Chris Crosby

Since their inception, call centers have been infamous for high turnover (especially in the outsource world). While this is no revolutionary statement, I recently had the realization that by my mid-twenties I had personally fired, or overseen the termination, of over 1,000 people (an average of about 200 people a year). I believe my personal record was 14 people fired in one day. Most of these terminations were executed in the name of “attendance policy violations” or other seemingly direct violations of ill-thought-out policies. At the time, I tried to detach myself emotionally from the situation and rationalized my actions as ‘just doing my job’. Yet in retrospect that part of my job absolutely just plain fuckin sucked. While its been roughly a decade since I’ve been in such a position, the gut wrenching feelings that naturally come along with taking someones source of livelihood from them are, perhaps above anything else, the part that still hangs around still today. So much for emotional detachment.

The point of this post, however, is not some weird soul cleansing apology or confession, but rather the beginning of a new conversation. In the coming days and weeks I’ll be tackling the issue of employee turnover through a new lens and attempt to offer some fresh perspective on the age old problem. High levels of attrition negatively impact the often forgotten individuals involved, the local community as well as the companies that foot the bill. Personally, I think its time we start to introduce new ideas into the broken equation and begin to rethink the relationship between employees and employers. Comments welcome.

Following on the heels of my post last week about the Google acquisition of MetaWeb, my favorite start-up Ellerdale announced that they’ve been acquired by Flipboard. As a reminder:

Ellerdale, founded in 2008, has developed a Web Intelligence technology that applies semantic analysis to large, real-time data streams to extract relevant and valuable information. To date, Ellerdale has indexed over 6 billion messages from around the social Web and currently processes nearly 70 million messages per day.

That’s right 6 BILLION messages at a growing rate of 70 million messages per day. One of the reasons I loved Ellerdale was that they were able to take virtually every bit of publically available social data and distill its context and meaning.They also had everything indexed and available for ad hoc search on demand (among many other cool things I won’t go into here). According to the press release, Ellerdale was acquired by Flipboard to make their social media magazine more relevant to readers:

Ellerdale has developed an impressive solution for understanding the ever-increasing stream of social data coming at us every day… This technology will add deep relevancy for our readers… by always surfacing the most important and personally interesting information from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.”

Pay VERY close attention here —> Ellerdale was acquired by a company that wants to make sense of Social Media for their niche application. How many companies do you think are building, or will be purchasing, applications that try to do something meaningful with social media data? If you answered a “gazillion”, I’d say you’re on the right track…

Any application that tries to do anything with raw text (social media) needs to be able analyze it and extract things like context, meaning, sentiment, and intent. Ellerdale provided a critical component of the foundation required to do these things. This is something most companies won’t want to take in-house because it’s a specialized art and science that falls outside their core competence; and it ain’t cheap to build something that processes and stores 3.5 million text records an hour. So the opportunity for a few independent players to step in here with their own analysis and open platforms  is, well, Mega…

Well, less than 24 hours after I posted The Mega Meta Opportunity, Google announced their acquisition of Metaweb. Normally this is where I would insert some smirky comment like “damn I’m good”. But admittedly I’d never heard of Metaweb and just got lucky on the timing of the announcement. Instead, I’ll be grateful to Google for underscoring my point, and it also gives me a chance to clarify a question that Jason posted yesterday:

Not sure I understand the analogy. Are you talking about adding the metadata at the individual level, or using that to generate metadata at a macro level?

Here’s a quote from the Google blog that I think captures what I was trying to say

…we’re just beginning to apply our understanding of the web to make search better. Type [barack obama birthday] in the search box and see the answer right at the top of the page. Or search for [events in San Jose] and see a list of specific events and dates. We can offer this kind of experience because we understand facts about real people and real events out in the world.

The key phrase there is that they “understand facts about real people and real events out in the real world.” My analogy with the digital camera photo was basically asserting that every record of data in the universe should get tagged with basic entity descriptions such as (in the case of Tweets): who sent the tweet, what or who its about, etc. Ellerdale is an example of a company that’s doing this well today. When this data gets rolled-up we can then generate macro level meta descriptions that describe things like trends and attributes that you need more than one metatag to discern. As example, based on my tweet history you could probably “tag” me with something like “High positive sentiment about Chicago”, or “Call Center Exec” <—Huge marketing opportunities here. Now think about applying this idea to data that resides inside the enterprise…

Consequently, Metaweb has a 3:30 minute video clip on their site that lays the foundation for this well. While companies like Metaweb (now Google) and Ellerdale are beginning to scratch the surface of this, I’ll state again that the opportunities here are ENORMOUS and go well beyond just search.

Seth Godin provided a teaser on his blog today about the lurking opportunities with metadata (information about information) that I’d like to expand on:

Many people and organizations are contributing to this mass of data, but few are taking advantage of the opportunity to collate it and present it to people who desperately need it. Think about how much needs to be sorted, compared, updated and presented to people who want to choose or learn or trade on it.

Think of metadata as descriptive attributes about something. For example, if you right-click on a file taken from any digital camera it gives you information about that picture, including: date it was taken, file size, dimensions, camera model, camera settings, etc (all of this before you even open the picture to see what it’s of). You then import these files into your photo management software and add even more metadata: the location or event the picture was take at, who is in the photo, and maybe a caption. This incremental data allows you to do increasingly useful things with the photo, like: find all those pictures from last year’s canoe trip, or all the pictures with “dad” in them, or even just to organize and share them in a way that’s more enjoyable.

The same idea applies to essentially every bit of data generated anywhere; and when you view the world as data waiting to be made into something useful, there is a A LOT of it. Now, venture into the social media sphere where publically available data about millions of individuals and companies is generated every second of everyday. I’m referring to Twitter Tweets, Facebook status updates, Foursquare check ins, YouTube video uploads, etc. The question that Social Media pundits have been trying to answer is, “is any of it useful?” Personally I believe the answer is YES, and that it is one of the largest opportunities for innovation of this decade. The trick to making any of it actionable is to create meaningful descriptions of items at a very granular level, and then another layer of meaningful descriptions of the descriptions which enable people and organizations to make sense of it all (remember the digital picture analogy here).  The magic lies in creating the right analytical algorithms to get at those useful meanings. Whoever figures that out will not just "change the game", they’ll own it.

One reason I love the Call Center world is that it breeds into you a passion for goal attainment. Everyday when you walk in the door you have a clearly defined set of short-term and long range objectives that must be met. You come in every morning, review your plan over a cup of coffee, then lock and load for the day ahead. Come snow storms, flu outbreaks, hurricanes, surprise mail drops or infomercials, fiber cuts, or product defects… you pro-act to react day-in and day-out to hit your numbers. It’s exhilarating. Really.

Hitting goals such as: Service Level, Average Handle Time, Average Speed of Answer and Agent Utilization are so core to call center operations that companies invest millions of dollars a year into technology and people with the sole purpose of attaining them. It’s also how people get paid. I can’t tell you how many compensation plans I’ve seen that reward people for hitting these types of “performance goals.”

The problem though, as I’ve come to realize it, is that they’re always the same goals. Day after day you are striving to be only as good as you were the day before. Secondarily, the goals are designed in such a way that they would be silly to try and do any better, ex. hitting an 81% Service Level for a day is really no better than hitting 80%. This means you are endlessly tweaking the machine to only achieve the same level of results everyday. In addition, the process is making you only as good as your competitors, not better than… This is sort of like endlessly adjusting your sails while at sea with the purpose being not to actually go anywhere, but rather just to avoid capsizing the boat. Isn’t the point of “goaling” to make you better? Perhaps make you more competitive or more profitable? So why then do we call these things “goals”? Aren’t they really just achieving the status quo?

Here’s an exercise to drive the point home: go through all of your reports, employee evaluations, and executive presentations and change the word “Goal” to “Status Quo”. Now start circulating these amongst the team and see what conversations come about. My guess is that once people realize the amount of money and resources going into efforts that do nothing to actually acquire or retain customers then priorities will start to change.

Setting and achieving goals is one of the most misunderstood and undervalued practices in the world. Most people confuse goals with wishes. Goals have passion and motivation as their impetus and force you to develop a strategy to achieve them. A wish is simply a desire to have or do something, but you put no real skin in the game.

Anyone can say “I want to lose 10 pounds” or “I want that promotion” or “I want to retire early” or “I want to get out of debt” or…But how many people actually develop a plan of attainment and put actions behind their words? The answer, sadly, is very few; and thus what most people claim as their goals remain indefinitely on their wish list. 

Here’s how to tell the difference: If you sit down to review your “goals” and don’t have the realization that you have a hell of a lot of work to do, then either:

1) These aren’t goals. They’re wishes and you’ll never achieve them until you actually develop your plan too.

2) You’ve set the bar too low. Anyone can go without eating McDonalds for a day, but can you sustainably change your eating habits for the rest of your life?

3) You’re in delusion about what it will truly take to achieve them and thus, most likely never will.(see bullet #1)

Here’s an exercise that drove this point home to me. Every year on your birthday sit down and look back at what you’ve accomplished the previous year. Then compare it to what you wanted to accomplish and where you thought you would be at this time. What’s that picture look like? If you’ve achieved or moved yourself toward your goals then celebrate and replicate. If not, then you’re another year behind… Have the tough conversation with yourself and make sure next year the situation is different.

Lastly, sometimes you sit down to develop your plan and realize you have no idea what you need to do or even where to start. Well, that means you’re at the beginning of something truly amazing. Stick with it and enjoy the ride…