Chris Crosby

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…

I’ve been pondering lately some the practices and methodologies in the Contact Center industry that are out dated and in need of a new approach. One thing that comes to mind is how people measure and manage “Agent Occupancy”. My first lesson in Occupancy came in the summer of 1995 when I transitioned from the domain of outbound telemarketing into the then foreign world of Inbound Call Centers. My manager sat me down and tried to explain to me the basic concepts of running an inbound call center. Somewhere between describing Service Level and Calls Per Hour, the concept of Agent Occupancy came up. There are many variants to the notion of Occupancy, but for simplicity and purposes of this discussion let’s define it as the percentage of time that an agent is occupied, or working, during any given period of time. For example, if an agent spent 45 minutes of the last hour talking to customers then their occupancy rate was 75%. Occupancy is traditionally, and almost always, measured at the Skill Group Level and not by individual agents. Urban mythology says that the higher your Occupancy the more efficient your staffing plan is, and thus your profitability. However, my manager cautioned me that, you “never want to run your occupancy rate at higher than 80% because you will burn your agents out, and your attrition will be higher.”

Now, as I mentioned, since “agent occupancy” is really measured by “skill group” and not by agent, let’s call it what it is Skill Group Occupancy. Coming back to 1995 and my manager’s (mostly correct) notion that the higher the rate of occupancy the more likely you are to burn out your agents (I also believe the inverse of that to be true); certainly a general rule of 80% doesn’t pass the acid test and there are other variables that impact an agent’s decision to quit; for example, the type of calls an agent handles (billing inquiries typically have a higher rate of agent churn than, say, general technical support). Additionally you will find that Skill Group Occupancy, as we’ve defined it, does not mean the work load is evenly distributed amongst the agents within that Skill Group; and you inevitably find that some agents are busier than others (the problem is compounded if they are multi-skilled).

So here’s the deep thought of the day: Could one build a model that can predict an agent’s likelihood to churn based on their individual “occupancy” data points? My sense is that we can. By taking Skill Group Occupancy down to the Agent level, we should be able to build an algorithm that evaluates factors like the amount of time an agent spends by each Call Type (not Skill Group) and overlay it to when similar agents churn. We could also ascertain their comfort level, and thus “stress level”,  with specific Call Types by looking at the amount/percentage of time the agent puts customers on hold, conference, has longer than normal talk time, or transfers calls to their supervisor or escalation queue as compared to other agents. If this notion is correct, then one could build staffing plans that not only optimize call handling but also prevent attrition.

Any thoughts, feelings or opinions?

Some random musing on some things we need to be thinking about and mantras we need to depart from in order to move call centers forward. Call it too much caffeine on a Monday night… 

1. Soon a Contact Center won’t have a “center” at all
2. We’ve moved from “Calls” to “Contacts”; “Interactions” is the next logical step
3. “Calls per Hour” as a metric needs to go away forever- please tell me that no one out there is still using it…
4. The same goes for Service Level – just when you thought I had stepped down from that soap box
5. "This call may be Analyzed for data mining purposes.”
6. Reporting from pre-summarized data (1/2 hour and daily reports from standard aggregated tables) is, and always has been, fundamentally flawed
7. Social Media + Customer Care = Tweet or Die
8. “Video Killed the Voice Only Star”
9. Outbound Telemarketing has been rebranded “Proactive Care” – Eat your heart out Do Not Call List
10. Erlang C and all it’s variants are no longer relevant (this means WFM as we know it will need to be rewritten)– yep, wrap your head around that one

Any thoughts?

Just read a great post from Seth Godin on “Boundaries.” He breaks the handling of obstacles into two basic categories:

Rigid boundaries: What do you do when you hit a wall? Do you have a tantrum? Spend countless resources trying to scale the unscalable? Or do you accept reality and put your energy into something else?

No boundaries: When there’s nothing but open space, do you run? Or shrink?

The latter is an important question, as I believe its where innovation originates. I’ve always attributed the early success of Latigent to the fact that when we started, we simply didn’t know what couldn’t be done (although plenty of people tried to tell me). That meant we thought, designed, built, and fostered ideas without boundaries. I wanted to build a product and company that would fundamentally change the way people viewed “reporting” and performance management in the contact center. This required new ways to solve old problems. Not all of the ideas we came up were new or revolutionary, but the point is that they didn’t need to be because our approach was. By not limiting or confining our thinking we bypassed hurdles that our competitors continued to stumble over.

If there were No Boundaries, what would you do?

I just read the article Asia’s Call Center Woe’s that discusses an Asia-Pacific consumer survey about customer service. The thesis isn’t a new one: Customer Care matters now more than ever; if your consumers aren’t happy with the customer service you are providing, they will switch to your competitor.  What struck me though is what was most important to those interviewed: How quickly the phone gets answered when they call. Now, I don’t like waiting for my call to be answered any more than the next guy, but there are certainly things more frustrating to me than long wait times, such as: navigating poorly designed IVRs, being transferred multiple times, talking to a rude agent, having to call back to get my issue resolved. These various aspects of a call rolled together (plus a few others) creates the Customer Experience.

Each one of your customers has a unique set of preferences about how they want to interact with your company and what they expect from those interactions. It’s your job to analyze those and discern how to create that customized care in a profitable manner. The end goal should be to provide distinctive and profitable service to each individual customer. It’s no longer safe to assume that one-size-fits-all.

The road to true customer intimacy can be a long one, however there are some things you can do to get started.

• Customer Segmenting: Do you know who your customers are, why they contact you, and what’s important to them? You can probably answer that at a high level today, but start to think in more detail about all the variations and nuances across your customer base, products/services and how they map together.
• Contact Handling: Are you routing calls solely based on what products/services your customers have purchased (or want to purchase) and what language they speak? Do you have one Service Level goal across your lines of business? As the article demonstrates there are other factors, such as cultural preferences, to be considered when setting objectives and designing routing plans.
• Metrics and Reporting: Are you measuring the right things and are you monitoring your success?

This list is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather just a conversation starter. As we kick-off 2009 I’ll be discussing these topics in more detail. Let me know your thoughts.

There’s an urban legend that during the dotcom melt down in 2001 Siebel experienced several quarters where they shipped more CRM seat licenses than what they actually sold. The first question that should come to mind is, “why?”. The answer, as it turns out, is rather simple. In the late 90s companies were spending huge amounts of cash on all things “dotcom” and throwing money at the “promise of CRM”. They were buying software based on half baked ROIs and then never installing it.* Once the bubble burst these companies then needed to see the ROI and value out of all those software licenses that had been collecting dust.

I’m not suggesting that during this downturn there are hoards of unused software laying around that are about to get shipped, but rather underscoring a simple point: The economy sucks and your customers need maximum benefit from your products or services. And its YOUR job to deliver it.

More to come, but I’ll leave you with this: How are you ensuring that your customers are getting the most out of what you sold them? If your customers are able to realize true cost savings and hard benefits from your product or service, they will buy more of your product or service (even in the current economy).

*In many cases the cost and complexity of deploying CRM applications far outstripped the price of the software or any tangible benefit.

I was chatting with a friend of mine this weekend who is currently in search of a new job. He mentioned that, in addition to applying for specific positions, he has his resume posted on Monster.com in hopes that someone searching for his skill-sets will find it. Now, I can attest that this does work. That’s actually how I got my job at Caremark back in 2003. Caremark’s HR Recruiter found me on Monster and it turned out to be a great gig with a great company.

The problem though, as I see it, is that was 2003; now its almost 2009 and if I was a betting man I’d guess that there are hundreds of thousands of resumes out on Monster.com today and my friend’s is just a needle in the haystack.

This started me thinking: if I was in the market for a new job, how would I approach it? The first thing that came to mind is that in the last couple of years I’ve received a handful of unsolicited “opportunities” in my email inbox. Now, this isn’t all that uncommon once you’ve been around long enough to get into the “headhunters” databases; but what is different compared to 2003 is that they found me via my blog, not via headhunters or job websites.

Let’s compare for a minute the difference between a recruiter searching for a resume on Monster and searching for keywords related to their industry on say Google:

A resume simply boils down into highly targeted and carefully crafted bullet points what I want to relay to you about what I’ve done in my life and how I think it applies to your job posting. Assuming that experience and past accomplishments are indicators of future performance you can probably discern things like my work ethic and basic levels of competence; but what does it tell you about how well I’ll fit into your company culture, or how I would approach the responsibilities of the role? The short answer is that it doesn’t. Arguably one could uncover some of this during an interview, but even that only scratches the surface.

So what’s the answer? Well, as audacious as it sounds, If I were applying for a new job, I would probably just submit a very brief cover letter and a link to ChrisCrosby.Net with no resume. Now, why would I send them to my blog and not tailor a resume to their specific job posting? It’s not because I’m too lazy to update my resume, but rather we’ve already established the flaws in the current resume/interview process so lets rethink it…

Imagine that the person interviewing me spent a few minutes on this site; what would they unearth?

• How I communicate: Not just grammatically, but my ability to articulate ideas (like this blog post)
• My true areas of expertise  and INTEREST: For Example, I’ve run call center operations, call center I.T., Resource Planning and virtually everything in between; but does that really mean I’m passionate enough about any of those roles to it again?
• How I think: Am I a negative person that complains a lot, or do I approach the world optimistically and solve problems? Do I have original ideas, or just regurgitate what I read in the Blogosphere?
• My “Brand” impact: By the shear fact that I have a personal blog I will have an image impact to your company. Would I be an asset, or a liability? Is it tangible or not?
• Personal data that you can’t ask in an interview but the “National Inquirer Wants to Know”: I’m married to the woman of my dreams, I’m 34, I grew-up in Ogden/Manhattan, KS, I live in Boston (but desperately miss Chicago), and have a baby Crosby on the way. And oh, by the way, I work for Cisco, not SYSCO.

The list goes on, but hopefully you get the point.

So, now that potential employers are finding and interacting with you online, what else will they find out about you? Jason Kolb has some very good stuff about owning your online identity (here) that I’d like to touch on:

Not that long ago, I made a religion out of managing Latigent’s online presence (If you Googled “Latigent” in May of 2002 when we founded you would have retrieved zero results; in Sept 2007, just before the acquisition, it was 34,000 results ((64k the day after the acquisition was announced, the power of Cisco ).One thing people don’t think about are the implications of the things they post on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and the like. One day, during our growth phase, I Googled “Latigent” and the third listing was a link to Jason’s Flicker page where he had innocently uploaded a handful of photos from our company Christmas Party and tagged them as “Latigent”. The pictures weren’t incriminating by any means, but lets just that you don’t want to walk into a sales call with a CXO after he or she has perused photos of you enjoying a few dirty martinis (Belvedere, 3 Blue Cheese Olives)…

The moral of the story is threefold:

1. Job Searching: If you don’t have a blog, start one. If you have one, don’t blog about what you had for lunch or how many beers you consumed last night. Talk about things that the people you want to find you will find useful. Trust me, we’ll find you…
2. In the age of Social Networks and digital pictures that can be sent from your mobile: think before you post (seriously).
3. The more your potential employer vets you (and conversely, by blogging about your interests you are targeting and “vetting” the people that find you), the more likely you are to end up in a job you you’re not only good at but that you’re passionate about.

My departing thought: What I find rather musing is that Monster.Com correlates “Your Personal Brand” to your resume. This means the majority of job seekers in the market today are still buying into that idea (that’s the audience they’re pandering too). And right now, the majority of job seekers (your competition) is growing by the day…

So how will YOU stand out?

Lastly: Want to start a Monster.com killer? Take advantage of the abysmal economy and de-commoditize job placement.