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.

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.

I heard an interesting podcast the other day that described how Sam’s Club is going to save somewhere north of $20M a year in shipping and cooling costs by changing over to square milk cartons. What struck me about this wasn’t that Walmart is looking for ways to save money, but rather the significant impact derived from a rather simplistic, yet innovative change to a product and design that one wouldn’t normally consider ripe for transformation.  This started me thinking about the innovation process and where ideas like this come from in an organization. I believe there are many aspects to the progression of innovation in a corporation including: culture, processes, policies and executive leadership. But for this post, I’ll focus on the people side of the equation.

I’ve categorized people (as it pertains to Innovation) into three buckets:

• Mercantilist – “This is the way we do things here", "Its the way we’ve always done it." They typically spend more time defending the Kingdom, and exporting the status quo vs. importing fresh ideas. These people will rise to the maximum level of meritocracy. 
• Town "Cryer" – "This sucks", "I don’t really like…" They are happy to tell you everything they think is wrong, and seldom any ways to make it better. This group can at least identify that the existing process doesn’t work, but when they do come up with a new idea its masked by their negativity. They will occasionally pop their heads up into the Innovator category, however will most likely not find themselves in leadership roles, and will mull around wondering why people stopped listening to them. 
• Innovators – "What if we tried this?", "I have a crazy idea.." Innovators see “problems” as opportunities and are constantly churning new ideas and solutions. The word "can’t" is a foreign concept to them. Not only are they not afraid to test new things, they listen to others’ "crazy ideas" with zeal. These people will ultimately rise about the fray and become your most valuable assets.

Now, your mission as manager is to seek out the innovators in your organization and make sure they have the tools to keep dreaming. Innovators are needed in all levels of a company, not just management. How many times has an engineer come to you and said "I think we can improve this product if we do xyz"? And "XYZ" just happened to be the secret ingredient that set you apart from your competitors. Encourage all people on your team to think bigger.

Evaluate where you fit into the categories above. Are you fostering an environment of risk and creativity? You never know when the next big or small idea will pop-up that can remake a product, or an industry. Will it be yours, or that guy in the cube down the hall that never talks? Will you recognize it, or dismiss it?

Think its crazy? Someday we’ll all be reminiscing about the days before Milk Cartons were Square…

Here is a useful article for any software company considering using open source components in your applications. I can tell you from personal experience that if you think getting acquired is part of your exit strategy then you need to pay attention to what open source code may find its way into yours, because your acquirer certainly will. If you’re not planning on getting acquired, its still a good idea to understand what your legal exposures might be.

My suggestion is to make sure you document any third party (even commercial) code and how you’re using it across your applications; and then have an attorney review the appropriate license agreements.

I’m out at a customer site this week and overheard the following conversation from the Workforce Management Team:

The difference in customer experience between 93% Service Level and 100% Service Level is negligible. But the difference in staffing cost to us is huge.

Now, I’ll spare you my full rant about Service Level (you can find it here) but I think this is indicative of a larger perception and education problem in the call center industry. Simply put: Service Level is NOT a measure of Customer Experience. It’s an opaque metric.

Let’s assume for purposes of this argument that the service level goal is 93% calls answered within 20 seconds. By decreasing the goal from 100% to 93% you’re saying that it’s okay for 7% of your customers to sit in queue for longer than 20 seconds. Logically, and most likely what the Workforce Manager was thinking, the effect on customer experience by being answered in 19 seconds vs. 21 seconds is unnoticeable. However the real impact to Customer Experience between 93% and 100% is actually immeasurable from Service Level alone. You have no way of knowing how many of the calls in queue longer than 20 seconds were answered in 21 seconds or how many were answered in 20 minutes and 21 seconds.

Try explaining to the irate customer that listened to hold music for twenty minutes that his difference in customer experience was “negligible”.

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?

Looks like Pentaho closed a $12M Series C round of financing. This is exciting stuff. With the consolidation of large Business Intelligence players its opening the market for the already under served SMB and for Enterprise BI projects looking for a lower cost of ownership.

The only real question is if these guys will join the ranks of Zimbra and become a promising start-up swallowed by a behemoth too soon…