to you best represent yourself to people with widely differing perspectives and interests?

Well, generally a contact centre is not setup to handle calls from skiing, golf watching, rabbit keeping, Economise reading photo-bloggers. Contact Centres are typically arranged around simple transactions, like a home broadband help desk, a charity donation line, a utility payment centre, etc. For this reason, contact centres tend to avoid individualisation and concentrate on very simple segmentation of customers, usually on one dimension, for example, value. So, "select" customer (those that spend at the highest level) get one level of service and the great unwashed get another (inferior) level of service. This is easy to enable, simple to communicate and operationally, easy to manage, however is a short-sighted approach, if not actually fully wrong-headed.

These days a boadband provider is rarely just a broadband provider (likely they provide phone service and perhaps mobile communications too), a charity is rarely about just fundraising (issue promotion and member get member, spring to mind) and utilities are rarely just utilities (infrastructureless organisations offering gas, electric and other services such as extended boiler warranty, home care, etc). This is the era of the multi-faceted brand, of service extenstion and massive cross sell. So, is the same tone of voice to all consumers still looking like such a good idea?

Of course, going too far the other way leads to operational inneficiency, you can't have a team setup just to offer a great service to golf-loving, Economist reading, rabbit-keeping photo-bloggers, just in case one should call. You might wait a long time. Still, there is value in looking at improved segmentation and tailoring service and offers more closely to the real issues people care about. For example, as hard as EDF Energy try, I really can't get excited about Gas and Electricty offers that involve Nectar points (the combined loyalty scheme with diverse members such as Sainsbury's, BP, etc) however, perhaps if they spoke to me about something that I am interested in, relating their meat and two veg product to something that I care about, might that make a difference?

Segmentation works in two ways. For service and for targeting

Managing data across channels

Profiling schemes, MOSAIC, etc

Heat Maps

RCV, CLTV, Scarcity Allocation Models

Managing massive customisation

Chapter 19: New Distribution Models

Asset Digitisation

Centralising or Dispersal of Assets?

UGC/Web2.0/Social Networking - What does it mean for Contact Centres?

RSS feeds and podcasts & blogs - What happens when advisors self-publish?

2007-06-07T16:09:00.000Z

New ideas

Honesty and humilty in financial intermediation, or how to be successful without fucking over the masses

In an age of ever increasing complexity of financial products we are simultaneously in an age of increasing financial illiteracy. As investment banks create ever more sophisticated products like Collaterised Debt Obligations the industry pulls itself increasingly into expert-only territory.

There is a famous book "Where are the customer's yachts?" which is great. Today, in our me-centric world, a view might be, "Where is my fucking Boxster", or rather, "Where is my fucking Boxster S with black leather seats, air-con, variable valve timing and ipod docking port?" The financial industry succeeds in making it's members fabulously wealthy whilst ripping maximum cash out of hapless consumers.

Loyalty does not exist in this industry. No it doesn't. Want proof? Seven years with a bank, sticking with the rules, try losing your job for a few months and see how they view your request for cover. David Mamet says a great thing about Hollywood that applies to finance - "In Hollywood there is an expression, 'to get ahead you need to be flexible' but the full quote is actually: 'to get ahead you need to be flexible. Bend over.'" As with the movie industry, so with the finance industry. McDonalds, Disney, Nike, Nintendo, don't insult their customers for a lack of knowledge in food preparation, entertainment, footware design, software, but banks deliberately confuse and distort information to the benefit of advisors pockets and to the discomfort of the public. What kind of industry succeeds by launching great new savings products to get people to sign up then freeze rates as interest rates go up, relying on inertia on the part of their customers. Who does such a thing?

2007-05-23T16:49:00.000Z

Chapter Outlines

Service at the Sharp End: Making Contact Centres Work

Or, how to survive in a world of change with too little budget, too many staff, too much complex technology, tight deadlines and revised briefs.

About

Which metrics are most important for improving service levels?

How to manage change that impacts on staff

How to retain good staff

How to recruit staff for specialist roles

How to give individual customers a personalised service without over-burdening your IT department or tying your advisors in knots

How to keep the buzz going, day in, day out

How to reduce the number of hand-offs between teams and increase the number of calls dealt with at first point of contact (first call resolution)

On the website there are downloadable forms and checklists, tools and tips mentioned in this book that you can take and straightaway make a difference to your centre.

Rob lives in Edinburgh, UK with his wife, daughter and rabbit.

Introduction

Part 1: Conversations with Customers

Chapter 1: Making Contact Centres Listen to Customers

Chapter 2: People. People Everywhere

Chapter 3: Delivering on Promises

Part 2: Customer Experience Management

Chapter 4: Serving for Success

Chapter 5: Content Personalisation

Chapter 6: Segmentation and Targeting

In God we trust, all others bring data, W. Edwards Deming

Chapter 7: Is There a Relationship at the Heart of CRM?

Part 3: Keeping the Show on the Road

Chapter 8: Technology

So far, so good, but what's this got to do with technology? Well the article continues:

"During the rescue effort, more than 2,600 suggestions from the public poured into a special e-mail account set up by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Chapter 9: Project Management

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future - Yogi Berra

Chapter 10: Living with Risk

doesn't do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations if you live near him - J.R.R. Tolkien

Successful risk recovery depends absolutely on planning, so that's where we start. Firstly, what kinds of risks might a contact centre face? The risks fall into three categories:

Commercial - is the plan / process economically viable

Operational - is the plan / process efficient

Technical - is the plan / process do-able

The David Tortolano Zwanzig Schilling Trick

Chapter 11: Running a Contact Centre in 137 Easy Steps

Part 4: Putting it All Together

low staff absence rate

HR too busy doing exit interviews to look at the absence rate

team areas dressed to support their products / roles

acres of desks, each identical and none personalised

staff using intranets, wikis, custom systems to access, gather and distribute new information

advisors competing to see who has the most Post-It notes around their monitors

notice boards covered in recent photos from team activities

notice boards covered in rules and regulations

coaches and trainers delivering training with high quality materials in a smart, comfortable room, separate from the calling floor

advisors checking facts from photocopied materials at their desks

So, once the team's in place, what else needs to come together. Well only 136 other things!

Chapter 12: The Keys to the Kingdom: Personalisation, Innovation and Excellence

Adding value can be done in three key ways: Personalisation, Innovation and Excellence.

Chapter 13: Integrated Marketing Communications

Chapter 14: Advanced Customer Management

Chapter 15: Outsourcing, insourcing, resourcing, offshoring. What?

Chapter 16: Contact Centre Support Organisations

This is a great example of a contact centre providing good outcomes that cannot directly be measured by call stats.

If you need legal advice, separate from that provided by an industry association, look for a commercial firm that has specialist partners in Employment Law, IP/Technology Law, Privacy and Information Security Law, etc. These are the areas that most commonly come up, aside from regular business matters such as Contract Law or Property Law, etc. Some legal firms provide valuable information free of charge. Stop. What, a lawyer not charging £192 per hour in six-minute time slots? Surely not. Well, http://www.out-law.com/ is a fantastic resource provided by legal firm Pinsent Masons. They run seminars and provide online advice and resources for steering a course through legal issues surrounding IP, IT and Ecommerce. Oh, did you hear the one about "what to do you call ten thousand lawyers nailed to the bottom of the ocean ... ?

Part 5: Future Directions

"Who the hell knows?"

Chapter 17: Service Technology Options

Chapter 18: Modeling & Customisation

Segmentation works in two ways. For service and for targeting

Managing data across channels

Profiling schemes, MOSAIC, etc

Heat Maps

RCV, CLTV, Scarcity Allocation Models

Managing massive customisation

Chapter 19: New Distribution Models

Asset Digitisation

Centralising or Dispersal of Assets?

UGC/Web2.0/Social Networking - What does it mean for Contact Centres?

RSS feeds and podcasts & blogs - What happens when advisors self-publish?

2007-05-23T10:33:00.001Z

Keeping Advisors Busy (and Happy)

A few years ago in the UK a Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) firm ran a series of TV ads to focus on the quality of their products. The device they used was to film advisors in the call centre, running the Quality Assurance (QA) line. The point was, no-one called - because the products were so good. The actors representing the advisors had to find a way to fill the hours and they did that by experimenting with how far they could tip back their chairs before they fell, indulging in food fights and other "fun for TV" activities. The ads were funny and presented the brand in a new light, however, from a call centre management perspective, the old phrase "the devil makes work for idle hands" comes to mind.

Nothing is as certain as that the vices of leisure are gotten rid of by being busy - Seneca

Quiet times in call centres can come about for a variety of reasons - dips in workloads as a result of campaign changes, reduction on advertising volume, product changes, previous peaks settling down. Quiet times can also occur from system outage, delays in new systems, etc.

10 Activities to keep advisors happy in quiet times

However they occur, quiet times need to be filled and a good call centre manager will have a ready list of activities that can be deployed to fill gaps in volume.

Provide reading materials for interest and personal development, which can be physical or online (intranet)

Create comfortable break out areas

Encourage suggestion forums, often the best ideas come from unusual sources - this has to be monitored and demonstrably used otherwise advisors view it cynically

Cross train staff to perform other teams work, creating more resilience

Cross train staff for back office tasks, creating more skilled advisors and greater capacity

Re-training, particularly in content-rich settings, such as media, communications where new publications or devices, for example, appear weekly

Briefings, get the team together to review recent days activities, look forward to any change initiatives forthcoming, etc

Simple quiet time - if there has been a heavy workload, allow time for advisors to simply cool off, take the pace down a bit until the next peak

team activities - fun can be had with stuff like NASA Moonbase Survival Game or even better, preparing for special days - say a Mexican day, a Football day, any kind of theme day - get the team thinking together on something unrelated to regular tasks. Dress-up themes shake the schedule and are always fun - take lots of pics and post them around the centre and on the intranet.

time off - if an outage is likely to last an entire shift, after exhausting some of the above, send advisors home (paid) as it's better to give them a treat than sitting are their desks getting bored (or worse, figuring out something negative to get up to)

Hopefully these suggestions can perk up quiet times and make as positive use as possible of gaps between work stages. As a final note, it's important that the advisors don't get into a mindset of "oh oh, another quite time, here we go for another pointless two hour team meeting", variety is the spice of life and keeping the mix varied will keep people focused. Obviously this is particularly important in environments with many quiet times.

Why are there quiet times?

Another approach to being imaginative with quiet times is to conduct failure analysis - this could actually be a quiet time filler for advisors! Why is there so much quiet time?

technology outage - escalate and develop fix/improvement initiatives. If the outage can be planned, e.g. Sunday night, then adjust staffing accordingly

staff resource persistently too great for call volume - are you trying to answer 98% of inbound calls in 5 seconds? That's unrealistic - reset targets for IB call presentation

high absence levels leads to over-staffing - high absence is a clear signal that something is wrong in the centre and it could be serious - demotivation, bullying?

2007-05-23T09:41:00.000Z

Five Good Interview Questions for Team Leaders and Coaches

Toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other - Seneca

Team Leaders

Describe a recent incident where you took initiative?

How do you get the best out of other people?

What would you do with a team member who is persistently late?

How would you encourage your team to meet new (higher) targets?

What aspect of your current role to you like least?

Questions one and two are really settling in questions. What you are looking for here is candidates not shooting themselves in the foot - mumbling, delays, lack of confidence, etc. Good answers talk about understanding situations and people, consulting with people, developing ideas, communicating clearly, etc.

Question three and four are about their approach to people and teams and do they activate the trigger finger too quickly (bad). Correct answers talk about contributing to the team, understanding the root cause, roles and responsibilities, opportunities for personal development, empathising with customers for reduced service levels, rewards for growth, etc.

Question five is as close to a trick question as you should get. Answers like, "my boss", "the workload", "the environment", etc. are signals that this is not the right person. Good answers include: "seeking more autonomy", "limited opportunities to contribute", "not able to develop my skills fast enough", etc.

The role of team leader is critical in a contact centre and you want people who are fun, responsible, supportive, focused, good communicators, comfortable with their confidence but not arrogant. It's a role that deserves time and care in recruitment (as do all roles) but this is the role that can make or break contact centre performance.

Coaches

What do you enjoy most about your current role?

What's the best thing about working in a contact centre?

How would you encourage an advisor who is falling behind team performance

How would you support staff undergoing change, say a new IT system?

What would you change in the contact centre if you could?

Question one should result in some positive statements about learning, sharing, supporting. Answers that feature "I" and "me" indicate a candidate unsuited to coaching. You don't want Mimi in your coaching organisation.

Question two is about loving people - being gregarious, interested in meeting new people, comfortable initiating dialogue, happy with diversity, etc. Not someone who is closed or negative - bear in mind the role they will occupy.

Questions three and four about their people skills - dealing with real situations to coach and develop advisors. This is the core of the role and you are looking for
people who can spot training needs, personal issues, diversion and obfuscation in the face of new challenges, etc. It is about happily taking people through a development cycle and getting a real buzz out of helping people contribute to the team and grow into new situations and challenges.

Again, question five is close to a trick question and answers that relate to more soap in the toilets, too far to walk to the shops, don't like my seat, etc. are obvious indicators of someone unsuited to coaching. Answers like more training for advisors, better information about customer communications, more flexible shifts to accommodate people with family committments, etc. Look for specific and positive contributions rather than general and neutral (or even negative). Whilst honesty is to be applauded, what you are seeking is someone who can see the positive in a situation - limited training? that's an opportunity to maximise the quality of the training we do give, poor briefings? that's an opportunity for advisors to make suggestions on improvement. The perfect working environment does not exist and coaches should be the people in your organisation who can always find the silver lining, always look on the bright side. Remember the vital role they provide on the floor and recruit accordingly.

2007-05-22T16:34:00.000Z

Are you cold calling?

If you make enough phone calls, there are bound to be a few that result in unexpected outcomes. Often, customer reactions or customer requests can be modeled over time so that in any given week, 23% of inbound calls will relate to, say, returns & refunds, 16% to, delivery queries and 14% to, payment queries. There trackable endpoints are known as resolution codes or disposition codes.

Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission - Fred Allen

There is a skill in handling disposition codes. Too many and it's difficult to slot a given query into a category, too few and your analytics get skewed as dissimilar customer events are being counted together.

Why does it matter?

It matters because disposition codes are a great way of learning for the organisation. It can be very valuable data to inform process changes, proposition changes, training improvements, IT developments, etc. In other words it's valuable feedback on how to improve service delivery. Say, in the 72 hours after an email blast the proportion of calls relating to "hot to find content on the web site" rises by more than 50% over it's mean level in the previous week, perhaps there is scope to embed better instructions into the email? Or perhaps landing zones active for the email campaign should be designed better to make content easier to find? In any event - this is valuable data and used intelligently, across the organisation it can lead to vastly improved customer outcomes. Often the call centre is the first to know that something is happeneing sub-optimally elsewhere in the enterprise.

Designing disposition codes is largely common sense. For example, in a hospitality environment, clusters of queries relating to similar events - such as "do you have a health spa", "do you have a gym", "do you have a pool", can safely by aggregated into "hotel facilities". Regular monitoring can detect individual sub queries rising - anything that accounts for 10% of volumen absolutely deserves a code of its own. So, for example, if "do you have a health spa" starts to form 8% of queries, perhaps separate it out into a new code and change the other to "hotel facilities ex spa". This itself is problematic as queries that span the date of code change may return unpredictable results, however, it's the best compromise and careful management of code data can save this from being an issue. "Do you have a health spa" queries rising may be information for advertising dept to consider adding "with spa" to all ads placed for the following two months to see if that reduces the quantity.

However, every so often there are calls that defy categorisation ...

A few years ago whilst carrying out a subscription telemarketing campaign for a national newspapers, the following dialogue occurred between the customer and our advisor.

Advisor: "Hi, this David calling from [National Newspaper] could I speak to Mr Customer please?"

Customer: "This is Mr Customer, what do you want?"

Advisor: "Hello Mr Customer, you have previously subscribed to our paper and I'm calling with a fantastic offer of 2 weeks free if you will take a 13 week trial. What could be better than that?"

Customer: "Hold on, are you Cold Calling?"

Advisor: "No, my name's David and I work for [National Newspaper]. We're calling all previous subscription customers with this great offer of two free weeks ..."

Customer, interrupting advisor: "Yes, you are Cold Calling!"

Advisor: "No, I'm not called Colin, my name's David ..."

And there we leave the call as there is no way back from that level of confusion. The coach listening in on the call is laughing out loud having listened to the dialogue. Fortunately, or not, call recording allowed many other people to share the joke, after the call had ended.

This example gives an insight into how customers and organisations have a different view of what constitutes a welcome telephone call and an intrusive telephone call. From a legal perspective, the customer had cancelled a previous subscription but had not requested to be removed from future communication programmes, therefore the re-solicitation programme was valid. The customer perspective, is that they have cancelled their subscription, and therefore, their association with the organisation.

It's like direct mail - if an offer arrives in the post, addressed correctly for a service or product that you are currently considering, or for something you covet, then the communication largely has value and is accepted as such - say an alternative motor insurance quote that arrives one month prior to renewal time, with all of your details correct. However, if the offer arrives, four months into your contract, with the wrong details, it's junk mail.

Like direct mail, so with telephone calls. If the call is expected and welcomed, then a positive reception awaits, if not, then there are a spectrum of possible outcomes - from mild interest through ambivilance and annoyance all the way to "screamer". That's the term for a customer who goes off on one - "he's going SAVAGE"

Tipping the odds of Successful Outcomes in your favour

Respect privacy and opt-out requests absolutely

Do not purchase data for which the provenance is unproven - there is a lot of seriously dodgy data out there - a colleague has been offered 1.9 million credit card customers, from a bank's backup system. Yes, seriously.

Use telemarketing discriminately, rather than blanket calling (which just doesn't work any more)

Get the data right. This is basic but often data used for telemarketing is poor. With so many data cleaning and enrichment options available, there is really no excuse for getting this wrong

Personalise the offer - make any communication talk to the specific needs, wants, motivations of the customer as an individual - "as someone who recently bought our new XTC300 Driver" rather than "as someone who is interested in golf", etc.

Train, train and train again. And then coach. Familiarity with material, experience of actual customer behaviour, first hand experience of the product / service do wonders for an advisor's confidence, and hence ability to engage customers.

2007-05-22T15:42:00.000Z

Standardising Technology across a network of Contact Centres

For enterprise clients, one or two contact centres is unlikely to meet the demand from customers for service requests. Often, in large markets, an enterprise may well have ten or more contact centres. This is to do with the difficulties in placing all staff together on one massive contact centre.

In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain - Pliny the Elder

Operationally, it would be difficult to organise a call centre with many thousands of staff and as a location it would offer no resilience to the business. Specifically:

it's hard to recruit more than 1000 contact centre staff in all but the very largest of locations - bear in mind that yours will not be the only employer in an area and in areas with high contact centre penetration, competition for good staff can be fierce

limits on organisation's ability to manage 3000 people on one site

building logistics complexity increases beyond a certain size - around a thousand seats

reslience is nill if all staff are in one place

for 1000 seats, if you staff more than one shift (common) then you are looking for not 1000 staff in a location but perhaps 2000 or 3000 - that will place a burden on your HR resources and external employment agencies

For these reasons and more, it is uncommon to find individual contact centres above 1,200 seats and 400 to 600 would be a much more common maximum size. For some organisations, such as Vodafone in the UK with over 7,000 seats, this means several locations.

If multiple locations are reality, how do you make it work? Well from a data perspective, it's relatively straightforword to "pipe" data applications into different locations from a central hub. Companies such as Citrix specialise in enabling remote operation. The voice environment is more difficult because organisations often have a mix of call centre technologies - different switches, different ACDs, different voice recorders, etc. It's often due to mergers and acquisitions where differing technologies build up as rival firms get purchased. Or it could be due to a deliberate strategy to not have too much reliance on one provider. Often, a large part of an organisation's contact centre estate is in the hands of outsourcers - and their technology will often be different to the brands they serve. Whatever the cause, dissimilar technologies are a reality for many organisations and it's usually easier to normalise the data environment, but the voice environment is harder because mostly, the key serving technologies are premises based - i.e. the reside in the location where service is delivered. To get round this, organisations look at a variety of normalising technologies:

homogeonising CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) technology - plugs into each physical switch and allows it logically to operate in harmony with dissimilar switches

hosting technology to move away from premises based equipment to a network solution - piping in services from a remote location

workstream organisation - moving projects from the workstack to locations where the volume can be comfortably contained without overspill to other locations

progressive standardisation - progressively refreshing eqipment which an agreed corporate standard

deploying more self-service technologies - at a central point make investments in self-service to draw more transactions to the web, push data capture requirements to customers (form-filling online) etc and reduce the transaction burden across the estate

Which strategy to adopt?

Selecting the correct option from the above list is hard and largely depends on the business requirements, however, it would not be uncommon for a strategy to involve three of the above options and often all of the options in the one strategy. Say, to host IVR operations for the group centrally, to reorganise projects to place them in contained areas, change procurement policy to govern new purchases and accellerate technology refresh, invest in more self-service technology and process redesign and at the same time deploying CTI solutions to allow multiple physical switches to operate as one logical switch. Needless to say, this is a complex strategy, but it may well be the only way forward. Hosting everything may not be an option due to the existing investment in technology, CTI may be good for some services (switch integration) but may be poorer at others (staff effectiveness metrics), rationalising the workstack can only go so far - if you need to handle 50K calls per day, then you need to handle them regardless if only 40K per day capacity exists in your preferred sites, and customers may reject moves to self-service options or perhaps self-service leads to other, new transactions (the law of unintended consequences)

Alternatively, an organisation may enter a large outsourcing deal with a large provider - IBM, EDS, etc. and pass the burden for technology refresh to them in exchange for a seven year contract to run the show.

6 things to consider before deciding

Have we exhausted all possible options for simplification, clarification, rationalisation and automation - if not, dig further, no point adding new technology to a bad process - get the process right, then technologise

Can suppliers be persuaded to engage more in exchange for a contract extension? Perhaps there is appetite at suppliers to take on more risk and complexity in exchange for a bigger share of the long term pot

What does the future hold for customer interactions - are there more transactions on the way or is the transaction load stable? Will new services require ever more complex technology innovation or are needs currently adequately met?

What technologies are on show at tradeshows and at supplier previews? Perhaps putting up with inconvenience for 18 more months to then deploy an interesting new technology once it has been market tested - this could save short term investment to direct to other deserving causes and lead to a smarter and slicker solution for the future

Are there regulatory issues that mean there is a pressing need for reform?

Are there commercial disadvantages compared to best in class - e.g. if processing time for a high volume process stream is 30% higher than your prime competitor then this probably deserves attention ahead of other transactions

Bear in mind that technology is not a silver bullet for all organisation problems. The greater the time spent planning and thinking about customers always pays dividends by yielding better technology projects. At the same time some pragmatism is required with regard to over-analysis.

2007-05-22T10:41:00.000Z

Book Index

Service at the Sharp End: Making Contact Centres Work

Or, how to survive in a world of change with too little budget, too many staff, too much complex technology, tight deadlines and revised briefs.

Book Index

Part 1: Conversations with Customers

Chapter 1: Making Contact Centres Listen to Customers

One Erlang or Two? Sizing the call part of the contact centre

Honey, I srunk the contact centre! Shrinkage and Occupancy

Sizing the contact centre - email, mail, other traffic

Queues and routing technology

Contact Strategy development

Chapter 2: People. People Everywhere

Motivation and Development

A Sense of Team

Matching Staff to Projects

Recruiting for secure positions

Super Agents! Subject Matter Experts and escalation

Maintaining Motivation over the Long Term

Dealing with Change

Promoting from Within

Introducing Management from External Source

Implant Managers

What can you tell from a recruitment ad for advisors?

Chapter 3: Delivering on Promises

Compliance

Quality Assurance

Back Office linkage

Regular Data Feeds

Reporting to the Business

Part 2: Customer Experience Management

Chapter 4: Serving for Success

Complaint handling

Stultifying standards-based approach - if it says 72 hours, we're bloody well going to take 72 hours - that's NOT service

Customer Selection - why it's right to deliver different service levels to different customers

Staff rewards

Self service augmentation and promotion to customers

Chapter 5: Content Personalisation

Personalisation as a source of differentiation

Commercial rationalisation

Using one channel's results to feed another channel's activity

What to personalise?

Chapter 6: Segmentation and Targeting

Chapter 7: Is There a Relationship at the Heart of CRM?

The Idea Behind CRM

What Relationships mean to Customers

Customers never see themselves in a relationship with a bank

Customers might see themselves in a relationship with Harley Davidson, but few other brands qualify - test #1 How many customers have Capital One tattooed on their shoulder?

Sensibly using CRM to make the operation effective and commercially viable

Sensibly using CRM to delivery a customer experience that encourages more of the outcomes you want

Understand exactly who you are set up to deliver a great service to

Part 3: Keeping the Show on the Road

Chapter 8: Technology

KTSR

Legacy Integration

CTI, IVR, ACD, Call Recording

Root Cause Analysis - Verint

PBE or Hosting

Chapter 9: Project Management

BDUF / Agile

MOSCOW

Involving the right people in the project

Chapter 10: Living with Risk

Identifying Risk

Project, Operation, Commercial Risk

Recognising Risk and dealing with it

Business Continuity

Chapter 11: Running a Contact Centre in 137 Easy Steps

Scheduling

Recruitment, Induction, Training, Development & Retention

For all of these reasons, training is hugely important to improving outcomes. It can be more impactful than a small increase in staff rewards.

Team structure

Briefing in Projects

Service Levels - Measurement Performance and hitting targets

Coaching and Performance Management

Knowledge sharing and escalation to SMEs

Maintaining knowledge bases and feeding back to training sessions

What challenges do "no paper, no pens" environments create

Part 4: Putting it All Together

Chapter 12: The Keys to the Kingdom: Personalisation, Excellence and Innovation

Sources of service differentiation: personalisation, excellence and innovation

Chapter 13: Integrated Marketing Communications

Campaign management across channels

Creating a sense of flow across channels

Database Management

Chapter 14: Advanced Customer Management

Anticipating Needs

Progressive Disclosure of Information - JIT data

Chapter 15: Outsourcing, insourcing, resourcing, offshoring. What?

Chapter 16: Contact Centre Support Organisations

DMA, CCA, IDM, The DMA

Part 5: Future Directions

Chapter 17: Service Technology Options

Moving to IP

Video Contact Centre

Business Intelligence

Software as a service / hosted applications

Chapter 18: Modeling & Customisation

Managing data across channels

Profiling schemes, MOSAIC, etc

Heat Maps

RCV, CLTV, Scarcity Allocation Models

Managing massive customisation

Chapter 19: New Distribution Models

Asset Digitisation

Centralising or Dispersal of Assets?

UGC/Web2.0/Social Networking - What does it mean for Contact Centres?

RSS feeds and podcasts & blogs - What happens when advisors self-publish?

2007-05-09T16:54:00.000Z

Observations on Customer Intelligence Data Integration

Merchants Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2006

Each year Merchants (part of Dimension Data) conduct an authoritative piece of research into best practice in contact centres. What is surprising is the continued gap between best performance and average performance for some very critical metrics. Take integration of key customer intelligence (CI) data, or how well integrated are core business systems and the contact centre? Frequently CI data is not shared between contact centre and other parts of the business (either from the contact centre or to the call centre).

Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair - George Burns

According to the benchmarking report on CI integration elements such as: delivery tracking, customer correspondence, pricing and product specification, performance varies from one in ten to one in three contact centres that have no integration whatsoever (relying on manual activities). About half again have access but not easily. This is surprising but helps to explain why service experiences can be disjointed.

So What?

This is a huge missed opportunity for improved efficiency and improved effectiveness. Customer exectations are firmly set as an organisation that has equal intelligence at all touchpoints. Frequently, equal intelligence means equally low intelligence, unfortunately. When a brand is good at integrated communications, customers expect that that high standard can be achieved repeatedly and the bar for the industry is raised. Consequently if a customer requests something of a staff member in a branch office, that customer expects that a contact centre advisor knows of that request. Easy to say, hard to do. But increasingly customers expect it.

Similarly with joined up communications, if you send a customer a letter inviting them to visit a website, you should expect that some will then call or email a contact centre and expect the adviser to a) know about the letter, and b) know about the website content. If you think about it from a customer’s perspective this makes sense. Don’t we all expect that? If you think about it from an systems integration perspective it makes your toes curl – don’t customers realise how hard it is to get seventeen different systems to talk to each other?!!! The trouble is, the customer doesn’t care how hard it is to get different data repositories, in different formats, in different locations to talk to one another. They simply expect that it does. Not from a reductionist, XML feed level, but at a common sense level – you keep trumpeting how good you are, surely you can keep track of all of my data. And they’re right.

2007-04-24T16:26:00.000Z

Challenges When Assessing a Portfolio of Business Change Programmes

In a world of boundless resources, there would be no need for decision makers to assess the merits of individual projects – all could be indulged with equal resources and without fear of consequence. In the real world however, resources are finite and organisations must ration their resources, investing first in the most deserving projects. The process of prioritising project investment is sometimes referred to as Capital Rationing.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - Benjamin Franklin

To adequately perform this task, decision makers need a rich information base to illuminate the costs, values & risks of competing projects. An assessment is made to find the projects which offer the greatest return when matched to the organisation’s key business objectives.

Perfect Information

No decision about the future is made with perfect information. Decisions are made based on information which is subject to sampling, of insufficient coverage, is not current or contains errors. This is the true position that most companies face when making information decisions. Consultants (including the author) provide an Information Quality Healthcheck service which assesses the strategic value of information available to senior executives relative to their business objectives. For example, organisations tend to have good information about how projects have proceeded to date but relatively poor information about what they will do in the future. This comes at two levels:

project efficiency - is the project on schedule?

project effectiveness - is the project still true to the objectives of business unit it serves?

There are a raft of project control methods to assist with the first but few tools to assist with the second. My Healthcheck service will point out where the organisation is information-rich and where it is information-poor, relating to it's strategic business objectives, where projects and business objectives are tracking and where they are diverging. This can be extremely illuminating (and important) and allow projects which are efficient to be killed because they no longer serve the business. Traditional project management takes an efficiency based view of the workstack that may not be most intelligent assessment method.

If a large project is scheduled to take two years to complete, that is a long, long time in a customer centric business. Look at how quickly User Generated Content took to gain mass market status and radically change the outlook of consumer facing brands. What are the chances that your two-year old CRM project remains as tightly relevant to the needs and aspiration of the market as it did when the project was commissioned. In many small, yet significant ways, poject develops can track away from where the market is going. These changes need to be picked up and fed back into the project workstack to ensure it remains true to the current needs of the enterprise.

2007-04-21T10:02:00.000Z

Scoping Projects for Risk to Inform Selection of Project Management Methods

It's common these days to hear of "agile" developments for IT projects - agile meaning, quick set-up, quick to get to the coding stage and an iterative approach to specification, development & testing. Organisations however, often still rely on more formal methods "Bid Design Up Front" commonly referred to as Waterfall methods, where one stage commences only once the previous stage finishes, so coding and design never overlap. How do organisations decide which method to use and is there scope to support both approches in the one organisation?

Apparently, if you stand on top of the Great Wall of China, you can see the moon - Boothby Graffoe

Formal methodologies usually require some form of feasibility study to senior management with a go/no go option on the development based on Return on Investment and do-ability. There is an option, however, to look at the project and quickly scope out the risk & value profile at a high level and inform the decision on methodologies, and if this points towards agile methods, restricting the effort required for feasibility and saving the organisation time and resources

How to Scope for Risk and Value up front

To be "Agile" in this step requires the Scoping exercise to be shift yet valuable and this requires its own methodology - Navigator - which is designed for Risk and Value management of individual projects, programmes and indeed an entire portfolio of development efforts. At a simple level Navigator allows a consultant to make an informed decision on the route the project should take. This is based on easily accessible information (which is expanded in greater detail as programmes progress) and presented in a simple and easy to digest format. Perfect for indication agile or formal.

There are about ten risk "markers" and about ten value "markers" but for this article I will examine the threee of the most common. Firstly, on the risk side we have: 1. the number of stakeholders, 2. assumed complexity of the mission, and 3. expected duration. For instance, imagine a project such as the replacement of premises based IVR systems in two call centres with one hosted IVR system serving both centres. Using only the three risk markers above, likely this project has one stakeholder - the head of customer service delivery, likely has low to medium complexity (the new system can be tested and tested without removing the old ones) and the duration is likely to be relatively short - three to six months. This data would lean the project towards agile methods. On the other hand, imagine a project to upgrade call centre applications to provide better integration with the rest of the busines. Immediately, this brings in other stakeholders - finance, branch networks, marketing, etc. It's also likely to be highly complex as interfaces between systems and division are often where trouble lies in project management and the duration is likely to be medium to long. This data would lean the project towards formal methods with a high degree of planning and consultation prior to development.

Without delving into the mathematics behind the risk assessments, one can see there is a relationship between, say an increasing number of stakeholders and an increasing risk of a project missing some of its objectives, due to the way conflicts are resolved in organisations.

The above examples are fairly obvious for the purpose of illustration but what Navigator does is allow value and risk, which are intangible elements to be deconstructed and given tangible £ values. The elements in a project can then be aggregated and compared, on an equal footing with all projects in the portfolio regardless of the asset class they serve.

Having risk and value assessments over an entire portfolio allows senior IT staff to accurately manage risk and be assured in delivering the value. They can also easily decide which projects to fast track through agile methods and which to manage through traditional methods.

Note: Navigator is a decision support methodology for enterprises to use to align business technology decision with business goals and to keep this relationship in lock-step as the business evironment changes and the portfolio evolves. Navigator is the property of the author.

2007-03-07T16:49:00.000Z

Using the web for commerce, when you don't have an "e" product

Even fields such as landscaping, consulting and estate agency can make significant use of the web to generate a commercial return. Whilst it is difficult to digitise a "product" from these areas, it is possible to create a list of well qualified leads and to engage with them in a targeted and relevant manner.

It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that the Internet has evolved into a force strong enough to reflect the greatest hopes and fears of those who use it. After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics. - Denise Caruso, New York Times

Take estate agency, for example. This business ebbs and flows with the economy and in some markets, it is easy to get leads and move property. Other times, when the economy is slower, buyers are scarce. In this environment it is particularly important that you have a good online presence and critically, that the reduced number of buyers in the market can find your site and the properties you list. Relying on leads exclusively from property centres can be a risky business in a low market.

For most real estate professionals the business climate has changed dramatically. Whereas for several years, simple presence in the field was a license to be successful and earn a significant living, today a much better strategy needs to be utilized, just to stay on the playing field.

Building a pipeline begins with attaining good data. This means: NATE - name, address, telephone number and email address. Increasingly, leads arrive from short text code messages from enquirers who see a property. These should be nurtured as they are usually very active buyers. While direct mail can still be of value, emails can be powerful, much quicker and less expensive, but no less targeted than other DM activity. For example, by grouping your prospect base into categories (like young family versus singly professionals), you can send out emails that are targeted to the interests of the prospects. The content of the emails will be customised with name, etc. but also the content and the list of properties will reflect the interests of the prospects. Generally, the greater the personalisation, the better the engagement from the prospects and the greater the response.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), also known as Organic or Natural Search is the process by which a site is designed to be aligned with the ranking of search engines. If the site is designed in a way that allows search engines to "see" your site clearly, by using HTML tags correctly, you can give your site the best chance of improved rankings. Regular and frequent content additions are important too and the content should be carefully designed to match tags, images, links, headings and other structural elements of the site. Keep the content on your site fresh, accurate and robust. For example, it’s a big turn-off to arrive at a site with inaccurate information or links that don’t work. Create a compelling reason for someone to search for properties on your site.

Last but not least: Links. As many links as you can get directing trafic to your site will improve ranking. This can be quite hard to achieve if you do not have a wide circle of associates with whom to foster co-operative links. Some independent hotels get round this by providing co-operative links between their site and hotels in different geographic territories. They are not competing (Vancouver and Edinburgh are not in the same market) however independents in both cities can help each other by fostering links.

Search Engines such as Google have a large paid component to its search results as well. Look at any search on google, say for "properties for sale in Edinburgh" and this will return two premium "sponsored links" at the top of the page and a series of tageted ads running down the right hand side. Companies bid for these positions using a variety of keywords that match the search phrase you provide. This is “pay per click” advertising and is unique in advertising media. Just try asking your favourite newspaper or property supplement to allow you to pay based on the results of the ad!

3. Honour channel preference – By that I mean make it as easy for someone to contact you via e-mail as by telephone. Prompt follow-up is also critical. Make sure you get back to them before they have a chance to reach out to a competitor. And as already mentioned, get complete information from each person so that you can maintain multiple contact points with them.

4. Utilize a contact management program. There are a number of these programs on the market today that will allow you to keep in close contact with those who warrant it, schedule others for contact later on, and also parse the database for mailings (as described above).

5. Study competitor sites. Although most sites have similar attributes, especially ones that are template driven, others are unique with varying degrees of professionalism. While a template site is okay, it has limitations from both a design standpoint and from a Search Engine Optimization perspective. Many Realtors have sites through the companies that they are representing (Prudential, Century 21, etc.) and also have another site that allows greater flexibility and opportunity for differentiation.

6. REALLY IMPORTANT – If you send an e-mail to your database and you do it in one bulk e-mail, make sure that you blind copy (Blind CC) all of the recipients. I received an e-mail recently from the developer of a new community. The e-mail was sent to 200+ individuals who had requested to be on the mailing list. The person who sent it out didn’t Blind CC everyone, and the entire list saw each other’s names. Besides the negative credibility impact for the developer, it was likely a bonanza for the handful of other realtors in town who were on the list themselves.

There is no question that this is a challenging time for most people associated with the real estate industry, including homeowners who are trying to sell their properties. The factors that fueled the market on the way up, along with the ones driving the downturn are out of the control of any individual.

What remains in your control is the lead generation and follow-up process. Hard work, strong organizational skills and a willingness to embrace e-mail/the Internet, are important ingredients to attaining impressive results in a tougher marketplace.

2007-03-06T22:24:00.000Z

Wi-fi and Wimax.

This is a subject that could fill several books, however, at an outline level, the difference between the two is essentially range. Both are wireless networking approaches to allow multiple mobile devices to wirelessly connect to a local hub and onwards to a private corporate network or to an internet service provider.

The thing with high-tech is you always end up using scissors - David Hockney

Both of these terms are thought of as technologies, but they are actually certification marks for equipment that meets the requirements of the IEEE standards group, specifically, 802.11 for Wi-Fi an 802.16 for WiMAX. These standards terms are difficult to use in speech and therefore the terms Wi-Fi and WiMAX have come to represent the technologies behind the standards.

Wireless networking refers to the ability of a device (most often a laptop computer, but in the future, wi-fi enabled mobile telephones) to share files and access network services (browse the internet, conect to corporate data services, etc) without a physical wire connecting the laptop to the network. A special chip inside the laptop provides the wireless networking capability.

Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity)

Wi-Fi is a solution for offices, homes, bars and clubs. As a single solution, typically you would have a broadband (Digital Subscriber Line) modem connected to a wireless router (sometimes one device rather than two) to support perhaps 10 to 20 wireless devices (sizing the solution depends on many criteria).

Generally, the device that wireless signals trasmit to and from is known as an Access Point. To support a large facility, say a hotel or large office, many wireless access points might be deployed to extend the range of the wireless network (or wireless LAN, as it's often called - WLAN) beyond the distance that one device can support.

There are three variants of wireless networking A, B and G. A fourth, "N" is on the way. Most devices are backwards compatible, i.e. if you purchase a "G" capable device, it can most likely support A and B also. Essentially, each progressive variant extends the speed and range of the previous generation. It is important to remember that although a 54 Mbps (mega bits per second) wireless connection sounds very fast, the user experience on a wireless network is determined by many factors, not least, other wireless traffic sharing the access point, but also, the wired network onwards from the router. So, if the wired network runs at a 512K connection to the internet, this will likely be the slowest part of the link and the part that most greatly impacts the user experience.

Wireless networks can be easily secured using passwords, encryption and or MAC addressing (unique code on each network card/chip). Wi-fi networks in public spaces, e.g. a cafe, are usually referred to as hotspots. Although housings are available for mounting access points in external areas, Wi-Fi is much more commonly an indoor deployed service (though the signal from an access point can often overspill the office / cafe domain and provide a limited service to non target users outside).

A considerable amount of work has been done to provide a "services layer" of capability beyond the physical networking layer, for example, management systems to monitor and regulate traffic flow, authentication and charging services to administer user accounts, etc.

Many hotspots are moving to a free access model (free at the point of delivery) but supported by advertising or a recognition that free Wi-Fi will generate more traffic at the cafe, bar, etc. especially in non-core hours. Ad-supported models are likely to appear more and more as people shun paid access and migrate to locations that offer free access. An ad-supported model allows the cost of the access provision (not very great) to be recouped and a steady income stream provided into the future. Ads can take the form of sponsorship where a blanket ad for a mainstream brand washes across the screen and cannot be avoided. The branding opportunity is strong but transient. Other forms that are more intrusive, give more opportunities to see but may be less welcome to customers. However, given that access is free, customers are likely to have a high tolerence for advertising in this medium. The high water mark for advertising persistence has not been reached yet.

T-Mobile in the UK has a neat service where for £20 per month you can get a username and password and unlimited access at hundreds of hotspots up and down the country. If you are a T-Mobile contract mobile phone customer, the deal is even better - £10 per month for unlimited access and the £10 charge is conveniently levied to your mobile phone account.

WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access)

WiMAX is often thought of as Uber Wi-Fi, but it is in fact a different type of wireless networking. WiMAX is for Metropolitan Area deployment, often under the control of a Public Authority with remit for public service provision in the particular metropolitan area. WiMAX floods a town or city with (mainly) externally mounted high performance wireless networking devices, the signal from these devices will actively penetrate internal areas.

The effect is to provide wireless broadband capability for masses of people, commonly under the remit of the town or city (other Authorities might be large office / university campuses, though Wi-Fi would most likely be used). The initiative is often sponsored through a desire to overcome a lack of connectivity (either because of individual economic challenges or legacy wired network infrastructure limits). Other uses include corporate redundancy (an alternative to wired networks for resilience) and corporate to consumer services, especially by telcos to deliver additional services into homes without having to provide wiring into the homes. However provided, the central idea is that masses can connect to WiMAX and access a range of services not currently available.

The range of WiMAX can be as much as 70 miles, however, the performance degrades over long distances and with "Line of Sight" issues. Essentially you can have either high bandwidth or long reach, but not both simultaneously. You need a suitable WiMAX capable device, similar to W-Fi above, but at the moment, not interoperable cards/chips. So, any Wi-Fi capability your current laptop has does not guarantee any coverage in a WiMAX wireless network. This likely will change over the next three to five years so, for example, you might use a city facility (WiMAX) whilst travelling on a Public Transit Authority bus or train and then connect to a corporate wireless network (Wi-Fi) in your office, using the same card or chip supporting multiple protocols.

There is a saying in networking: fast, cheap, good - pick any two, but can't have all three. As with wired networks, so with WiMAX.

A great deal of the complexity of WiMAX is dealing in three areas: a) overspill to other networks, b) overcoming the obstacles of a diverse cityscape, and c) providing a fast and efficient way of connecting the "Mesh" network of WiMAX access points to the main switching station. Backhaul connection from the mesh will normally be at least 100 Mbps so there is little issue there, the problem is mostly at the "radio" side, the signal to and from the wireless devices, where theoretical connection speeds drop quickly as line of sight and other users impact the connection.

Most effort in this field is currently directed at the engineering level to address these points and less work has been done on the services level, compared to W-Fi, although, much of the services work developed in the Wi-Fi space will be transferrable, because most of the large Wi-Fi players are heavily involved in WiMAX.

At a services level, much work has gone into the commercial basis for WiMAX. If free at the point of delivery, who pays? One option would be to increase local taxes, but that is unpopular with politicians (and constituents!) and many installations are moving to some form of advertising supported model. Perhaps a systems integrator or infrasructure firm will pay for the install and then pay the local authority a %age of revenue generated from advertising on the network. This passes a lot of the risk for the project to a technology firm.

2007-03-01T17:39:00.000Z

Commercial Property Notification

Today I saw an office property to let. The board outside the property advertised a short text code and a property reference number - for example, 88010 & HALLDM6. The service costs £1 per instance and delivers, initially a text message with basic details of the property, but very shortly afterwards a WAP push message with a min-schedule with photographs. Very impressive.

Clients often can't articulate exactly what they want in a system until they see a system with what they don't want. - Rob Innes

Similar services are well used by residential property sales agents and letting agents but this was the first time that I'd seen a similar thing for commercial property. Not sure about charging users £1 to access information in a form that makes service provision easier for the provider. Also the charge information was not displayed nearly as prominently as the call to action. Still interesting use of the technology.

2007-02-22T13:27:00.000Z

Notification Technology

Ever had a confirmation email or text message? That's notification technology. Alerts or "comfort messages" that tell you things are on track (an application, a service process, whatever) or that something is ready (a car to collect, a ticket about to expire, etc).

Sirs, I have tested your machine. It adds a new terror to life and makes death a long-felt want. - Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Response to a request from a gramophone company for an endorsement.

At one level these are quite simple - log into a parking meter service and it sends you a text message when you are within 5 minutes of the expiry time of your current ticket. The technology is however capable of greater sophistication, particularly when integrated with other customer contact methods.

2007-02-21T14:24:00.000Z

A connected World

We now live in a connected world. Don't believe me? Look around. This week, I have received a text message from my motor vehicle repair centre confirming a date for a vehicle service, I recieved an email about my Starbucks card, advising of a special tasting at my local coffee shop, I browse the web with my laptop at hotspots and have the charge sent direct to my T-Mobile mobile phone bill and I receive live schedule information on Edinburgh City buses at bus stops. This all happened this week. And it's only set to increase. What is strange is how different this is to just a few short years ago, and yet how normal it seems.

I passed through Glasgow on the way here and couldn't help noticing how different it was from Venice - Raymond Asquith

What ties these services together? It's convergence. Finally after years of promises, converged media and devices is a real option for millions of us. Never before has so much information been packaged, integrated and presented across channels and devices, often in real time. Alerts, comfort messages, offers & promotions, advisories, etc.

What makes it relevant and manageable is the personalisation. The messages come in a form, at a time, in a location and with content that helps make my daily life a little easier. 12 minutes before the number 26 bus comes? OK, I'll go get my Grande Skinny Latte, rather than wait. When is that service scheduled? I'll just check my phone inbox.

What's really amazing is how 'normal' this starts to become. If we all stopped and thought about it we'd be shouting at each other - "Look how cool this is!!!!" but we go on with our day, "Yup, the plumber has just been to check the radiators and he recorded his time on a mobile device little larger than my phone and I signed the screen. Oh yes, this is just normal." Are you kidding me? How did we move from not being able to programme video recorders to having trades-people record their time on digital devices and automatically bill us?

Yes indeed, it is a connected world. And if you think it's cool today, just wait and see what's round the corner.

2006-12-01T11:36:00.000Z

An Outline Operations Plan for Outsourced Customer Management

This article looks in some detail at how to get started in customer management – what are the challenges, what should the objectives be, etc. The article leads five points to show where your plan should start and how it should develop into the future.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans for the future - Woody Allan

Operations Capability

The Operations Plan is designed to meet the company growth from day one. A key component of the plan is to utilise external partners wherever possible. The reason for outsourcing most operations is to allow fast set-up and wide service range without involving the company in capital intensive (and resource intensive) developments. Utilising external partners can leverage company strengths and access operations capabilities on a variable cost basis – allowing the company to grow quickly by adding scale when required, using the outsourcer’s facilities.

This will not dilute the company’s service experience, in fact, in the short term, it will likely provide a more professional solution than could be deployed from start-up. In time, and as the company develops its customer base, some processes will naturally be brought in-house to reduce servicing costs. Even over the long term, some elements are best left with external partners, e.g. variable volume handling, out of hours handling, etc. and processes that are hard for a small team to be experts at, e.g. Payroll Administration, where an external facilitator can deliver a better service for a lower cost to service.

The outsourcer should be managed by a senior executive, perhaps in consultation with an external Outsource Management Consultant (OMC), such as myself, Rob Innes, as I, and many people like me, have extensive experience of running inbound and outbound customer communication programmes through contact centres.

The chosen centre (or centres) do not need to be geographically close to your operations site. Communications, efficiency, experience, resources, price, are valid selection criteria, geographic convenience is not.

If using an OMC, they will likely have pre-vetted partners with whom they have already successfully placed outsourced business. All calls to the company will be answered in the name of the Brand and the customers will be unaware that they are being serviced by a separate company. As mentioned earlier, especially in the early stages of development, most likely this will improve the professionalism of the business and the way the brand is presented into the market.

Automating the Service Experience

In the short and long term, it should be the intention to focus on self-service options wherever possible, to reduce to an absolute minimum the number of “touches” required to win, activate, service and retain a new customer. This will likely be done through a combination of via web-enabled application forms, automated web procedures, straight-through processing and online forums. The company will always provide a telephone based service, however, to maximise efficiency, encouraging uptake of self-service options for prospects and customers is sensible. Web-enabled self-service allows the company to service more customers from a smaller base, than handling all customers via the telephone or face-to-face.

Unless business is constrained by distribution or legislation to a tight geographic territory, the website will likely be the front door and the contact centre the engine room. The website will contain, in addition to a public face, a large private and secure area for processing applications and managing customers. This work can be backed-off seamlessly to a third party (often and conveniently to the same OSP as the one handling telephone calls in your name) to allow fast go-live. Both the public face of the website, the secure customer management procedures and the forums should certainly be kept regularly up to date and developed to reflect the changing needs of the brand and its customers. Usability, accessibility and maintainability are key issues for customer management portals and strong consideration should be given to web standards from day. Extra effort in planning for semantic markup separated from presentation layouts (separating (X)HTML from CSS) will pay dividends later on.

Managing Data and Generating Business Intelligence

Whether through the contact centre or through the web site, customer and prospect data will be stored in a database of some kind. It may be that this again can be backed-off to the OSP and access given via a hosted model. “Software as a service” is a hot topic these days and can help the business avoid much pain on it’s own infrastructure, concentrating instead on building the brand and winning, developing and retaining customers. Worrying about integrating Microsoft Exchange Server with a network level anti-spam service is not, perhaps, the best use of company time, particularly when it can be purchase on a variable cost basis, with greater features and less heartache than doing it yourself.

This base of data will be gathered, stored and used in accordance with the provisions of the Data Protection Act and in line with procedures allowed by the Information Commissioner. Information for marketing will be used strictly in accordance with the Direct Marketing Code of Conduct. The OSP or OMC will have extensive knowledge and experience of managing customer data for marketing purposes whilst remaining compliant with all current UK legislation. This is not an area for guesswork.

The growing base of data will be used to generate Business Intelligence to inform new approaches, revise media schedules, improve customer profiling, process changes and the like. The company should recognise that customer transaction data represents a valuable asset for the business and should intend to maximise the value of this resource and exploit information intelligence to deliver outputs that matter for customers. That is, if the information cannot be leveraged for improved customer management: smoothing bottlenecks, reducing cost to serve, improving data quality, etc. then it’s value and the reason for collecting it should be questioned.

Key Processes

All processes for the company will no doubt be developed with quality built-in rather than relying on a quality checking process to follow-up the original process. This makes sense and a little extra time in planning at the front end will pay rewards later on. The company should aim to process all transactions “right first time” and should spend a considerable amount of time designing processes and tasks to meet this goal. This is an area where a good OSP can be a huge help – having worked for a number of different brands, no doubt they will have seen at least 80% of your requirements before. Perhaps not, with exactly the same wrinkles as with which you will present, but close enough to make a comprehensive start faster and more cost-effectively than you could manage internally.

An example of straight-through processing.

Straight-through means with no hand-offs to other staff / departments unless absolutely necessary – this is often where delays and errors arise and there is often a direct correlation between increased hand-offs and poorer service, as one rises the other falls.

with quality built in, rather than checking for quality later, would be as follows: a customer telephones to ask for an application form, the advisor will pre-populate the form using a computer programme with built-in error checking. Thus, the printed form that is sent to the customer (or posted online for download and printing, saving time and postage) will only require a signature from the customer and then returned in a pre-printed, pre-paid envelope.

Similarly, an online form-filling application would use exactly the same logic base to check for errors. As the logic rules and processing requirements are updated for the call centre advisors, so it is automatically updated for the self-service online application, intelligently re-purposing the logic for the online environment without manual intervention (i.e. delays, inconsistencies, errors). This reduces errors and re-works and ensures a high percentage of applications are right first time. Experience shows that the higher the percentage of re-works the higher the drop-off rate from application to fulfilment. Consequently the company should aim for 0% error rate and put in places processes to maximise the right first time percentage. This is easier to accomplish using an OMC to operationalise the plan with the OSP.

Key process that might be identified:

Proposition development and communication development

Inbound enquiry handling leading to prospect registration

New customer registration and activation

Customer payment processing

Supplier integration for new customer set-up

Supplier payment and reconciliation

Customer transaction processing and fulfilment

Customer analysis and marketing effectiveness planning

Customer upgrading, cross-selling and reselling

Customer retention

Of course, each organisation will have their own take on process requirements and for some, say, not for profit organisations may use alternative terminology such as donor rather than customer, and some, say, governments may not have a customer retention focus, as there is only a single source of supply for government service and will instead focus on revenue protection, for example. The key point is, for most organisations, the process of finding, getting, developing and keeping customers needs to be a core capability and organised supremely well.

Each process would be mapped graphically and in logic terms to show inputs, linkages, dependencies, processing, distribution and outputs. A process mapping tool such as Visio is usually adequate. Examples of process maps can be found on the main SATSE.CO.UK website.

Future Growth

As a business grows, some tasks may transfer back internally to release more efficiency in operations. Outsourcing will serve the business well in the early days but will become expensive as the transaction processing volume starts to grow. Some organisations accept this and continue to outsource, happy to concentrate on brand and proposition development and leave customer management to experts. To help decide when some activities should be brought in-house, it is helpful to consider the following points:

Is the outsourced service subject to large delivery variations or is it stable?

Is the company expecting rapid growth?

Are capital resources stretched?

Does expertise exist in the organisation, or can it be easily accessed to replace that present in OSPs?

The answer to these questions, service proposition by service proposition will help to identify the value of outsourcing going forward.

A hosted application environment, no doubt, utilising IP based telephony services will be deployed to provide call routing, unified communications handling, queuing services, call recording and multi-media outbound contact. The organisation will require considerable experience to build this resource, but as a hosted service the demands are lower on the organisation. In time, an operations staff can be developed to oversee operations from the company’s own facility. The key roles are:

Recruitment

learning & development

performance management

project management

infrastructure management

content management

facilities management

data security

information management

All of these roles will be represented by either an individual (for example, in the case of data security) or a team (for example, in the case of performance management). These teams will be managed by an Operations Director or similar senior and experienced executive.

It is important to note that having a hosted infrastructure and using outsourcers are not mutually exclusive. An organisation can (and many do) create their own shared or solus hosted environments and serve sessions out to partners across secure links. Technologies such as Citrix is well used in organisations for managing large numbers of IT sessions across large numbers of geographically dispersed staff teams, often extending to contracted third parties. What is newer, but no less capable, is serving Telephony sessions from a central point to remote workers (in house and through OSPs) minimising the premises footprint of switches, diallers and recorders and running one large data centre for both IT and Telephony sessions.

This capability allows OSPs to have IT and Telephony systems “piped in” for use on a contract and then closed down at the end of the contract, allowing all staff (in-house and through OSPs) to access the same resources and to work as one logical team, sharing information and services dynamically and in real time.

2006-11-29T17:42:00.000Z

A Tale of Two Companies

Announcing how seriously you take Quality of Service on your corporate website is a good way of establishing how customers can expect to be treated. Or is it? Perhaps you just set an expectation that cannot be matched in reality. If customers had low expectations and you delivered poor service, that might be easier than promising high and delivering low. Take this contrasting account of recent customer service interactions with two UK online organisations: www.picstop.co.uk and www.simply.com (or www.namesco.co.uk as Simply is also known).

Firstly the good. Picstop is an online retailer of consumer electronic products such as memory cards, MP3 players and the like. They offer a good range and excellent prices. The service in my experience has always been excellent. Recently I signed up for their newsletter and provided a Blueyonder email address (Blueyonder in the UK is the broadband product from Telewest, a nationwide cable company). Blueyonder offer a hosted email service which is great for those of us who travel and may want to access our email accounts from different devices.

When I received my first newsletter the email did not display, but rather showed the HTML code (written as XHTML transitional, to be exact). This code copied to a text file and accessed through Internet Explorer or Firefox displays fine, but accessed via the hosted Telewest service, it does not display – probably something to do with old technology used in the Blueyonder site that does not handle XHTML. I know that Blueyonder are testing a new version so eventually this “problem” will go away. However, to get right back to the service story, I emailed support at Picstop to alert them to the non-display of their email. Unexpectedly I quickly received a personalised response thanking me for notifying them and indicating that they would work on the problem. I thought nothing more about it.

About a fortnight later another Picstop email arrived. Again, the email did not display, but very soon after I received a second, personalised email asking me if I had be able to read the most recent newsletter as they had done some recoding. I was impressed by this level of follow-up, as would anyone. I informed them that it did not display and they replied that further work would be done and hopefully they would get it right. This level of service to cater for a tiny minority of their customers (I estimate less than 1% of their customers would be using the same configuration as me. Still could be a large number, but not a significant percentage) is impressive. I believe this shows a deep interest in the feedback of individual customers and a willingness to develop the organisation according to that feedback. This is a rare quality – actually living the mass produced corporate slogan – “we listen to our customers”. It’s rarely true but it sounds good. In this case, with Picstop, it is true. Hats off to them.

To preserve the global balance of service delivery – for every service there must be an equal and opposite service, to borrow from Newton and the recent Mint TV adverts. So, to balance the positive experience of Picstop, we have the very opposite from Simply.

Simply are a domain registration and hosting provider. They also provide a hosted email service, again, very useful for those of us frequently on the move. Over the past two weeks, Simply have had technical problems with their hosting environment and email access has on two separate occasions been unavailable for extended periods of time (for example, over five hours during the core business day). This is clearly a woeful performance for an organisation that is in the hosting business. A lesson in how to turn a drama into a crisis is what followed.

With no access to my email, customers and suppliers are unable to reach me and I am forced to revert to my home email service (Blueyonder) to communication with clients. As a business professional advising clients about online activities, this does not present the best image. My business has suffered a minor reputational risk due to our dependence on a hosting company. Previously a strong advocate of hosting solutions, this highlights how vulnerable we all are when data centres are unprepared for technology failings. Something related to power supply to a server in a cluster caused this service interruption. How could this be? A cluster? The whole point of a cluster is that it is unbreakable. That’s the first problem. Secondly, why would you expose a service to a PSU with a single point of failure?

However, technology does fail, we should be mindful of this and thankful that it does not happen more often. The part that sticks in my throat is the utter lack of care Simply showed towards me as a customer. Poor information on it’s website, no response to emails and no apology for the outage. On behalf of clients, I have 50+ domains administered by Simply. It seems that even that level of business does not gain a response to an email. Time to find a new hosting company.

2006-11-16T19:58:00.000Z

10 Features you Really Need in your CRM System

Some CRM systems are sold on their feature-rich environment, however, there are, it could be argued, only ten core features that are really needed.

I would rather fail three months into a two year project than three years into a two year project - Scott Ambler

These are:

ability to record all customer interaction data that is important to your requirements.

ability to select, filter, aggregate, extract, report and distribute information important to your requirements. This could be:
- customer selections
- suppression lists
- mailing lists
- campaigns and their customers
- credit stop list
- real-time access
- granular historical data
- live linkage to external data sources
And perhaps with the following features:
- simple counts
- cross-tabs
- multiple level grouping
- out of range events – exception reporting
- sampling – one in n, etc
- multi-dimensional analysis
- statistical analysis
- time trend analysis
- enveloping and routing
And in the following styles:
- conditional highlighting
- rich graphical layouts
- simple lists
- dashboards

ability to efficiently and effectively conduct your business relationships with your customers

ability to track communications effectiveness over time

ability to describe and model customer attributes contributing to positive or negative trading / service behaviour and form multiple discrete customer groups for analysis, targeting and value scoring

ability to tailor marketing communications, servicing communications and customer service handling to the different needs and opportunities of discrete groups of customers

Ability to customise customer engagements to the needs and opportunities of each individual. Note this is different to the point above

ability to integrate and coordinate multi-channel communications, especially, telephone, web, mobile and self-service

ability to measure internal performance over time
- response times
- customer satisfaction
- learning time / training effectiveness
- one call resolutions
- average handling time
- staff satisfaction / attrition
- dependent process performance – commitments made by service provider (advisor / self-service process) delivered by other departments / organisations, e.g. mail room, sales force, etc.

ability to exchange data with other organisational systems and processes with integrity and without delay

Other options that may be required:

Service management / Case Management / Ticket tracking?

Sales Force Automation

Business Intelligence / Business Analytics

2006-11-10T14:19:00.000Z

3 Things NOT to Worry About in a Call Centre

To say that a call centre is a complex environment is like saying the ocean is deep. The complexity comes from the intersection of technology, marketing, processes and lots and lots of people. Despite the complexity, good tools and practices exist to effectively manage call centre resources and deliver a great service.

Anyone who uses the word 'workshop' outside the context of light engineering is a TWAT - Alexei Sayle

As a manager in a call centre, dedicated to quality, the need to improve service delivery and reduce cost to serve, can sometimes seem impossibly difficult to achieve.

1. The moment

This is rule #1 for call centres managers - Grace Under Pressure, "If you can keep your head whilst all around ...", etc.

Trust me, there a lot of crunch moments in a call centre manager's day. IT systems unavailable, high sickness levels, changing requirements, delays in applications development, personnel "issues" between staff or between teams. Everything from racial abuse to failures in key operating systems. Hopefully they don't happen very often, but employ sufficient numbers of people and run a sufficiently complex environement and these and the like will occur often enough to keep you on your toes. The key for a good manager is not to get sucked into the details. No-one will appreciate you diving into the IT room to scream: "When will the xxyyzz system be back online"? You can be sure that your floor managers have already had that conversation. Ensure that the IT team have the resources to fix the problem and that the floor managers can effect some sort of workaround, if possible. That's your role. Once the challenge has passed, what can be learned? Was it a freak incident or were was it predictable? Can it be avoided in the future? This is your next role.

2. Client demands

By client, I mean internal reporting client for in-house call centres or senior client contact for outsourcers.

Clients have to be managed and that can't be done if you are on the back foot. Get your SLA in line and then you can push back and manage the client. If you can't manage upwards then life will be tough for the long term. Most of your clients will push simply because they can, not because they are evil (honest). It is in the nature of heavily linked organisations that delays get passed down the chain to the call centre but the live date never seems to change!

The key is to get to SLA compliance and stick there. The route is dependent on where you are starting from - a bit vague, but there you go. I have no visibility of your delivery issues. If you need to buy time then flag that with your client (better if you don't have to) but in any event, do whatever it takes to get off the back foot. Then, identify the risks to slipping behind on the SLA - what can you put in place to give early warning on risks and then mitigate risks? (See separate article on managing risk). That will lead to operational stability. From there, you can build and develop. Increase service width, increase task depth - take more from the organisation or client to increase the value-add (and visibility - a two-sided sword).

3. Customer Complaints

Yes, that's right. You can't worry about them. If you do you will sucked into a world of administration and needless dialogue. Some customers cannot be satisfied with your service proposition. Accept it and get on with delivering the best you can for the majority of your customers for whom your service proposition works.

This does not mean: ignore the fact that customers complain. That is something entirely different (and entirely negative). What I mean is deal with complaints in aggregate, not individually. Focus on root causes not flashpoints. This is what separates good managers from those learning the job. Quick recap: customer complaint handling for beginners:

recognise the complaint - not all complaints are prefixed by "I want to complain"

categorise the complaint - have we seen it before, do we have a proceedure for it, can we stop it escalating into something really ugly?

gather information - act through information not suspicion

acknowlege the complaint - act honestly and with all due care and respect

deploy fix - above all, get it right

customer buyin - get acknowledgement from the customer that this is the route to follow - NB it may be all you can do, but not satisfy the customer

learn from it - can proceedures / training / customer documentation, etc. be improved?

add to MI - make sure the incident is recorded for later analysis

Your role is not to oversee every step but to make sure that processes and resources are in place to ensure that your managers can effectively deal with complaints without getting sucked into an extended dialogue with Mr Angry.