There’s far more to handling customer contacts than improving the satisfaction and loyalty of those customers – as important as that is. As a primary customer touchpoint, the call center has significant potential to provide other business units with invaluable intelligence and support – e.g., it can help operations pinpoint quality problems, marketing develop more focused campaigns, IT design better systems, and serve as an early warning of competitive developments.
Unfortunately, far too many organizations seem to be missing this opportunity. In its recently released landmark benchmarking study, the Contact Center Operations Report, ICMI found that only 54.8% of call centers are sharing key customer data and feedback gleaned from monitoring with other departments and upper management. “This results in many missed opportunities to improve products and services, marketing, interdepartmental relationships and executive support,” says ICMI’s Greg Levin, one of the report’s authors.
While monitoring is not the only way to capture customer input, it’s a primary source, and when it is missing, that’s usually an indication that other means aren’t optimized either. With the right approach, any organization can better leverage this input to improve performance – which is especially important when the economy is so difficult.
Brad Cleveland
Senior Advisor and Former President & CEO,
ICMI
bcleveland@think-services.com
Showing posts with label Greg Levin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greg Levin. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 31, 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.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
In Your Ear: The Top Censored Contact Center News Stories of 2008By 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.
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