Consistent Performance

If your organization is seeing call center workload patterns that are somewhat different than in similar historical months and years, you’re not alone. And the reasons – the economy, changes in customer behavior, etc. – are certainly no mystery.

Unfortunately, many managers rely on metrics that are summarized over overly-large blocks of time and lose visibility of problem areas. That can be especially problematic when underlying workload patterns are changing. Take, for example, service level… reporting and interpreting this enabling objective by day (let alone, by week or month) not only conceals problems, it can lead to bad management practices (e.g., if you have a tough morning, you will be inclined to keep more agents plugged in than necessary this afternoon in order to improve the "daily" number). Of course, that doesn’t do a thing for customers who called this morning, and it will keep your team from getting other things done this afternoon.

The good news is, you don’t have to get buried in data to report service level, forecast accuracy or other important operational metrics by interval. A simple alternative is to create a table with five or six rows and then input the number or percent of increments that were within, say, 2.5 percent of your target (first row), 5 percent (second row) and so on. You determine the thresholds—and you can tighten them down the road as performance becomes more precise.

Consistent performance, interval by interval, is one of the standout characteristics of a well-run call center. Teach your team to think, plan, report and manage in terms of what’s happening interval by interval—that’s the key to consistent performance. And it's expecially important in this season of change.

Brad Cleveland
Senior Advisor and Former President & CEO
ICMI
bcleveland@icmi.com

And Now for Some... ahem… Breaking News...

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece that concludes that “companies are trying harder to please customers amid the recession – and it appears to be working.” (“Companies Strive Harder to Please Customers,” Michael Sanserino and Cari Tuna, Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2009). The authors rightly point out that the American Customer Satisfaction Index is at a record high, an unexpected result given that customer satisfaction has declined in most prior recessions as companies cut back on service.

One example Mr. Sanserino and Ms. Tuna cite is Sprint Nextel Corp, which has in the past emphasized keeping call times short, but is now focused on first call resolution. According to the article, Sprint’s ACSI score is up 12.5% and the average subscriber called service four times last year, down from eight in 2007.

I am (very!) delighted to see good customer service – and sensible call center practices in particular – get this kind of positive press. And this article is just one example of many similar stories breaking across the business and popular press, recently. Kudos to the authors and especially to Sprint who seems committed to this direction (they announced this morning that they are acquiring Virgin Mobile USA, which has built a great reputation for service.)

But heck… do you ever wonder why this theme seems to be such a revelation to so many, now? Why did it have to take a severe downturn to prod so many companies to revisit and refocus their service efforts? Yep, build and equip your call center to provide solid service, allow it to do its thing – and good things happen. Not new stuff, folks. But if your company is not fully on board yet… better now than never.

Brad Cleveland
Senior Advisor and Former President & CEO
ICMI
bcleveland@icmi.com

Is Your Strategy Working?

Given the current economic challenges, it's an important time to revisit your customer access strategy, and ensure that it is finely tuned to support your organization’s brand and your customers’ needs. All nine components should be up for discussion:

Customers: How your customers are segmented and served according to their unique needs.
Contact types: The major types of interactions that will occur.
Access alternatives: The communication channels available to your customers, e.g., telephone, Web, email, retail, social media alternatives, etc.
Hours of operation: The days and hours each access alternative is available.
Service level and response time objectives: How quickly you will respond to customer contacts.
Routing methodology: How each contact will be routed and distributed.
Person/technology resources required: The agents and systems required to handle different kinds of interactions.
Information required: The information required for each contact, as well as what should be captured during interactions.
Tracking and analysis: How the information captured and produced during contacts will be used across the organization to better understand customers and to improve products, services and processes.

And the benefits? From a customer's perspective, a good strategy leads to simplified access, consistent services, ease of use and a high degree of convenience and satisfaction. From the organization's perspective, common benefits often include lower overall costs, increased capacity and higher customer retention. There is a silver lining to an uncooperative economy: you’ve got the chance – the mandate, really – to adjust direction, hone your operations, and differentiate services.

Brad Cleveland
Senior Advisor and Former President & CEO
ICMI
bcleveland@icmi.com

History's Most Powerful Consumer Movement?

Some believe we are seeing the emergence of the greatest consumer movement in history. I agree. Studies suggest that the vast majority of consumers now use search engines and sites such as the http://www.consumerist.com/ to review the comments of other customers before making brand or product decisions. And bad customer experiences – even if they are one in many thousands of interactions from an internal perspective – end up on blogs, twitter, YouTube and sometimes even the morning news. (This is not just a business-to-consumer phenomenon; the trend towards providing and searching out customer feedback, albeit with somewhat better etiquette as a rule, is similar in B2B environments.)

All of this is just fine with Zappos.com, the online shoe retailer that’s getting oodles of positive press for their great customer service. Sales have grown from $1.6 million in 2000 to about $1 billion in 2008. In an interview with Success magazine (Success, November 2008), CEO Tony Hsieh, referring to their “customer loyalty team” (the 24x7 call center), says, “Most call centers have this concept of average handling time, which is all about how many customers a day each agent can talk to – and the more the better. But that ends up translating into, ‘how quickly can we get the customer off the phone?’ which we don’t think is great customer service.” On company culture, Hsieh says every person – accountants, lawyers, everybody – goes through the same training that call center representatives get. “If we want our brand to be about customer service, then customer service needs to be the whole company, not just a department.”

Some business execs believe these kinds of customer-first strategies apply only to… well, entrepreneurial startups like Zappos.com. But tell that to USAA, FedEx or even American Express (who is putting the customer experience at the center of their strategy). The call center can and should be a powerful loyalizing tool – these are not new principles. They are being “rediscovered” by companies in virtually every sector who know they’ve got to get service right. For those in call center management who really “get it” this is a powerful window of opportunity to make a difference.

Brad Cleveland

Senior Advisor and Former President & CEO

ICMI

bcleveland@icmi.com

The Power of Good Questions

By Brad Cleveland

Are we headed in the right direction? Do our priorities make sense? What would you do if you were in our shoes?

At ICMI, we are often asked these and related questions (they usually come up in the context of working on specific projects or issues with clients). They are good. They are important.

Questions establish context, and the best questions compel decisions and solutions that have far-reaching, positive impact. When it comes to strategy and direction, there’s never been a more important time to ask good questions.

Here are some of the most important questions I believe those leading customer contact services should be asking now:

Do we have a comprehensive and up-to-date customer access strategy that includes all forms of customer access, including new social media channels?

Does our mission reflect the call center’s role not only in efficiently meeting customer demands, but also in contributing intelligence (captured during contacts) to other business units?

How do others across the organization perceive the value of customer contact services, and how can that continually be improved?

Do we have appropriate performance standards for individuals and the call center, and do they align with the organization’s direction and changing customer expectations?

Have we applied disciplined planning and management methodologies to all types of activities, e.g., does our process encompass all contact types and channels, as well as all other types of work related to operations?

Do we have an effective process for training and cultivating upcoming managers and leaders (an important key to success in coming months)?

Do we have a supporting culture that is candid, consistent in values, and establishes the right objectives and opportunities for people to grow and contribute?

Have we envisioned where customer expectations are heading, how we will meet them and what we need to do now to prepare?

Many of the answers to these questions will be interrelated, and some assume (necessitate) the involvement of the broader organization (e.g., marketing, finance, operations, etc.). Effective answers require leadership, persistence and collaboration. But, given the fundamental changes taking place in our economy and the growing importance of customer contact services, asking good questions – then building solid answers – has never been more important.

Brad Cleveland
Senior Advisor and Former President & CEO
ICMI
bradc@icmi.com

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.

In Your Ear: The Top Censored Contact Center News Stories of 2008
By Greg Levin

It’s that time of year again – a time when I reflect back over the past 12 months in our industry and realize what a journalistic coward I have been. You see, all these months that I’ve been writing fluffy, feel-good feature articles and case studies, there have been duplicitous scandals, great injustices, vendor cage fighting occurring all over the contact center world.

Most of you never hear about such unsavory stories because few trade publications have the guts and spunk to go up against the powerful industry leaders and establishment. But trust me, plenty such stories exist. If only I had a dime for every time a top contact center consultant wrote his own “client” testimonials, or every time a leading Fortune 500 company’ center genetically cloned one of its top agents, well, I’d be rich enough to cover the fee that major vendors pay to win “Product of the Year” awards.

Just like every year around this time, I’ve become disgusted by my own cowardice and, as a result, present to you now the top two censored contact center news stories of the past year. If you often become squeamish at the sight of naked, objective truth, you may want to bypass the remainder of this blog/article (blogicle) and instead turn on Fox News.


Speech Analytics Solution Removed from Market for Taking Advantage of Callers Who Aren’t Right in the Head

The power of speech analytics has been highly touted for several years now, but one vendor recently tried to go too far with its latest offering, which has been banned in the U.S.

Where typical speech analytics tools are able to evaluate key words and phrases to shed light on caller preferences and satisfaction levels, CallAmity Inc.’s new product, VoiceVasion, is able to analyze vocal patterns to determine such things as customer sanity, loneliness levels, and likelihood that the customer might be really stupid. Using such information, the system can then help companies take advantage of such poor saps.

For instance, if VoiceVasion’s highly sensitive speech technology detects a crazy person or a numbskull on the line, screen pops instruct the agent to tell the caller that if he doesn’t buy the company’s product or service immediately, the world will end within the next day or two, or a week at the latest. Or if the technology determines that a suicidal person is on the line, agents are told to lie about how every new purchase comes with a two-year supply of Zoloft or a free ticket to Disney on Ice.

Harry Skink, CallAmity’s director of marketing, acknowledges that the product is a bit controversial, but explains that it stands to make a real difference in people’s lives. “The number of wackos and idiots in this country is ever-increasing, but they are often overlooked and ignored. We saw a real opportunity to recognize these people while at the same time vastly increasing the revenues of our clients.”


Top Contact Center Consultant Suspected of Stealing Most of His Insights from Wikipedia

Carl Jeffries’ meteoric rise to fame as a contact center consultant all started in 2004 when he helped a renowned Fortune 500 company implement a VoIP platform, with only three fatalities reported. He received much praise and recognition, and word soon spread of Jeffries’ skill, innovation and full head of hair – helping him land scores of additional consulting clients.

It was recently discovered, however, that up to 99 percent of Jeffries’ ideas, approaches and advice may have come directly from Wikipedia – the online encyclopedia that is written and edited by users who are smarter than Jeffries but who receive none of the $10,000-a-day consulting fees Jeffries charges clients.

Sarah Johnson, director of customer care for CitiChaseAmerica Bank, was the first person to expose Jeffries. A colleague of Johnson’s – who was considering hiring Jeffries to help her call center hypnotize customers into thinking they were loyal and satisfied –
asked Johnson to take a look at Jeffries proposal and give feedback. While perusing the proposal, Johnson realized that much of the information had been lifted directly from a Wikipedia entry on Customer Hypnosis that Johnson had written while drunk a few months earlier.
Dozens of other contact center professionals have since reported similar incidents, greatly discrediting the star consultant. It should be pointed out that it is not illegal to steal information from Wikipedia, thus Jeffries will face no prison time nor fines; however he will likely face years of declining business and having nobody sit by him during lunch at industry events.

Seven Keys to Cutting Costs Effectively

Because of the nature of random call arrival and the reality of queues, simply reducing costs across the board does not work well in a customer contact environment. Insufficient staff or other resources can quickly lead to long customer queues, additional contacts and intolerable agent occupancy rates.

Those who get the best results are more savvy – they focus on leverage points, and have an organizationwide perspective. Here are seven key principles to keep in mind as you look for ways to minimize and reduce expenses:

1) Clarify your strategy and approach. Before making major changes, it is essential that your internal management team agree on the services the call center will provide. Your “customer access strategy” should define issues such as the customer segments you will serve; access channels (telephone, email, Web, etc.); telephone numbers, email addresses, URLs; hours of operation; service level objectives; services provided; and how you will capture information on customer interactions to strengthen processes, products and services. Without this strategic framework, cost cutting efforts are likely to head off in many unrelated directions.

2) Identify organizationwide opportunities. Rather than focus on cost-cutting in a vacuum, look for ways to maximize cross-functional resources. For example, marketing managers may be willing to provide the call center with budget to capture and analyze information on consumer trends and expectations, when shown they can save money on target marketing. Similarly, maintaining effective after-sales services can provide valuable research and development input, leading to sustained market share, better sales and money-saving process improvements throughout the organization.

3) Redouble your efforts to prevent unnecessary and unprofitable contacts before they happen. Chances are, about 20 percent of call types account for something like 80 percent of the call load your center handles. In the context of your customer access strategy, explore options for preventing, handling or deferring a greater percentage of these contacts – versus trying to cut back across the board.

4) Pool agent group resources as feasible. The powerful pooling principle is an immutable law – all things equal, if you take small, specialized agent groups, effectively cross-train them and put them into a larger group, you’ll have a more efficient environment. The objective should be to keep things as simple and pooled as possible without jeopardizing the services specific contacts and customers require.

5) Optimize staffing and schedules. Being even slightly understaffed will cause big problems in terms of low service levels, high occupancy and heavy telecom network usage. On the other hand, those increments (i.e., half hours) of the day producing service levels of 100% may indicate that you have far more people at those times than needed. Getting forecasting, staffing and scheduling tuned up is a sure path to better cost performance – and customers, employees and shareholders all come out ahead.

6) Work on process improvements. Errors and process inefficiencies are particularly troublesome in call centers – they consume valuable staff time, drive up network costs, and contribute to repeat calls. The good news is, even modest improvements to processes can yield dramatic results.

7) Keep your eye on the biggies: customer loyalty, revenues, and market share. Customer expectations are evolving rapidly and customers are more sensitive to perceived value and service than ever. In an uncertain economy, customer care has become a key battleground, and it’s important to assess decisions in the context of how your customers will be impacted. In other words, don’t let short term measures undermine longer term success. These decisions require foresight and a healthy dose of good instinct.

Brad Cleveland
Senior Advisor; former President/CEO ICMI

Brad is passionate about helping organizations improve the effectiveness of their customer contact services. As former President/CEO and longtime owner of ICMI, Brad led the firm to international recognition and an eventual sale to Think Services. He now serves as a Senior Advisor to ICMI/Think Services and delivers keynotes and consulting across the globe. Brad is author/editor of eight books, including Call Center Management on Fast Forward, which received an Amazon.com best-selling award. He can be reached at bcleveland@think-services.com.

An Example of what TO DO in a down economy…

This morning we were greeted by the staff of the Hilton Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs. The staff included one of their Executive Chefs - cooking the HDI/ICMI office breakfast. It was their way of saying thank you for being a great customer. You see, we do a lot of business with the Hotel because HDI/ICMI is in the business of getting people together. We hold a lot of meetings and events.

Here is the point; CEO’s, CFO’s, and other executives are mandating cuts, cuts, and more cuts because they are anticipating or realizing difficult financial conditions. They are telling their management, the people that deal with customers, that we must be more frugal, and no expense is off the table. Now I have no issue with reviewing expenses and doing business efficiently, but there is a line between efficiency and effectiveness.

The further you are from the customer, the easier it is to recommend cuts. But I will argue that what the Hilton did here at our offices is what we need to do at our organizations; wow the customer by investing and standing out from all of the competitors that are cutting. In your support organization you play a critical role in keeping the entire organization efficient. As a Contact Center, you are the face of the customer and have the ability to stand out, and up for your customers in these difficult economic times. We should be encouraged both motivationally and financially to find ways to WOW our customers to improve their experiences with our organizations. Because business will continue, even though it may be less business than last year, don’t we want to be the company they choose to do that business with?

Taking care of your customer like the Antlers Hilton did here today at our office, builds loyalty and tells me, they know how to treat their customers. Where will I want my customers to stay; at a hotel that is cutting staff and services, or a hotel that understands there is never a good time to skimp on customer service?

We have difficult choices to make in the near future but investing in your customer is never a bad business decision.

Are you investing or cutting your services to your customers? I would love to hear from you. Let me know what creative things you have done to reduce costs but improve customer services. Being so close to the customer we know how important it is - now more than ever - to invest in our business, not retract it…

Rich Hand
Executive Director of Membership
HDI/ICMI

The new ICMI Blog has launched!

If there is one aspect of our business that remains constant; it is change. Change is both a challenge and opportunity for both our professional and personal lives. 2009 will be one of the most challenging we have faced in generations. It is more important than ever to stay connected to understand the challenges, but more importantly, how to navigate successfully in this turbulent economic environment. We will do our best here at ICMI to bring you up to date information on current conditions, and the best information we have to help you succeed in these challenging times.

Brad Cleveland, one of the leaders in our industry shares with you some of the ways to be more competitive in this global and difficult economy. Brad will be a frequent author here, and I hope you read and respond to his posting below.

As you may know, I have been bringing together IT Support Professionals for over five years now at HDI, and I am proud of the results that we have achieved by building an interactive community of Support Professionals. My position is simple; serve the membership by providing the services they need to be better at what they do both personally and professionally.
ICMI has a long history of providing services to the Call Center Professional, and I hope to build on that success by incorporating more opportunities to network, share, and contribute to the value that we provide as a community. I am a firm believer in a simple concept; ask the membership what they need, and deliver it!

In the near future I hope to provide you with additional opportunities to share your knowledge and wisdom with others, by introducing some local Call Center events, construct a Strategic Advisory Board made up of you, the members, and to add to the value you already receive from the ICMI membership experience.

I hope to meet each and every one of you to hear how I can better serve you through the ICMI membership experience. I will continue to share with you any changes that we plan to make to the membership experience, and I look forward to hearing directly from you regarding the services you need to be successful.

I look forward to the changes, and great opportunity we have to continue to move the Call Center industry forward.

Blog on!

Warm Regards,
Rich Hand
Executive Director of Membership

Economic Challenges Create Window of Opportunity

Customer contact services are more important than ever during economic downturns… this is your chance to shine!

I recently talked to a group of managers from different verticals who are responsible for their organizations’ customer contact services. Many relayed a similar theme: That they have come so far; they understand and are meeting customer expectations better than ever; they have learned the art and science of staffing and scheduling; they have invested in technology, spent untold hours training their people; and, continue to improve processes. “I just don’t want that work to be for not [if we get into an economic slump],” summed up one.

My take? This is a season of great opportunity! Customer contact services are more important than ever during economic downturns… and this cycle is certainly no exception. Consider a recent (and obvious) example: Financial organizations that provide easy access and competent services reassure customers and add to their confidence – in a crises of confidence, that directly contributes to the organization’s continued wellbeing.

But you don’t have to be a bank or mutual fund to make a significant positive difference. When managed well, the call center’s contributions generally fall into eight areas. When you think about your call center’s ability to help the organization through this season, think through these areas – running on “all eight cylinders” is essential when the stakes are so high:

1. Boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty. The call center ensures that the organization is "easy to do business with," which helps measurably bolster customer satisfaction and loyalty. As customers shop around and competition for wallet share sharpens in an economic downturn, this becomes more essential.

2. Improving quality and innovation across the organization. By capturing a constant stream of data from individual contacts, the call center can pinpoint quality problems early and capture customer input that can lead to significant product, service and customer-communication innovations.

3. Better leveraging marketing initiatives. By tracking buying trends, capturing customer feedback and analyzing demographic information, marketing campaigns can be focused around a better understanding of customers’ real needs and wants.

4. Enabling more focused products and services. By capturing and analyzing customer comments and input, the call center can help the organization to design products and services that resonate with them.

5. Delivering efficient services. Efficient service delivery is a fundamental role of call centers, as they pool resources (people, processes and technologies) in order to provide on-demand assistance efficiently and effectively.

6. Encouraging the use of self service systems. Call centers not only provide support to customers who need help with Web or IVR services – they also capture information that can help improve the systems themselves, and are instrumental in giving customers the encouragement and confidence to use them.

7. Preventing further escalation. Think of this one in the reverse: One of the unintended consequences of cutting call center services is that customers find alternative routes into the organization – ultimately burdening individuals and departments with distracting workloads and resulting in poor or inconsistent service.

8. Contributing to additional revenue and sales. By enabling customers to reach agents who are trained in relationship building skills, the call center can provide powerful up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

In a general sense, focusing on delivering quality services during these times will be an important enabler to maintaining service levels and an efficient cost structure across the board. Consider the impact on the organization's overall workload and quality when the call center helps manufacturing pinpoint specific glitches in products or manuals; or enables marketing to better address the evolving concerns and needs customers have; or helps IT design more elegant processes that encourage self-service use; or supports publicity efforts using customer-specific examples. When you have an eye on the larger implications of processes and services, that will positively impact the entire organization's workload, productivity, quality – and, ultimately, viability in a difficult season.

How far the financial crisis reaches into the real economy remains to be seen. Organizations will be impacted differently, and no one would wish for a bad economic climate. But the services that customer contact centers provide are never more important than when the pressure is on. This test is a window of opportunity, and my encouragement to you is to roll up your sleeves and go after it! How you perform now will impact your customers, organization, call center, and your own career far beyond the current challenge.

Please drop me a note with your stories, comments, feedback… I’d love to hear from you.

Brad Cleveland
Senior Advisor; former President/CEO ICMI

Brad Cleveland is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on call centers and customer service, and he has delivered keynotes and consulting across 45 states and in over 60 countries. Brad has appeared in media ranging from The New York Times and Wall Street Journal to NPR’s All Things Considered. He is author/editor of eight books, and received an Amazon.com best-selling award for his book, Call Center Management on Fast Forward. Brad can be reached at bcleveland@think-services.com..