Chris Crosby

Last fall I participated again in the ICCM Canada Keynote Panel: 60 Ideas in 60 Minutes moderated by Paul Stockford from Saddletree Research. Dave Butler over at NACC recorded the session and has been distributing the ideas presented in his monthly newsletter. I keep promising him that I’ll expand one of mine into an article for him, but in the meantime here is the one he sent out today. Since it’s one of my favorite rants, I thought I would share (pardon my grammar):

Take out the garbage, I am not talking about employees or customers, I am actually talking about reports and data. One of my pet peeves, and I could go on for hours but I will go on for 45 seconds, is when you walk into a call center and you see the reports that supervisors are looking at every day and the first column you see is calls answered,  and this is for an agent. Johnny had 27 calls yesterday and was logged in for 15 hours, blah, blah, bah, blah. Step back and ask yourself what value you are getting out of this information. So take your 30 column report and pare it down to four or five columns that you can actually impact and actually take action on. If you can’t impact whether an agent is logged on for six hours or seven hours, get rid of the column. Just say, you know what, what was their schedule adherence, or what was their hold %? In other words, what are the columns that you can influence? Then write out the business value for each column on the report. Are you going to see service level on there, or outbound calls? Write down why you need to see that so you can articulate that back to the people that are managing to that data every day and why it is important.

I couldn’t have said it better myself

I’m sure most of you saw that Barack Obama raised a record $55 million in the month of February, so I won’t regurgitate old news here. But what I find more interesting than the jaw dropping dollar amount, is how much of the fundraising activity is happening relatively under the radar. Yesterday his campaign made the rather boastful statement:

No campaign has ever raised this much in a single month in the history of presidential primaries. But more important than the total is how we did it — more than 90% of donations were $100 or less, and more than 385,000 new donors in February pushed us past our goal of more than 1,000,000 people owning a piece of this campaign.

My first reaction was “Wow! Go Baby Go”! Then my second thought was, “Wow! That’s roughly 900,000 donors we can’t track…”

The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) regulates that a campaign has to disclose all donors contributing more than $200 to Candidate. I downloaded the most recent FEC database and found only 84K contributors to the Obama Campaign at a time when he was claiming north of 500,000k. That means the vast majority of campaign money is originating virtually anonymously.

This raises questions around current Campaign Finance laws and if they will need to be revisited or reporting limits adjusted to adapt to current trends. My sense is that inevitably they will, but whether that’s good or bad for us is its own animal.

For example, last summer I contributed a whopping $25 to the Obama campaign. Should my Name, Address and Contribution Amount have to exist in a publicly accessible database as a matter of Campaign Finance Reform? From a privacy standpoint my reaction is “Not just no, but hell no”. But as a fan of Government Transparency, shouldn’t we be able to have visibility into the money flows of these campaigns? My answer is “yes”. So then, where in lies the balance?

The gray matter that exists at the intersection of Personal Privacy and Government Transparency when you participate in “public” activity will no doubt be the subject of much debate when the dust settles on this election. My gut says the issue will be raised from which ever side looses in November.

I came across a clever demonstration of Analytics from a Business Intelligence software provider called QlikView, and thought it worth sharing. Note- In an indirect way, Latigent competed with QlikView and I always admired their clever marketing campaigns. In this application of their analytics tool, they dumped radio airplay data from  MediaGuide.com into an OLAP cube and overlayed the QlikView front end (demo found here).

Originally I just wanted to play around with the data, so I filtered based on the greatest band of all time, Van Halen.

Unexpectedly, a couple of things struck me about the results:

1. The top two most played songs both appear on the album 1984, but 1984 is the second most played album: Seems a bit counter intuitive at first, but upon closer inspection we discover that the album Van Halen’s songs may be played fewer times, but there are more of them. The aggregate is greater by more than 300 song plays. There is a lesson to be learned here about product distribution, and a pretty good example of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory in action.
2. Why the big disparity between the “David Lee Roth Van Halen” and the “Sammy Hagar Van Halen”? My assumption is that this is most likely because Van Halen is on tour right now with David Lee Roth. No doubt radio stations are heavily promoting this tour by spinning the vintage favorites. My hypothesis though is one that is impossible to prove given the current data set. One would “just need to know” that these guys are on tour to draw that conclusion. Without this information, what conclusions would you draw? Would they be accurate? Is mine accurate?

Now, an interesting exercise would be to take the chart below that displays where these songs are being played and overlay the tour schedule. Also, the data is only available from Feb 24, 2007 to current. What would a wider data set show us? Is the distribution reversed when they’re on tour with Sammy Hagar? What about when they’re not on tour?

This example demonstrates that the unlocked power of analytics is not just about spotting trends that you otherwise would not have, but its often in finding and qualifying external (and sometimes non-structured) data points and quantifying their impact. It also causes you to ask questions and seek answers that you otherwise wouldn’t: What long tails are hiding in your data? How can you leverage them? What external events influence your business? How do you qualify them, and quantify their impact?

What else do you not know you need to know?

I recently realized that February 13th, 2007 was the 17th anniversary of my first day on the job as an outbound telemarketer. That means I’ve officially been in contact centers for more than half my life. Scary, I know. What’s even scarier is that some people reading this blog probably remember that shy, scrawny kid with the high pitched voice trying to sell Cititravel (a consumer travel service provided by CUC International as a private label to Citibank Credit Card holders for $49 a year

 
Needless to say I’ve changed a bit since then, and so has our beloved industry. When I started this gig, all outbound campaigns we’re manually dialed and managed from color coded labels that were stuck on “sales sheets” and “callback cards”. And things like VOIP, WFM, CRM, Business  Intelligence, Performance Management and Analytics weren’t even glimmers in our eyes yet.

Ironically enough, some things haven’t changed much. In February 1991, a Bush was in the White House, we were at War in Iraq, and the U.S. was in a recession…

On that note,  “Smile and Dial”

-Chris