For all their downsides, bad economies have a way of forcing useful critical thinking across organizations. Common questions begin to surface: How are we really doing? What’s the value we’re creating for our organization and customers? What can we do differently? What should our workload look like? How well are we leveraging resources?
The answers can help you get through a heck of a rough patch in the economy. They can also position your organization for quick and strong recovery.
Making the right decisions requires both intuition and discipline. Although you can’t boil leadership – that’s of course what we’re really talking about – down to a simple checklist, there is something powerful about focusing on the things that matter most. So… what to do now? Here are some suggestions on high-level priorities:
· Develop a global view of your organization’s mission and principles. Then take steps to ensure that every person understands the “why” behind what they are doing.
· Recognize that “best efforts” or trying harder isn’t enough. Instead, look for true innovation opportunities – processes are where the most leverage will be.
· Analyze and understand every facet of your role and responsibilities. Then do the same for every position in the call center.
· Don’t make decisions based on assumptions — insist on having and using accurate and timely data. Use performance measurements, monitoring and coaching as a means of learning and improvement at the process level.
· Remember that those who know processes and customers best are those closest to the work – continually seek their ideas and input, and create an atmosphere of trust and open communication.
· Don’t sacrifice training – that will come back in the form of more expensive problems later. Training people to do their jobs is an enabler to sustainability and growth.
· Communicate openly, candidly, and often the value of call center services to customers, and in sharing customer intelligence that helps improve products, processes and services across the board. This just may be the time to invest in call center services – not cut them.
Brad Cleveland,
Senior Advisor; Former President/CEO ICMI
bcleveland@think-services.com
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
My New Year's Resolutions for 2009
I’m continually looking for ways to improve my credibility and reputation as a contact center journalist and researcher, and not just because of the court order to do so. I enjoy setting ambitious goals for myself, working toward them, and then blaming the fact that I didn’t achieve them on global warming and the economy.
What better time of year to set personal and professional goals than right now – when all the alcohol from holiday parties makes me feel brave and invincible. So, here are my career-related New Year’s resolutions for 2009:
1) I will only quote actual people in my articles. It’s inevitable that, as a contact center journalist, you start to develop some strong opinions and ideas about what are the best practices in customer care. The trouble is that it can be challenging to find respected sources who support the opinions and ideas that you want to espouse in your articles. To overcome this challenge, I’ve become very adept at making up fictitious experts and quoting them in my feature stories.
While this practice makes for better reading and helps to drive home my brilliant points, I realize it might be considered a tad unethical, even if only by people with a pulse. So, from this point forward, I vow to stop citing fictitious sources and, instead, will pay real sources to let me attribute my groundbreaking ideas and suggestions to them.
2) I will learn how to tie a tie. Having worked from my home since 1994, and being obnoxious enough to not get invited to any weddings, I have lost all tie-tying capabilities. This, I have found, has hindered my ability to garner the level of respect I feel I deserve in the contact center industry. Regardless of how much insight and wisdom I provide while presenting on expert panels at conferences, being seated next to peers who are dressed to the nines while I’m wearing my flannel robe and Winnie the Pooh slippers sometimes costs me in terms of positive recognition.
I wish people could just see past my pajama bottoms (well, not literally) and rate me based on the sharpness of my mind and full understanding of all things related to contact centers. However, if all it takes is for me to put on a collared shirt, a non-clip-on tie and some pants without a drawstring to earn a place among the customer contact elite, then I’m willing to go to Target today.
3) I will stop hurting people who are in search of “industry standards” for everything. If I had a dime for every manager who has asked me for the (non-existent) industry standard for service level, abandonment, handle time, cost per call, or (insert the name of any other metric you can think of), I’d have enough money to finish building the dungeon I’m currently constructing to house all such managers.
Am I proud of my aggressive and often violent treatment of these well-meaning professionals who are under the impression that complex performance objectives can be reduced to a simple, universal figure or formula? Well, I don’t know if proud is the word, but it does feel good to go ballistic on an unsuspecting soul who is looking for me to tell him what his and every other contact center’s email response time objective should be. Nonetheless, I acknowledge that verbally and physically abusing relatively innocent managers and supervisors is not only wrong, but ineffective, too; most continue their futile search once they recover from the insults and/or injuries.
So, I promise to stop taking it upon myself to teach these poor contact center novices a lesson through violence. Instead I’ll have a trained and certified goon from Chicago’s South Side deliver the lumps that have for years left my hands swollen, thus hindering my typing efficiency.
Publisher’s Note: Greg is of course exaggerating in this article for entertainment purposes. He is not building a dungeon to house inexperienced nor incompetent contact center professionals – it’s more of a large cage.
What better time of year to set personal and professional goals than right now – when all the alcohol from holiday parties makes me feel brave and invincible. So, here are my career-related New Year’s resolutions for 2009:
1) I will only quote actual people in my articles. It’s inevitable that, as a contact center journalist, you start to develop some strong opinions and ideas about what are the best practices in customer care. The trouble is that it can be challenging to find respected sources who support the opinions and ideas that you want to espouse in your articles. To overcome this challenge, I’ve become very adept at making up fictitious experts and quoting them in my feature stories.
While this practice makes for better reading and helps to drive home my brilliant points, I realize it might be considered a tad unethical, even if only by people with a pulse. So, from this point forward, I vow to stop citing fictitious sources and, instead, will pay real sources to let me attribute my groundbreaking ideas and suggestions to them.
2) I will learn how to tie a tie. Having worked from my home since 1994, and being obnoxious enough to not get invited to any weddings, I have lost all tie-tying capabilities. This, I have found, has hindered my ability to garner the level of respect I feel I deserve in the contact center industry. Regardless of how much insight and wisdom I provide while presenting on expert panels at conferences, being seated next to peers who are dressed to the nines while I’m wearing my flannel robe and Winnie the Pooh slippers sometimes costs me in terms of positive recognition.
I wish people could just see past my pajama bottoms (well, not literally) and rate me based on the sharpness of my mind and full understanding of all things related to contact centers. However, if all it takes is for me to put on a collared shirt, a non-clip-on tie and some pants without a drawstring to earn a place among the customer contact elite, then I’m willing to go to Target today.
3) I will stop hurting people who are in search of “industry standards” for everything. If I had a dime for every manager who has asked me for the (non-existent) industry standard for service level, abandonment, handle time, cost per call, or (insert the name of any other metric you can think of), I’d have enough money to finish building the dungeon I’m currently constructing to house all such managers.
Am I proud of my aggressive and often violent treatment of these well-meaning professionals who are under the impression that complex performance objectives can be reduced to a simple, universal figure or formula? Well, I don’t know if proud is the word, but it does feel good to go ballistic on an unsuspecting soul who is looking for me to tell him what his and every other contact center’s email response time objective should be. Nonetheless, I acknowledge that verbally and physically abusing relatively innocent managers and supervisors is not only wrong, but ineffective, too; most continue their futile search once they recover from the insults and/or injuries.
So, I promise to stop taking it upon myself to teach these poor contact center novices a lesson through violence. Instead I’ll have a trained and certified goon from Chicago’s South Side deliver the lumps that have for years left my hands swollen, thus hindering my typing efficiency.
Publisher’s Note: Greg is of course exaggerating in this article for entertainment purposes. He is not building a dungeon to house inexperienced nor incompetent contact center professionals – it’s more of a large cage.
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