Today, I’m told, is the start of National Customer Service Week.

As much as I’m tempted, I’m not going to comment about how we now have “weeks” for everything. In truth, I’m still trying to work out how we make 52 of them go around.

What does customer service week mean to you? I’d be interested to hear.

From the ICS website:

National Customer Service Week (NCSW), is designed to reward staff for all the hard work they do during the year. By hosting an event within your organisation, no matter how big or small, serious or fun, the NCSW aims to raise company-wide awareness of the crucial role customer service plays in your organisation’s reputation and success.

I’m not sure I’ve got this right: Is the main idea to celebrate good customer service by taking agents off the phones en mass? What effect is this likely to have on customer service?

Regards,
Scrooge

You may have noticed that John’s not been around for a while, and that’s because he’s off exploring South America. I’ve received this email from him that I thought a few of you may be interesting in reading:

Done loads and loads so far; feels like we´ve been here a lot longer than five or six days. We´re in the shadow of a few of the world´s largest mountains - El Misti (just under 6000m) and one that´s 6300m - and they´re all volcanoes. In fact, El Misti is due to blow “any time now", though it gives plenty warning. Scenery is spectacular, even if the mountain passes are really scary at times. LOTS of sitting around in the back of the 4wd truck, but good company as there is a great mix of people. Been up in a Cessna at the famous Nasca lines, climbed up a huge sand dune (200m high ‘ tough work!) and seen the largest sand dune in the world - over 2200m, almost twice Ben Nevis! Had a beach barbie by the pacific, saw hummingbirds in the garden, went out to a huge seabird colony and saw sealions, birds and penguins, about to go to the Erequipa market where you can buy anything from a Donkey, Rats, Food, Cocaine, probably black market guns and I may trade Mrs Clark for a nice Llama.

Next on our trip is an ascent from here up to Puna, which is something like 3000m above sea level. We´ll do Colca canyon, the world´s deepest at over 3000m and see Condor, and then spend a night on the reed islands on Lake Titicaca. Then, we make our way up to Cuzco and in around a week´s time we start on the Inca Trail itself…

Jealous? I know I am….

OK, I get a bit silly at the end but….

From: The United States of Litigation …

“Do Not Call. Those words are music to millions of Americans who have signed up for the list so they’re not bothered by telemarketers. Not content to let things stay as they are telemarketers are now lobbying the FCC to have state laws which regulate the practice overturned. In April an ad-hoc group of firms ranging from the Direct Marketing Association to the National Children’s Cancer Society filed a joint petition asking the FCC to declare that it has ‘exclusive jurisdiction over interstate telemarketing calls.’ The issue revolves around some states whose Do Not Call laws are more strict than Federal law and which prohibit telemarketers from calling anyone on a Do Not Call, regardless of an existing business relationship.”

The above was pointed out to me at the end of last week, I have the feeling this was done to elicit the same reaction as a red rag to a bull.

Digging a bit deeper it seems this ‘Ad-hoc’ group is saying that in five states where, locally, they have tightened the law over and above the federal statutes, marketing to existing customers (which is outlawed) should be allowed.

For a full description see Here: epic.org

Ok, so what does this mean?

Well the short version is some states have completely banned cold calling, whereas the majority have gone with the federal limits on ‘Existing Relationship Contact’, the ‘We may contact you with products or services we feel may suit you’ rather than the other, ‘ We’ll pass your details onto anyone who pays us a large wodge of cash for your personal data’.

This is specific to several states where the local legislature has ruled against not only marketing to individuals who are on the DNC list but to existing customers as well. This means they can’t call to up-sell, re-sell or solicit.

Now I have had calls where they’ve marketed on the basis I’m an existing customer (Guess who?) but I’m more interested in the slightly more esoteric and mercurial status that is ‘Existing Relationship’. Who do I have an existing relationship with? Who do you?

Some of the answers may surprise you.

1) Obviously anyone you trade with, Gas, Electricity, your bank, Telecoms provider.

2) Anyone you used to trade with. So if you’ve changed suppliers for any of the above in the last 12 months they can call and try to persuade you to switch back or sell a new product

3) Now the grey area. Anyone YOU have approached for information and supplied personal contact details to. Again they have 12 months to call.

Now we all know the NIMBY effect around Contact Centre staff. Hands up who’s NOT TPS registered? So one wrong marketing survey, one missed “Can we pass on your details to our carefully selected Cash Cows”, box and the whole cycle starts again. In this case you’ve potentially actually removed yourself from the list voluntarily.

So across the pond they are campaigning to be allowed to call ‘Existing customers’

I’m about to let my imagination run riot.

How long will it be before the courts are sitting on a test case where the American company is defending their right to call and sell you insurance because you bought a can of beans in one of their stores. Therefore establishing an existing relationship.

Come to think of it we’re not that far away here, even given my comments above.
Insurance, home loans, air freshener, new car and bunch of flowers all under one roof,
or in one call? How long before the ‘Existing relationship’ renders the TPS regulations invalid just by the scope of a modern business or a well thought out ‘Strategic Partnership’ forged only to exploit the two, potentially varied, customer bases comes into being?

British Airways and Samsonite? As you use luggage you may travel, as you travel you may use luggage?

Easy Jet and Walkers, because you bought a packet of their crisps on the plane or might be interested in other places they sell their crisps.

BMW and Odeon Cinemas because you saw the Italian Job therefore like Mini’s or vice versa.

Back to the serious part though…

As with Spam and Spam blockers where there is ongoing battle to hit your ‘In-Box’ the marketing / advertising / soliciting trade (Ok ourselves) are constantly adapting to the changing market conditions. I’m deliberately not using the phrase Market forces, all too often we use a ‘Shotgun’ approach. As the legalities of the trade tighten who isn’t prepared to shamelessly exploit the loopholes left in an effort to hit the widest possible demographic?

Will we in five years time see ourselves in the same position as our colonial cousins?

From the article above it appears the US DMA is one of the bodies behind the legal challenge. Whilst here we champion ‘best practice’, we set ‘Industry guidelines’ and we try to self regulate, for which the DMA here is responsible. Will we hit a point where our DMA is forced by the industry to challenge the TPS service it itself helped champion in the first place?

And what’s more do we want to be around to see that battle?

Dave Appleby

I am not a natural whooper and leaper. On a bad day, even the most perky effervescent cheerleader type would probably find curmudgeonly1 a generously optimistic adjective for me.

However one thing I do buy into is the power to influence others; small changes we can make to what we do that can have a big impact on the actions of others. And if this is applied positively (using your powers for good) so much the better!

For example: My fifteen-month old daughter (not uniquely!) has an aversion to having her nose wiped. And thanks to a ‘summer cold’ this is an activity we have to do with alarming regularity recently. (Sorry – stay with me, that’s as graphic as it gets and there is a work-related point to this!) Weary of chasing her round and cornering her with a piece of tissue (at this point do feel free to add a Benny Hill style soundtrack to the image for maximum effect), to be greeted by tears, tantrums and flailing limbs, I considered the situation objectively and examined our respective roles. By doing this I was able to change what I did which then influenced her response. So rather than feed her reaction (“I know, you don’t like having your nose wiped, but it has to be done – now, hold still, please!”), I started praising her (initially non-existent!) co-operation (“Well done! What a good girl having her nose wiped.”). And it really helped, at first her reaction was less extreme, then calm and after five days I just have to ask her if she needs her nose wiped and she says yes and comes straight over!

Separate out what you can control, influence or merely respond to and then adjust your side of the script to influence theirs. Simple!

Now if this sounds to you a little like NLP, well I’m glad you noticed! Joking2 aside, I think some of the more practical NLP techniques can be fairly useful in the call centre/customer service environment. For example I would say that the ability to guide an irate customer to a more reasonable and responsive state to begin to resolve their issue using Pace, Pace, Lead is quite a handy tool. And I would also say that a course for agents to be trained to tap into the callers’ processing preferences by noticing whether they use visual, auditory or kinaesthetic references and then adjusting your own responses accordingly in order to increase conversion is probably not going to bring about the return on investment you hoped for.3

Now typically call centre agents barely have five minutes let alone five days to work this magic on customers. But there are some really simple small things agents can do that can make a difference.

Consider this: If an agent needs to refer someone on, rather than saying, “I’m sorry I can’t help you with that, you would need to contact X”, try saying “Yes, you can do that by contacting X” And how about even anticipating the next question and offering the number! The outcome is the same in both, but how the caller perceives the level of customer service they have received is likely to be more favourable in the second example. Now this example is fairly generic, but I’m sure you can come up with a selection of typical exchanges in your own environments that could benefit from a few simple changes that may even have a Pareto-style4 effect on levels of customer satisfaction. Ask your agents – I’m sure they could come up with some suggestions!

Whether you support NLP or not, surely anything so simple with the potential to reduce callers’ frustration levels is worth some consideration.

Zoe

1 An ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notions.
2 NLP being the art of noticing – well I thought it was witty!
3 Scoff all you like, but as an agent I once endured a five hour session to do just that.
4 Pareto’s law states that 80 % of the objectives or effects are achieved with 20 % of the means or causes.

Last time I promised that I wouldn’t post again on Silent Calls. I promised that I’d change the record.

I’m sorry to say that I’ve changed my mind.

Firstly, because I’ve spent so much time on silent calls over the last few weeks that I haven’t had much of a chance to do anything else interesting. Secondly, because BBC breakfast went nuts about the story this morning.

I’m sure many of you spotted the story, and a couple of you may even have spotted that David Hickson was shown reading our Voluntary Code of Practice.

But unfortunately, this was the most exposure that the code got. This was a real pity.

Whether we can ever expect BBC breakfast to produce a story that supports industry is another discussion, but I wonder if BBC breakfast are really interested in helping stop silent calls at all. I get the impression they’d rather pretend they are and do nothing about it.

What do I mean? Well, lots of people involved in call centre management would have seen the piece yesterday. They may be thinking that they want to stop making silent calls, but don’t understand exactly how the informaton message should be used. They would have seen Robert from the DMA talking about their code being updated and will probably have concluded that they’ll wait until then before they do anything.

It’s unlikely that the DMA will update it’s code until Christmas at the earliest. This is because the DMA has strict rules in it’s constitution to ensure that any changes are fully considered.

The result is that many call centres are not going to think about making this change until after Christmas. That’s a lot more silent calls, and a lot more TPS registrations. This wouldn’t be the case if they knew about the Voluntary code.

I suppose you could put it down to the BBC not knowing about the code, or not understanding why it should have been mentioned. This would be true, except for the fact that I had a telephone conversation with the reporter just before they filmed the piece and explained all this to him.

If the BBC don’t really want to help, perhaps they should change the record.

Regards,
DB

At the risk of turning this blog into a silent calls soap-box, I’m going to post once more on the topic.

Then I promise I’ll change the record.

I spoke a while ago about a guy called David Hickson. David is a consumer who, single-handed, has taken on the issue of silent calls. David’s campaign has been rather high profile and if not for him we would not be in the pressing position we are now. For this reason you may consider him a thorn in the telemarketing industry’s side.

The truth is, however, that David has done nothing more than acted as a catalyst and bought this issue to a head quickly. The real thorns in our side are those who continue to make silent calls.

I received this press release from him last night and I thought you may all be interested:

THE MENACE OF SILENT CALLS - WHO IS THE MENACE ?

Silent calls create a menace in two ways. There are seen as menacing by
some who receive them. They are also recognised as a major reason for TPS
registration thereby creating a threat to the future of unsolicited
outbound.

Many in the industry are now looking seriously at the option of
transmitting an Informative Message, giving their name and the reason for
the call, rather than leaving silence when there is no agent available to
handled an answered call (a NAA call).

For those who are prepared to receive properly conducted marketing calls
this has to be an acceptable alternative and greatly preferable solution to
the problem of Silent Calls. Some believe that following this route will
not only support ethical objectives, but may help to slow down the rate of
growth of TPS registration.

There appears to be a market for selling by telephone, so in the event that
cold calling effectively ceased to be a viable legal activity we must
assume that this would be picked up by those not covered by the TPS. One
may assume that those not covered by the TPS would not respect other
enforced aspects of good practice either, perhaps leading to far more
telephone nuisance than we have at present.

Unfortunately these efforts to retain and upgrade the UK industry are
menaced from two sources.

IS BT THE MENACE?

BT is spending a lot of money on TV advertising trying to persuade all of
its customers to sign up for the Telephone Preference Service. If BT is
successful then its customers may have to look forward to receiving all
their telemarketing calls from those who do not respect regulations.

If BT’s success with its “Privacy at Home” service continues at the present
rate, how soon would it be before this created a real problem?

IS OFCOM THE MENACE?

The companies planning to use Informative Messages need confirmation from
Ofcom that it would not regard them as the same type of nuisance as Silent
Calls. Ofcom has stated that it cannot make any public statement on this
topic, such as that which is required, whilst it is conducting
investigations. Its present investigations into 7 companies should be
concluded by Christmas, unless Ofcom decides that it needs longer.

If the industry has a solution that is nearly ready to go, can we wait
until after Christmas?

David’s website can be found here: http://www.users.waitrose.com/~silentcalls/

Remember, the first draft of the voluntary code is now available here: Dialling Code Link.

Now is the time for you to pledge support.

Regards,
Darryl

I’ve just been speaking to David Hickson (see recent articles) and he pointed something out about the BT privacy at home thing that could be interesting. Please understand that neither I nor David are suggesting that anything like this is actually happening; this is just theoretical.

One of the things that I highlighted was that BT are obviously concerned about the number of consumers who are moving to alternative providers for their call traffic. This is driven by the fact that it can be significantly cheaper to buy your minutes from elsewhere.

Most CPS/LCR companies rely on telemarketing to contact consumers and let them know that they’re being ripped off by BT.

How can BT stop it’s competitors from helping consumers to save them money? Get them all to sign up to the TPS list so they can’t call them.

That’s just one (strongly anti-BT) point of view that you could take. As I said before, I’m not suggesting for a minute that this is the reason that BT are doing this. I’m sure they’ve just got the interest of the consumers at heart.

Regards,
db

I’ve no need to tell you that this industry has concerns about the number of TPS registrations.

It’s obviously with concern that I read about BT (who aren’t afraid of making a few sales calls themselves) who are promoting a new service called Privacy at home. This is sold to consumers as a way of stopping cold calls. It gives the consumer free caller display and automatically subscribes them to the TPS list.

I’ve a few issues with this - mainly because it’s a crooked as a nine bob note.

One of the conditions is that the consumer continues to make some calls using the BT network. This is aimed at getting call traffic back from the CPS/LCR providers that offer a much better deal than BT.

This in itself I don’t like - BT are using the current concern over telemarketing as a way to market something unrelated.

Secondly (and this is the really dodgy one), regarding TPS registration BT say:
“Of course, we’d like you to give your consent for BT to contact you after registration with news of genuine savings and improvements to our services.”

Yes - although they subscribe you to the TPS, BT are still going to make telemarketing calls to you. In fact; you’re likely to receive more calls then before.

Regards,
db

Terrorism is at the forefront of everyones minds at present.

Last Thursday around 50 people were killed. Whilst this was a tragic event, and my thoughts go out to the families that have lost loved ones, the truth is that London escaped lightly. Remember that over 400 firemen alone were killed on 9/11 - and the death toll in Madrid was over 200. More lives were lost at Lockerbie, but the location and nature of the London attack was too familiar for it to not make us stop and think.

This served as a strong reminder that the open nature of our society makes us an easy target. It’s the price we have to pay for our freedom.

I was interested to hear that there was a security clamp down at Nuclear power stations immediately after the attacks on Thursday. This is on the assumption that these may prove tempting targets because of the panic and destruction that would be caused by one of these power stations being destroyed.

Truthfully, they’re safe. Thursday proved that the likely targets are ones that are easy to get into, have a large amount of people in a small space and would cause maximum disruption after the attack.

With that list of criterea in mind, how many people think we should seriously consider the security in our call centres?

Regards,
db

I thought I’d brighten your afternoon with a return to one of my favourite subjects: silent calls.

Firstly, I’m going to start calling them something else. I’m going to call them “No Agent Available Calls” - for a reason I’m hoping to get to in a minute.

OFCOM issue a notification to MKD holdings under section 128 of the Communications Act towards the end of April. They gave them “one final chance” to sort things out before OFCOM considered further action. Whilst this stopped short of making (as I would have liked) an example of someone who was at one time obviously causing a nusiance, it must be noted that MKD holdings have cleaned up their act and this latest investigation was the result of a misunderstand around how to report the number of NAAC’s made. When I spoke to OFCOM yesterday, they confirmed that MKD have returned the first tranche of information required under the notification and the results were satisfactory.

This starts us on a long journey to clarify exactly what is and isn’t allowed. The act itself is not clear and does not specifically mention silent calls or NAAC’s. However, we now know that OFCOM do consider silent calls to be a nusiance and what this industry needs to know is what level of calls are acceptable. OFCOM won’t quantify - citing that there’s many other factors to be taken into consideration, not only the number of calls made. I don’t feel this is a suitable answer though. Can you imagine if we were told that there was a speed limit but we weren’t going to be told what it was?

What is relevant is that with MKD they have insisted that the level of silent calls on each individual line must be under 5% of the total calls made. In thoery, this goes some way to set a rule for us to work by.

A lovely chap called David Hickson, who emails me regularly, seems to suggest that no silent calls are acceptable. Intially this seems a ridculous point of view: I strongly believe that this industry needs to be able to maintain the use of dialling equipment in order to maintain and improve staff productivity levels. Without this, we’ll be taking a step backwards.

However, this may be possible - and that is if we make NAAC’s, not silent calls.

This is an idea that has been in circulation for a very long time. The plan is to play consumers a message (rather than silence) if it turns out that there is no agent available to take the call. This way we don’t get little old ladies that are concerned about the calls, and the consumer is fully aware where the call has come from.

As an industry (lead by the DMA) we’ve always been concerned about this. There’s another piece of relevant legislation: The privacy and electronic communications regulations, this time policed by the Office of the Information Commissioner. This says that it’s illegal to call people with automated called equipment and then play them a message for marketing purposes.

The big question centre’s around whether it would be acceptable to play someone a recorded message which did not contain marketing information, if the original purpose of the call was for marketing purposes. Some people tell me that this is obviously allowed, but reading the regs myself I don’t believe it’s that clear cut.

So I spoke to the OIC about it and they agree it’s OK in principle, but they start to get nervous when you ask them to put it in wrting. I’ve now written to them with some very specific text and hopefully soon the OIC will agree a standard message that could be used. Then we’ll be able to get OFCOM to agree that 5% of NAAC’s are acceptable.

Then we won’t have scared old ladies, and people who don’t want to receive marketing calls can continue to register with TPS just like did before. The big question would then be: What are BBC breakfast going to moan about without the telemarketing industry as a target?

It’s been a long week.

Winning the Olympics. Terrorist attacks in London.

I can honestly say that this is the biggest rollercoaster I’ve ever experienced. These two events were probably the happiest and the saddest that London has seen in last 50 years.

But they both made me proud to be British, and proud to be a Londoner.

I felt immense pride as Lord Coe and his team celebrated the Olympic result. I also felt immense pride at the way that the emergency services calmly and selflessly carried out their jobs on Thursday morning.

What’s my point? I don’t really think I’ve got one.

How am I going to relate this to Customer Service? I’m not.

Britain Rocks.

CSM is a brand new show organised by CMP (the same people who publish Call Centre Focus and bring us the Call Centre Expo).

Whilst not being specifically a call centre show, it’s relevant to what we do and therefore had a sprinkling of call centre exhibitors. By far the most popular technology on site was CRM, although it’s interesting how CRM seems to be splitting into different directions. On one had we’ve got systems that are really just call centre datacapture screens, and on the other we’ve got some quite aggressive sales workflow packages.

The first thing I noticed upon driving into the car park is that the cost of parking has now risen to £7. I don’t really understand what the NEC think they’re doing to deserve this amount of money for lending us their tarmac, but I suppose I’ll just have to put up with it.

I was too busy chatting to make it to any of the keynote sessions, but the speakers looked interesting.

A few things that caught my attention:
MX Digital
I had a really interesting chat with Paul Moorman about how it’s important to ensure that your hosted service provider cuts the mustard. It’s all too easy for someone to host your call centre system from their back room - and you need to ensure that something as business critical as your call centre is supported with correct voice and data links in a secure, fire protected location on servers that are correctly maintained and patched.

Right now
Rightnow provide an on-demand CRM package (which I plan to discuss in CCF this month). What’s really interesting is that they are bundled with a speech service. This means that the CRM is in a position to provide complex voice self-service from information captured by the CRM system.

Talisma
Talisma are placing their CRM as a multi-channel solution, providing a level of workflow management for enquiries into the contact centre. I expect that they’ll look to bundle this with an ACD in the near future to provide a complete out of the box call centre system. When I mention this to the guy on the stand he said that there were no plans at the moment, but did hint that Talisma were owned by the same VC group as Concerto. Could be one to watch.

DPS direct mail
Have some software which, although starting out as a data processing tool, is starting to look little like CRM. This allows data from many sources to trigger a customer contact through any channel (Such as inbound mail resulting in a record ending up in an outbound call queue). I look forward to learning more about this in the future.

Reach2Mobile
These guys have just started selling text message marketing software. Unlike most systems till now, these send messages directly from a GSM modem (rather than over the ‘net to a gateway). Purchasing pre-paid SIMs is a great way to get cheap texts, and the software is well put together. It’s targeted towards getting mobile numbers to opt-in for marketing and could find some great uses soon.

I believe this holds potential for a “call me” text from mobile although the MD told me that they’ve no immediate plans to do this.

ContactCentreWorld
Were there in full force - and kept hassling me everytime I walked past the stand. Frankly, it’s as annoying as when I have to remove spam messages from the forum about how we should visit their website.

Next stop, Call Centre Expo.

Regards,
db

I am not a meek person.

I am demanding, exacting and have high expectations. I have a low tolerance for ineptitude and intellectual laziness.

And I’ve experienced a few customer service failures recently that have particularly frustrated me.

It’s not that I don’t accept that things can deviate from plan; I’m actually a firm believer that it is not so much what goes wrong, but more how a situation is dealt with, by organisations demonstrating positive reaction and resolution, that influences customers’ loyalty and shapes their impression of that company.

People are human, and will make mistakes, however robust your recruitment, training and ongoing development may be. And unanticipated (and unanticipatable!) things will also happen from time to time, often way outside an organisation’s sphere of control or influence, to throw things awry.

Neither of these things is the issue. It’s when things go wrong despite or particularly as a result of everything being done right that I seethe. Processes that are planned in isolation, that don’t drill down further than the most superficial of customer needs and wants, and that are even sometimes designed purely for the convenience of the organisation itself.

For example, I recently needed to request a standard form from my bank. Everyone I spoke to was polite, friendly and helpful, and would rightly have scored very highly on whatever quality metrics were applied, but yet I was not satisfied with the experience*. If I complained, I’m sure it wouldn’t be referenced as such, as nothing actually went wrong.

Isn’t there a case for organisations examining these non-compliant complaints further as indicators for process or procedural conflict? The assumption that all customer service failures are as a result of people or circumstances would be staggering organisational arrogance. Progressive organisations listen to customers, speak to staff and adapt and grow.

This isn’t to say that everything customers want will ever be deliverable, and there is perhaps a case that customers are becoming more difficult to satisfy; what delights them today, they expect as standard tomorrow. We just need to ensure we are looking in the right places for problems.

Zoe

*I called the number listed against my branch in the phone book and was told I had come through to the national call centre, I needed to call my branch on the number they would give me as they were unable to send out the form. But because it was (just) after 4.30pm on Friday they would not be available until 10am Monday. On Monday I called and my branch staff were unavailable, so I was routed to the cluster support team, who were also unable to send me the form, but took my details to pass a message to the branch to put one in the post. 10 days later, the form arrived. Grrrrrrrrrrr. And don’t get me started on everything else!

Hi everyone. It’s been a while since last I wrote, and I’ve been pretty busy what with work, rest and play. But mainly work. Lots of it. We’ve also collectively been devoting our efforts into moving this and our other sites onto a new server and setting up a new framework with which to move everything forward.

However, I’ve been feeling a bit guilty, having neglected the ‘Gurus log for quite some time. And I’m here to do something about it.

Today, I’m going to put my thoughts down about Oftel and ask: Is this feeble beast ever going to learn how to bite?

Time and again, I see examples of companies abusing their positions, and being let off by Oftel with little more than a mild frown and a “ooh, naughty boy, don’t do it again". We have the potential for a world-class telecommunications infrastructure, if only we could shift the dead wood and anti-competitive practises from our industry and encourage innovation and competition. However, with the limping, toothless mutt that is Oftel, our industry ‘watch-dog’ is no deterrent to anyone.

I used to think that the biggest problem was the fact that our communications infrastructure was borne of a state-run monopoly. Privatising this monopoly was in principle a great idea, but it has certainly had more than its fare share of critics. The resultant public company, who shall remain unnamed though I imagine you all know exactly who I mean, has always skirted on the edges of ‘the rules’. Regardless, it’s a publicly traded organisation and as such we can almost excuse its dirty tricks; in a nutshell, its goals are like any other of its ilk - to maximise revenue and add shareholder value - and it is obliged to do this under the terms of its public listing.

As an industry, we need to be protected from the abuses of giant telecoms concerns such as the one in question. Its stifling, anti-competitive operations can be considered as resistance to the threat of alternative choices. However, with the power that big business has, it is vital that someone referees. We all know in our hearts that big business does bend and often break the rules, and will always do this unless kept in check.

So, there is a clear need to provide both an effective ‘watch-dog’ and a ‘referee’ for our industry.

This is where Oftel comes in. It is meant to regulate against all manner of bad industry practises, and provide an independent body to act as industry arbitrator. It should be an example of a highly trained, fair-but-capable ‘watch-dog’, keeping everyone in check.

It fails miserably.

I have a feeling that it is doomed to continue to fail unless it is reformed into a many-toothed beast with real power. I’d like to see it operating with the ‘no bullshit’ force of HM Customs & Excise (a veritable Doberman Pinscher amongst ‘watch-dogs’) or some other such body. It needs the power to act, and needs to actually see its threats through.

However, again and again we see little bark and almost no bite. I ask: is it now time to disband Oftel and create an industry regulator that actually regulates? To turn our toothless “Mutley” into a “Sabre” or “Cerebus"?

OK,

Your starter for 10.

How many of you have somewhere your school reports? Maybe the piece of paper you wrote when you were 10 years old that starts with something along the lines of…

“When I grow up I want to be…”

I’ll take odds that 90% of you remember doing this at some point.

So what was top of the list? Train Driver, Pilot, Astronaut, Soldier, Income Tax Inspector, Mergers and Acquisitions Lawyer? I’ll also take the bet that no-one has:

1) Resource Analyst

2) Customer Care Trainer.

3) CSR / CSP / Agent / TBR (Delete as appropriate)

4) Dialler Controller

On their list.

I was right wasn’t I.

I know we have a reputation in this trade for having a very ephemeral workforce and that high churn rates are considered the norm (regardless of what we all say). I also appreciate the ‘Job for life’ culture that prevailed up until about 10 years ago has now gone and the idea of having (gasp) two careers in your life is no longer thought of as ‘shiftless’ rather the norm, we no longer do collage course / apprentice to a trade / degree in the subject we *will * work in for the rest of our lives.

When I was eighteen Degree courses tended to be either a pure subject (English, Math, Physics, French etc…) or you could do Law, Business Studies, Medical (Vet / Doctor / Dentist). There was very little scope for other choices. This year a friend of mine is going back as a mature student and is interested in property, she has a choice of six (Count em!) courses and only has to decide the final degree choice in her last year. Humm if I’d had that amount of choice I might have stayed on.

Which leads me back top the original question above. From observation we (in the UK I know offshore is VERY different) have two sorts of staff. Type A are the short term student, need a job in a hurry whilst looking for something in their field, people who seem to stay between 0 and 18 months. These probably represent 85% of the current staffing levels. Type B are the people like me who come from diverse sources (in my case being a chef) and for want of a better word, find a home.

So why do we stay? What have we found that makes this different to other trades?

Well in my case I get to be a geek {GRIN} and get paid for it.

That’s obviously not the case for most people, the trade is still ‘something new’ still
something fresh and still working out HOW to do the job properly.

We have best practices, accepted methods and ‘Industry Standard’ KPI’s SLA’s etc..

We also still have the opportunity for innovation, personal opinion (Well you WILL listen to my opinion), weird ideas and experimentation.

This is what I think attracts the ‘outsiders’. As far as I’m aware there is only the one
associate course and several “Certificate in…” NVQ’s along with the planning courses the Professional Planning Forum run. These have only been available for the last couple of years anyway.

The nice side of this is we have had chance to come in and do well in an industry because we CAN’T be judged on prior qualifications. There aren’t any! Whoopee for us.

The drawback is we’ve just about hit the time that we’ll need to grow up, the industry will need to formalise the qualifications and requirements for a post meaning we’re probably the last to have all the fun. At some point we’ll need a BSc (BA?) in Contact Centre Operations, a BSc in Statistics with Planning. A rationalisation of the myriad of NVQ’s available and possibly the establishment of a BTEC track as well

I just hope when they get round to it the industry is consulted. The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors have tied in with the property and planning courses at universities
so much that they no longer run their own internal qualification exams.

I just hope at the time I can get a Dip(Ed), can you imagine me in a lecture hall?

This could be fun.

DaveA

Firstly, I’m sorry for not posting. It’s been a few weeks. I feel like a very, very bad person for neglecting you so.

Second, sorry for moaning about OFCOM again.

BBC news website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4516101.stm

What’s going on? First offence OFCOM say “Sort it out now, or you’re in trouble". They continue to offend, so OFCOM say “Honestly, sort it out this time, or you’re really, really in trouble". How long do you think this will go on for?

What sort of message does this send out to the industry about compliance? More importantly, what sort of message does this send out to consumers about how this industry (including OFCOM) feel about compliance?

Anyhow, It’s May 5th people. Don’t forget to vote. I know you’re all busy, but it just isn’t an excuse.

Regards,
db

(Just for clarification, those weren’t OFCOM’s exact words.)

Just a short UK based blog today.

As you all *May* (Oh the awful pun) be aware, we in the UK have a General Election coming up in the next couple of weeks

From a personal point of view I think the right to vote (franchise) is one of the underpinning tenets of UK Democracy (Cue guffaws).

Without getting into my personal viewpoint or personal politics I was err… surprised by the results from the site below.

Who Should you Vote for?

As a personal observation I do work on the basis that if you don’t vote you’ve thrown away the right to complain for the next 5 years (not that I whinge about anything.)

Also there may not be anything you want to vote for, but there will always be something you want to vote against.

So use the vote you have, make time, or if all else fails you still have time to register for a postal vote (just)

DaveA

I know a man who can….

As this is a family site all the swear words have been deleted from the following story. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged anything but things have been a bit hectic. This one isn’t really Call Centre related but I thought the general ideas might apply.

A couple of months ago I organised a surprise party for a friend of mine, using a local pub in Watford I hadn’t been to recently. It had the advantage of being easy to get to and having a separate function room.

Whilst sorting out the details with the (new) landlord the conversation go onto entertainment and Audo Visual.

From this I ended up offering (with assistance from a friend who’s a sparks) to install and align an old 3 gun video projector in the bar. Not a problem, I’ve not used this particular model before but the principal is the same for all of them.

We arranged to go in on Good Friday to hang the projector and do the alignment. Now I haven’t done one for a few years but I’ve probably done 50-60 in the past. OK I think, ‘This’ll take 3-4 hours’, and so it should have.

This was where the fun started.

In the weeks before I’d had fun getting a remote control so I could get the alignment grid up and trying to obtain a manual. In the end I ended up with a copy in PDF format for the next model up but no problem there. For what it’s worth Seleco’s customer service is non-existent. I’d say bad, but I couldn’t even get a reply let alone an answer off of them.

So we get to site.

And the projector is already on the ceiling. Ah…

The landlord had thought he’d help by putting it, and the screen up in advance. So I spent four hours trying to align the projector using every trick I could remember o make it work.

As a technical note, the screen size and alignment is VERY dependant on the distance and angle from screen to the MIDDLE of the projector.

Now here’s the diplomacy in action. How do you explain that the down angle should be 12 degrees and he’d set it to 20+; also the throw distance should be about 8′ for the screen size and it was nearly 12. The screen top was also higher than the guns rather than level with.

Having had a crash course in projector alignment my colleague (the sparks) went back last weekend and spent another 4 hrs moving it nearer the screen, changing the height and re-aligning as I’m in Manchester and not down every weekend.

So he moral of the story I suppose is.

Sometimes it may be a simple job but it can cause problems down the line. You may be able to do part of the job but what impact is that going to have?

Whilst it added problem s the landlord thought at the time he was helping but in effect he wasted a day of our time trying to work around the problem that wouldn’t have existed if he’d let us fly the thing in the first place.

At the end of the first day the mantra was “Why didn’t he just let us hang it?”

As an additional note does anyone have a manual for a Seleco SVT150?

I suppose this applies to all trades, how many tradesmen are making a living off of DIY disasters? So it’s not bad news for all.

DaveA

We’re not usually in the business of promoting services or products here - in fact most of us feel more at home when we’re rubbishing them. I think that’s what they call a British thing…

Anyway, I stumbled across something a couple of months ago that I think is quite good and I’m going to share it with you. I don’t know if the concept will ever take off and prove worth the money, but as I said, it’s cool.

Webgreeter.com
It’s called www.webgreeter.com and it’s a service that provides a live chat connection between the website user and an agent. Nothing new there really - web chat and collaborative browsing have been around for a while and as yet haven’t proven to be that popular. Why this is remains to be seen - although I believe that the problem is mainly due to sale reps not being aware of the capability of the systems available (One reason why business development should use the skills of consultants more)

The difference with webgreeter is that rather than wait for the customer to request live chat with an agent, you automatically open the session after the user has been at the site for a pre-determined period. Say one or two minutes. The philosophy behind this is that most users tend to leave the site within a couple of minutes, probably because they couldn’t immediately find the information that they were looking for. The idea is to catch them just as they are about to leave and ensure that they got what they were after.

Pushy?
At first this seems a little forward - but it is something that we already see in the real world. Often when you walk into a shop for a browse you get jumped on by a salesman. Annoying as it seems, this dialogue can convert a sale where a customer was too shy to ask, or where a customer misunderstood the service or product on offer. Furthermore, if handled correctly it can be very good customer service - although the line between customer service and sales is sometimes more grey than an accountants suit.

So the style of greeting is essential - but due to the technology this is easy to control. It’s also easy to capture and assess the conversations at a later date for training purposes.

Chat on the Internet…
…is now widely accepted - especially by people who are quite “shy” in standard society. The fact that it’s slower and more fraught with difficulties such as mis-understanding and identity confusion doesn’t seem to bother most people. I’ve working with many who’d much rather send an email than ask a question face to face or on the phone.

I never click on the chat button on a website - just the same as I rarely ever go and ask an assistant a question in a shop. However if I’m prompted I’m often quite happy for a conversation, and this usually ends up with me getting more useful information that I would have done otherwise, even if I was a little resistant to begin with.

Regardless of if the technology is “pushed” as webgreeter is, or a orthodox “push a button to chat” setup, I think we’ll finally see more of this in the years to come. Hopefully we’ll start to see many true multi-channel contact centres, where agents are automatically fed calls, sms, email, scanned paper or webchat depending on priority and queue time.

Regards,
DB

Sometimes I wonder if what the call centre industry needs is full-time spin doctor. I always come back to this thought whenever I see an article like this.

Now, regardless of your view on call centres you�ll see that it�s a pretty weak article - there�s some �rough� statistics banded about and talk about people taking things into their own hands�.just the kind of thing I come to expect from our press which loves to hate UK business. If the press would give us half a break it would be nice - perhaps the independent should construct a follow up article about the good stuff UK contact centre�s are doing. But hey�pigs might fly.

I�m pleased that people want to act, in fact I�m quite tired of apathetic Joe Public. I just wish they were encouraged to do it in a different fashion.

As a Contact Centre Consultant I�m more attentive than most when I call my water company, bank or car insurers. In fact, I expect good service first time and I�m very intolerant if I don�t get it. I�m pleased to say that this doesn�t happen very often, the companies I call offer me very good service.

So I struggle to understand what�s going on here�what I read in the press is radically different from what I see.

I think an element of this is the press trying to find a story in something that doesn�t exist.

But I think it mostly comes down to supplier selection: I choose companies that offer good service. If you treat me badly, I switch. It�s no trouble nowadays to move anything: mortgage, bank, services. If you think it is then you�re just lazy. Remember though that this won�t be the cheapest company�but that�s the way the world works. If you want quality service you have to pay for it. So come on people, vote with your feet.

You don�t complain that the lacklustre service in McDonalds isn�t as good as the Michelin starred restaurant down the road, so stop complaining that you end up in a queue when you call your electricity supplier. After all, you did switch because they were the cheapest.

Regards,
DB

Some people are lucky; they sail through life with a ‘devil may care’ attitude and don’t seem to be susceptible to the ill-effects of the modern workplace. For the rest of us, though, we’ve got to watch out as there is a very real and ever-present danger in every workplace, be it small or large.

That danger is stress.

Sometimes stress isn’t taken seriously enough, yet it is one of the most commonly cited reasons for employee absence. Unlike most ailments, however, stress can take more than a few days tucked up in bed to cure. For many people stress is debilitating, impacting in all areas of their lives. Relationships suffer, tensions rise, friendships wane. It’s a bad thing.

In the call centre, it’s quite common for agents and management alike to be placed under ever-increasing pressure to meet often arbitrary performance targets. Quite often these targets are based on bad management information and as a consequence unattainable. However, senior management isn’t always the most rational of beasts, and so no quarter is given to those who speak out. As a result, we are bound by unrealistic targets and this places enormous - often insurmountable - pressure onto us.

This causes stress!

Some ideas to mull over

The question is: are call centres particularly conducive to employee stress? I’d like to suggest that they are, and that we can do something about it.

Modern contact centres are all about efficiency and lowered costs. Sure, many will argue otherwise, but when push comes to shove, it’s about getting the most out of a workforce for the lowest overall cost. It should therefore come as no surprise that the workforce get stressed when every last detail is analysed using spurious and unreliable analyses. The average senior manager cares not for statistics. They care not that the mathematical basis for their pie-charts is based on incomplete or incorrectly interpreted data. They just want to ensure that the little graph of costs keeps heading down whilst its sister graph of profits heads up.

The pressure to perform is all around us.

We can, however, do something about all of this. We need to ensure that senior management is educated to the knock-on effects of nebulous and unrealistic target setting. Tell the Pointy Haired Bosses that their targets need to be realistic - and ensure that we exercise our right to full disclosure on the measures that such bosses use to define performance, targets and so on. Emphasise the point that the continual tightening of the target thumb-screws is resulting in worker stress and hammer home the point that stress is extremely dangerous to an organisations resourcing; people quit, or end up on long-term sick-leave. Educate your colleagues - ensure that they understand that stress is not a good thing, it’s not macho and that long hours do not necessarily let you achieve more. Host a chill-out day - something fun which allows workers to leave the daft targets behind and relax. For that matter, why not offer free relaxation sessions or even massage?

There are so many ideas to combat the effects of stress, but these are reactive and the best way to deal with stress is to prevent it ever happening. As managers and strategists, we must be very careful about what we ask of our workforces, and we must ensure that our targets are not built on false assumptions and lies.

Sorry it has been so long without an update. The work here is overwhelming, and various events have made it difficult to stay in touch.

There is a desperate need for the work here; the impression the western press is creating that all is in recovery is far from the truth. The government has spent very little funds, and most people will still be in tents or rubble houses when the monsoons hit. The poverty, hopelessness, and overall devastation of this beautiful island is beyond belief. Every day something makes you realise that there is no way anything that we do is enough - there is always something more.

The original project was through Global Crossroads, to build permanent housing for families affected by the Tsunami. While the time spent was rewarding in the sense of a visible output - the house - the poor organisation, suspect family selection process, and complete lack of project management by Global led to many frustrating waiting periods where work was delayed. Tania & I agreed to help with the project management however the support promised by Global did not materialise, and we made the decision to join an alternative organisation. We did however succeed in working on the completion of two houses.

DO NOT GIVE YOUR MONEY TO ORGANISATIONS SUCH AS GLOBAL CROSSROADS. THEY ARE NOT SET UP TO PROVIDE EFFECTIVE DISASTER RELIEF AND THERE ARE OTHER ORGANISATIONS THAT WILL PROVIDE FAR BETTER OPPORTUNITIES TO AID THE PEOPLE OF SRI LANKA.

I am now working with Project Galle 2005 - http://www.projectgalle2005.com - which is a frontline aid programme.

Having raised concerns over the sanitation and tent quality at many of the camps and the lack of drainage with the monsoon coming early, it was agreed that we would begin a large scale joint project with the United Nations - UNCHR, UNICEF & World Food Programme, with CHF International ( http://www.chfhq.org ), and with Red Crescent. The scope is to prioritise camps for upgrades, work with the government, community leaders, camp owners (e.g. Italy have donated around 1000 tents to the original camps), and technical experts in identifying solutions to bring the camps to an acceptable standard of living. Thereafter there will be the implementation of the upgrades for the first 20 camps identified for phase 1. Phase 1 will provide a significant improved standard of living for 3500 people from almost 1000 families, and ensure the survival of the camps through the monsoon. Phase 2 will include further camps, with a total of 63 identified for upgrade. I have also proposed an ongoing education programme for the camp leaders, which the UN have signed off yesterday.

I have been selected by the joint organisations to head this up as Programme Manager for the overall project. This means I am in regular meetings with the UN agencies and CHF & Red Crescent, as well as with local government, to ensure all parties are working in coordinated workstreams.

As I have only a week or so left, I am trying to drive through the government permission (via UN intervention), the assessment and detailed solution designs for each camp, and create the detailed implementation plans including government & stakeholder signoff. I also need to concentrate on handing off and training up resource for the actual implementation management.

Phase 1 of the programme will run throughout April, and I am under constant requests by PG05, the United Nations, and CHF, to extend my stay to manage the implementation. I have explained the situation that while I am able to fund my stay, it would require paid leave from Zurich, and that this was agreed only until the end of March. It is clearly something that I feel is extremely important, and I have therefore agreed to request an extension to my leave. Watch this space…

The National Audit Office has today published a report about the new directory enquiry services (DQ).

There’s been some interested comments about this already in the press, and although I don’t agree with most of them I see no need to go over old ground. So I’m going to pick on something that caught my eye as I snoozed in bed this morning.

On BBC Breakfast was a guy from 118tracker.com. This is a very good website and lists details of all the DQ providers together with rates and services they offer.

I wasn’t so impressed with his comments. His suggestion was that the public was largely uniformed about the extended DQ services that are available. He then went on to say that this was OFCOM’s fault.

If you’ve read my posts in the past you may have realised I’m not a fan of OFCOM. I don’t believe they work hard enough to enforce the legislation that’s in place. However, I’m happy to defend OFCOM on this point. They’re not a marketing organisation and it’s not up to them to educate consumers as to the services available. The only responsibility OFCOM have is to ensure that consumers are aware that they have a choice of suppliers. I think they did this very well.

Marketing
At the end of the day, I don’t think the failure to take up these services is due to a lack of advertising. People are not interested in them and have therefore ignored the advertising. I don’t think the public is prepared to pay a few pence to get cinema listings when they’re free in the local paper or on the ‘net.

The important thing about a free market is that you…market. You’re not forced to offer any particular service. Ensure that there is a market for what you’re offering, ensure that people are prepared to pay for it.

Public perception
In true style of the 3G licence fiasco, enormous amounts of money were being thrown around after 118 numbers were allocated by the big boys trying to get the best numbers. This was followed by several large-scale advertising campaigns, one was so successful that still to this day people shout “Got your number!” at me when I’m out running.

This gave the public an inflated perception of what liberalisation of the market was going to offer. They didn’t exactly know what was going to be different - they just knew it was going to be great. This gave way to dissapointment when things weren’t much different to what they used to be.

As a consequence everybody is still saying that opening the DQ market was a failure. Some say it’s more expensive. Some say the services are no better. Some say the quality is worse. But the truth is:

Some DQ providers are cheaper than 192, and some are more expense.
Some DQ providers offer extended services, and some don’t.
Quality is the only thing we can’t measure because data was never collected about 192. However, many DQ providers offer over a 90% success rate.

All call centre staff will know that the 10% of numbers not found will be more to do with GIGO than anything else.

You pays your money, you takes your choice. A free market at it’s best.

Regards,
DB

I just want to have one quick dig at OFCOM: They elected to disallow use of 118192 because it was seen as the best number and be an unfair advantage.
At which point did someone think this was a better number than 118118?

…about my effort: Leaving one ski vertical in the snow whilst landing over 10 metres from it.

Darryl’s crash

And I had my jacket undone at the time which made for a very cold and damp afternoon.

Well, I’m back from a weeks skiing and feeling like waxing lyrical. As I’m not overly known as a ‘people person’ and am never likelyto be the worlds greatest trainer I thought I’d share a few observations from the last week.

Point one: I’m not the worlds greatest skiier and never will be

Point two: Last year I didn’t do very well. I finished the week thinking I hadn’t done anything at all.

At the end of this week I was skiing Red runs comfortably and thinking WOW I can do this! So what changed? The simple answer is my instructor, at the end of the first week I was STILL having problems stopping. This year that problem was solved within 15 minutes on the first day ( 2 minutes to recognise the problem and 13 to ‘break’ the habit). Looking back on the first year, the sessions were fun but I didn’t seem to get anything out of them. This year again fun but an actual feeling day on day of getting something out of it.

One thing that stands out however is the different Styles.

This year the instructor would call one person down at a time, then spend just 60 seconds pointing out ONE error and getting tghem back into line, working on one problem at a time. Last year everyone go down then a group breakdown on the problems. Obviously the task loading with the two techniques is radically different.

Example 1 (This year). Ski down, speak to the instructor and get “You need to push further into the skis as you stop". Back to the top and wait to go again. With thinking time about correcting the one error. Repeat as required.

Example 2 (Last year). Ski down. Back to top. Wait for everyone else to go. Instructor says, “Dave you need to push into the skis, Keep your upper body straight, Start the turn earlier and move the knee more, away you go.” Repeat once or twice.

Now which of these is better? Are either of them wrong? People learn in different ways I know and we’re really into a subject here I know almost nothing about.

So a couple of questions to the trainers here.

1. How you decide how to teach a group?
2. How do you know if it’s working 1/2 way through the session?
3. Is it correct to change the method 1/2 way through?
4. Do you tell the group you are changing or just do it subtly?
5. How do you judge success during a session?

Have fun,
DaveA

Today I discovered a new diversion from my planned activity for the day*.

I’m not normally one for games, but this one at least has some relevancy to what Gurus is all about, so I figured I’d give it a plug. After all, we all need a break from our call centre work, and so what better way to spend our free time than with a frustratingly addictive little call centre game.

Ah, and with the most annoying soundtrack, too. Try it, I think you too will end up whittering away some time trying to reach your quota.

It makes me wonder whether we should make a Gurus game. Hmmm… now there’s an idea…

John

* the planned activity for the day was something more mundane and serious and boring, so the diversion was very welcome indeed

Stuart just posted this at CCV: McDonalds article.

My first reaction was one of horror. This is surely taking things a little too far. Then I started to put some thought into it and realised this could go either way. There’s scope for major success or failure.

The golden arches
The logistics are quite interestig for starters - The sound needs to be sent from the terminal to the call centre, and then the order needs to be sent back to the resturant. All of this can be accomplished over IP, so each resturant just needs an internet connection. Issues here are latency and reliability. If there’s a big delay then the customer will get upset, and if the line is down then no order. I suppose in this instance a real person would step in.

The customer perception
The customer is not going to expect to be sent to a call centre, so when they roll up they will expect a voice immediately. This means no queueing. McD’s will have to staff their call centre carefully to ensure that this doesn’t happen - and the 3 daily peaks of breakfast, lunch and dinner will have to be carefully thought about.

The real fact is that the customer shouldn’t realise that there’s anything different from normal going on. Ok, it may not be a local accent, but there’s sufficient “transients” nowadays for this to be accepted. As long as speed of service is there and there’s no latency on the line, the customer doesn’t lose at all.

Quality of service
This is where the make-or-break is. We could have agents that don’t understand anything about the order that they’re taking. There’ll be wrong orders, complaints, lack of ownership by the staff in the call centre. It’ll be a mess.

But I don’t think it’ll turn out like that. I think that this presents a chance to improve the order process. Training is easier. There’s likely to be less people to train and they can all be trained by one trainer. This means the process will be much more uniform. These people can get to know the products better, and will always be aware of the latest offers. Finally - it’d be possible to record the transactions to improve the service more later on.

Loss of jobs
The final argument that is always made will be about the loss of jobs. McD’s could probably run each resturant with one less member of staff. There’ll be the same uproar that there usually is about jobs being lost. But what’s the problem? This is progress. Saving money like this gives us cash to advance elsewhere. Ok, so it may only result in gassing chickens, but progress is progress!

So…
I think this is cool. We may not like the sound of it (and it’s not happening in the UK yet, anyway) but I do believe that it’s good to change the way things work now and again. You never know, you may prefer it. I know many people who complained about the thought of telephone banking who now can’t live without it.

Regards,
DB

When a company really, truly, fundamentally annoys you - whether because of bad service, a lack of interest in you or your needs, a general lackadaisical attitude to quality, whatever - then you might have felt compelled to act. You might have thought about writing a letter, but, wait, that’s so old-millennium. You might have considered an email, but you know that they’ll never read it. You might even have tried calling to register your dissatisfaction, and ended up in the IVR maze from hell.

If you’re a normal person, you might fume a bit. You might tell your friends over a few beers and fume some more. You might even try to talk random strangers out of buying the products/visiting the store/doing any business with your hated organisation.

There is, however, another way. It’s the sort of thing that I have even considered. Me, mild-mannered janitor of mystery. Me, taker-of-paths-of-least-resistance (at least when it comes to these sorts of things). Me. Yes, your amiable host…

Some people, driven insane by the incredible short-sighted, can’t-give-a-damn attitude or intrinsic disastrous service of (generally bigger) companies, resort to a real ‘don’t get mad, get even’ tactic. One I secretly admire. Damn, cat’s out of the bag.

What we’re talking about here, people, is the concept of the Corporate Hate website. For instance, if you really hated CallCentreGurus and were really mad at us, you might send us a nasty email, which we’d ignore. Probably. Or, you might register CallCentreGurusSucks.com and try to get your own back. Now, of course, you’d never do that to us, as we’re the good guys, but you might do it for a larger company.

Bearing this in mind, I direct you now to this interesting article which I have just discovered. It’s a fascinating insight into the mindset of the truly offended, deeply unhappy, disrespected and angry customer. Customer with the time, and willpower, to really play hardball.

I have a lot of sympathy for some of these people. They’ve been driven to it by uncaring or ineffective organisations with lousy customer service. They’ve seen no option but to lash out in the public arena. They’re the extreme cases, for sure, but they’re customers no less.

As customer service and call centre people, it’s our duty to try to prevent such customers reaching this plateau of dissatisfaction. However, not everyone sees it this way, and so it’s no surprise that sites like this exist.

Links:
Corporate Hate Article @ Forbes

How do you like our new home? Nice, isn’t it?

Anyway….

I wrote here a couple of weeks ago about making your own telephone system rather than buying one. I’d like to talk today about a similar topic - using a “hosted", or “network-based” system.

For those who are not familiar with the concept: it’s a bit like renting a telephone system, except you don’t have the system on your site. It’s usually located at a datacentre which has reliable telephone and data connections. Thesedays, just about any telephone service is available as a hosted solution (inbound, outbound, IVR, call recording, speech recognition, etc.).

How does it work?
The basic idea is that each agent has a direct dial number. When the system is ready for an agent to deal with a call it will transfer it through to this number. In certain cases the telephone lines are lost competely and the voice sent via IP. Some setups are slightly more complex, with an active-x or COM component provided to install on each agent’s PC. Via the internet this lets the hosted system know what each agent is up to, and in return provides from useful CTI that’s essential for some situations like outbound calling.

What’s it cost?
Obviously price differs from supplier to supplier, but you usually have to pay for the following:

• An account setup fee
• Monthly rental per agent
• Inbound leg call costs to connect to your agent (If via PSTN)
• If applicable, outbound leg call costs to connect to the customer

Pricing will depend on the exact service - and I know of suppliers who will provide an inbound IVR service free if it’s on an 0870 number and they keep the few pence made from each call. For high-call campagins this is quite a popular model.

Why do it?
The key benefit is scalability. Within hours your supplier can double your call centre capacity. No waiting times for kit. Assuming, of course, that you’ve got the lines and agents in house.

As technology improves, your supplier should update their kit and this will be at no charge to you.

You don’t have to deal with capital expenditure for the switch, which means you can account for the switch as P&L rather than as an asset.

More reliable than a switch on site - with technical support taken care of.

Multiple sites and homeworkers are easily accomodated. In fact, physical location is completely irrelevant.

Why not do it?
It can be more expensive. Whilst it seems cheaper on a monthly basis (and this is how most suppliers will try to sell to you), it will cost more over longer periods.

Lack of control. Unless you’re a very very big customer you’re not going to be able to demand changes or improvements to the system. You can’t decide which call carrier outbound calls go through so you may not be getting the most cost effective deal.

You still need telephone lines for all your agents - unless it’s a VOIP solution.

Who does it?
iCall
Ultra
Five9

to name three….but you could also consider getting a consultant to research suppliers that are suitable for you. There are many around at the moment and not all of them provide good service - so beware.

I honestly believe that most call centres will follow this route over the next 5 years. It fits perfectly with my vision for the PSF call centre. In the future your company will need to be lightweight and turnaround jobs in hours rather than days.

On the flipside - we may see the traditional box manufacturers get cleverer with what they offer and start to provide scalability-on-demand (IBM style). Keep your eyes open for this.

Regards,
DB

An ever-increasing number of us are finding the benefits of affiliation with one of the various call centre or customer service organisations. The most obvious of these is the Call Centre Association, but there are many others.

Membership of such well known organisations can be extremely beneficial, but we’re interested in hearing about the lesser-known associations and networks. How did you find out about them? Is it helping you develop or improve your call centre, or if you are a supplier, is it generating new business.

This of course extends beyond the sphere of our own industry. Many have written of the benefits to be had from being affiliated with organisations for business networking, including Chambers of Commerce and local business development agencies. Often, these organisations can offer funding opportunities for business growth or recruitment incentives.

Again, we’d be interested in your comments about any affiliation with such organisations - is it worth it, and has your company benefitted? Would you recommend others to look into such organisations.

“Why are you asking all of this", you may wonder. Well, everyone knows that in modern business (in any discipline) it’s not so much what you do but who you know and how much you are able to work that network. Playing the networking game can be hugely beneficial in many ways.

So, let us hear your thoughts on affiliations.

I received an interesting email just the other day which alerted me about a film whose premise I found intriguing. Apart from the fact that I generally enjoy watching films (especially non-Hollywood fare - with a particular soft spot for low budget horror flicks and offbeat French worldy observations such as Amelie), this particular film was noteworthy because it is the first film to my knowledge to feature a call centre as a plot device. Hopw intriguing!

The film is called American Daylight and it’s a contemporary thriller set in today’s technology-savvy world. This is a world that we all know so well; one where the outsource call centre is king. When we dial our apparently local bank, we are routed to another continent.

In the case of American Daylight, Sujata (played by Koel Puri) is a call centre agent who, as it often the way, is trained to talk with an American accent, and to complete this illusion, she is renamed ‘Sue’. ‘Sue’ receives a call from a guy called Lawrence (played by Nick Moran), a millionaire who is concerned that his wife is about to empty their joint bank account. Now, I can sympathise with that. Happens to me all the time. Anyway, Lawrence tries to persuade ‘Sue’ to bend the rules to give him the ‘inside info’, which she does. Meanwhile, ‘Sue’s boss, Pat (Vijay Raaz), who has a thing for ‘Sue’, starts to resent the way things are starting to turn out between Lawrence and ‘Sue’. Lawrence falls for his ‘Sue’, not realising that she isn’t who she purports to be.

It’s an interesting concept, with shades of Cyrano de Bergerac and other such tales. I haven’t yet had a chance to see it, but I’m definitely going to make a point of looking out for it, as it will be fascinating to see how the director (Roger Christian) handles the topic and the complexities of what isn’t such a far fetched concept.

Keep your eyes peeled for it, should it hit a cinema near you.

We hear a lot of negative talk in the media about the way that call centre agents are generally treated. This is often blown out of all proportion, but it does highlight that we can often treat our call centre employees that little bit better: this article contains a few ’soft skills’ pointers which are worth bearing in mind:

1. Remember that agents are only human

Yes, it’s true. Whilst the managers are thinking about maximising return on investment by squeezing the last ounce of performance from the various teams, it’s all too easy to forget that call centre agents are individuals, with the needs, desires, strengths and weaknesses that we all possess. Don’t expect super-human performance: reward it when you see it, but nobody can perform at 100% for sustained periods of time - factor this in, and don’t try to fight against it.

2. Agents know about working the ‘phones better than the managers

In other words, the best people to identify any flaws in the call centre are the people who use it day-in, day-out. Don’t forget that as one gets familiar with a tool, new flaws may be revealed that were previously masked. Talk to your agents, see what they think about the systems they use.

3. Make it fun

Happy employees make for effective employees. If you can make little changes or allowances that make the agents’ jobs more enjoyable, you will find increased retention, better performing individuals, and such people present a much more professional image to the customers who they are in contact with. A future article will discuss some great ideas about introducing effective incentives into the call centre and some case studies. For now, however, just use a little lateral thinking. Think: what can I do (as a manager) to make my agents’ happier?

4. Talk, don’t preach, to your agents

Getting to know each and every agent may well be an enormous task, and not something that can be expected of every manager, but it’s at least worth making an effort to break the ice with some. After all, getting to know the agents - their concerns, ideas, issues and even finding out what is going well - all of this enriches our understanding of the true dynamics of the call centre without relying on MIS, much of which is somewhat spurious. Developing one’s soft skills provides a degree of balance which will help you make better, more informed decisions. Don’t forget to treat agents as equals - don’t preach, lecture or judge from on-high: these are your troops and they must also respect you - and the best way to do this is to get to know them and show them that you actually give a damn.

5. Exercise reason

Don’t expect the impossible - setting hurdles too high helps nobody. There is a fine line between effective versus ridiculous objective setting - and only experience, and the points above, will allow you to judge this properly.

As ever, I welcome your comments. This isn’t a definitive list by any means, and it’s all simple common-sense, which could be applied to investment bankers, tradesmen, software developers or teachers. It’s basic man-management, and it’s something we should all practise.