Chris Crosby

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…

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”.

Seth Godin has an interesting post about why your last impression with a customer is more important than the first (you know the old adage “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”).

He’s right, and I thinks its really about making every interaction count across your organization. When you consistently deliver you build credibility with your customers that leads to repeat business and the word of mouth marketing that Seth talks about. You may have a “great” sales team that wows your prospect on the first sales call, but if the rest of your team can’t deliver on these expectations then it doesn’t really matter.

This theory applies in mass when you look at a contact center where a customer may be calling (or emailing or chatting) with an agent about anything from placing a new order to questioning a billing issue. Its important to focus on every aspect of this interaction, from how long the customer sat in queue, to how long the agent left them on hold, to how professional and knowledgeable the agent was.

Sometimes you never know when the current interaction will be the last.

One of the most effective, and ineffective, ways to increase the value of a customer is by upselling additional products or services at the time of a sale. Effectively this can increase your items/revenue per sale and raise your gross margin, ineffectively you can frustrate your customer and send them somewhere else. Here’s an example of the latter:

Amy and I went to open a new checking account a couple weeks ago and over the course of 15 minutes we were offered: a Home Equity Line of Credit on our home that we had owned for two weeks, we were pre-approved for a credit card we didn’t ask for, and we were pitched overdraft protection (apparently incase we somehow forget how to balance our checkbook). At this point it became blatantly apparent that the woman helping us was just reading prompts on her screen vs. actually identifying what services Amy and I might find useful based on our needs (interestingly enough we were dealing with the branch manager). 

By the end of the conversation I was almost frustrated enough to walk out and skip the whole deal, but the idea of going through the exact same scenario at another bank was nauseating.

Ironically, the only offer I did accept was the option to have my monthly statements sent via email vs. the old fashion printed/snail-mail way. In my opinion this offer was actually backwards, “eStatements” should be the standard offer and paper statements being the downsell.

The moral of the story is this:

Are you qualifying your customers’ needs and offering appropriate services and products, or are you taking a shotgun offer approach just to try and hit a monthly quota? How are you really impacting your bottom line and your customers’ experience? Are you training and empowering your employees to discern the difference, or just populating scripts for them?

I was recently asked by Call Center Magazine what I thought the difference between analytics and performance management is so I thought I’d post it here as well.

Latigent defines Analytics as the process and enabling tools for root cause and trend isolation. This can range from call volume drivers, to customer segmentation, to agent performance. You hear a lot about slice and dice and drill-down when it comes to analytics. These are very important; however a well defined analytics product should also let you correlate disparate events together and analyze their impact on each other.

Performance Management ties in broad based metrics to paint a picture of individual performance against company objectives. This is where the idea of the “balanced scorecard” comes into play.

Performance Management and Analytics are often used interchangeable. However, Analytics is more about opportunity and problem identification, where Performance Management is geared towards generating the report card and faciliating the process for improvement.

-Chris

Have you seen the Verizon commercial where the two guys download the 80’s tune “Rock the Casbah”, but instead of singing along to the correct lyrics they misinterpret them into something completely different? Over the course of the commercial they botch the chorus into “lock the cashbox” and “stop the cat box”, which takes a perfectly good rock song and makes it complete gibberish.

The commercial ends with the narrator stating:

“You don’t have to understand your music to understand how to get it all from your PC to your Phone” 

Albeit, I think the commercial is funny and is reminiscent of my grade school days running around the house playing air guitar and trying to belt-out Van Halen tunes (ok, maybe that was last week); it got me thinking about something not so funny: how often I see reports and metrics that end-up getting botched because somebody misinterpreted a few lyrics along the way.

Unfortunately in the contact center, you do have to understand your data to understand how to get it all from it’s source into your reports, dashboards and scorecards.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

Average Talk Time is almost always calculated as (Total Talk Time/Calls Answered). Seems simple enough right? We’ll, not always…

Some of you may have noticed in the Avaya CMS tables there are two fields that represent “total talk time”: ACDTIME and I_ACDTIME

According to the CMS documentation:

ACDTIME = The talk time of all ACDCALLS (calls answered) for an interval.

I_ACDTIME = The length of time during the collection interval that agents were on split/skill ACD calls.

What this means is that ACDTIME represents the total talk time for calls that were physically answered in that interval vs. I_ACDTIME which tallies up all of the time for a half-hour interval that agents were actually talking.

In this example, you would use ACDTIME for an average talk time calculation and I_ACDTIME for an occupancy calculation. Interchanging those two fields incorrectly in a report changes the tune completely…

Another common misinterpretation I see is in the Cisco ICM/IPCC Enterprise world. Cisco makes available both Calls Answered and Calls Handled for reporting purposes. These terms are often interchanged in verbal context, however according to the Cisco database schema:

Calls Answered = Number of calls answered by agents associated with this skill group during the half-hour interval.

Calls Handled = The number of inbound ACD calls answered and wrap-up completed by agents associated with this skill group during the half-hour interval.

So, Calls Answered are pegged to the half hour interval when the call is physically answered, and Calls Handled pegs when the call is actually finished. The difference seems subtle, and over the course of a day the grand total should be the same (except for calls running over midnight).

But what happens if you feed your WFM application Calls Handled instead of Calls Answered? You got it, inaccurate call arrival patterns and forecasts. What would seem like a relatively minor botch will end up having a significant impact downstream on your Service Levels and staffing efficiencies.

I remember as a kid cracking open my first cassette tape that actually had the lyrics printed on the inside of the cover. This was a novel concept as I no longer had to decipher them on my own. This same concept applies to your reporting. Most vendors publish a document that explains, like the examples above, the meaning and usage behind their database elements.

When designing a datamart or report, it’s critical that you reference these documents as your lyrical road map. Also review them whenever you upgrade your ACD or WFM system, as often times fields will change with new product releases.

The best way to avoid these types of pitfalls is to consult an expert or somebody that is familiar with each vendors’ nuances and understands your desired end game requirements. (cough, Latigent)

Before you know it, you’ll be Rockin the Casbah…

-Chris

I recently finished reading “Bill Snyder: They Said it Couldn’t Be Done” and thought it a noteworthy recommendation.

This book is a narrative about one of the greatest turnaround stories in college football told through a personal interview with the man that made it happen.

I grew-up in Manhattan,KS (home of K-State) at a time when the wildcats were consistently ranked at the bottom of the NCAA. So, my childhood memories consist of going to home games at an almost empty stadium and getting excited if we won a game (any game).

Then in 1989 things started to change. We didn’t know it at the time, but what would happen over the next 17 years would not only reform a football team and a university, but would revitalize an entire community. Needless to say this book touches a bit of a personal cord with me as it recounts some of the events that impacted my own life.  

A warning for the non-football junky, this thing is chalked full of stats and game talk. However, underneath the numbers is the story about how Bill Snyder’s vision, fortitude, management principles and unwavering expectations accomplished near miracles to create one of the best football programs in national history.

It goes on to get Snyder’s own perspective on the key events that shaped the program. A couple of my personal favorites: K-States first big win over Nebraska in 1998 and curb stomping #1 ranked OU in the Big 12 Championship in 2003. It finishes with an emotional and insightful look at the events ultimately leading up to his retirement decision at the end of the 2005 season.

This book is a good read for any manager, leader, coach, teacher, or anyone with an eye on making yours or others worlds a little better.

With the right vision, attitude, accountability and focus anything can be done.

-Chris

You only have to spend about 30 seconds in any call center on the planet to hear the term Service Level thrown out as a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) for measuring “customer experience” and “accessibility”.

I’m going to tell you a little secret about Service Level that the rest of the industry is too afraid to acknowledge: not only is it a misleading and meaningless metric, it’s causing you to hemorrhage cash by overstaffing your call center. It is the single largest cause of wasted labor dollars in the industry.

Now, I don’t know the actual origin of Service Level, however my theory is that it’s roots go back to a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away when Ma Bell accounted for the majority of contact centers. Not only were these early call center pioneers not quite sure of what they needed to be measuring or how, but the first ACDs on the market couldn’t report on much of anything.

Service Level and ASA were probably logical choices because calculations such as Erlang C had existed since the early 1900’s and could easily be adapted to accommodate Call Center Staffing Models.

So one day the Jedi Council convened and Service Level, Average Speed of Answer (ASA), and Abandon Rate (ABA) were born.

In an effort to maintain peace and balance in the galaxy, our friends at the FCC and Public Utility Commissions (PUCs) legislated these core metrics into permanent call center history.

Lets take a step back for a moment and define what Service Level is; traditionally there have been two primary calculations:

(Calls Answered within Target/Calls Answered)

(Calls Answered within Target/Calls Offered)

Although I won’t go on record as saying that the first is “the industry standard”, I will say that in my experience I’ve seen the first one used far more often. This means that abandoned calls typically do not count against your Service Level. (What ever Service Provider dreamt that baby up was freggin brilliant…). 

OK, let’s say for example that your service level for yesterday was 80%, with a target answer time of 20 seconds. That tells us that 80% of the calls you answered, were done so within 20 seconds. Nice job, right? Well maybe, but to truly answer this question we need to take a look at what Service Level DOESN’T tell us. 

In this hypothetical scenario, we’ll assume you were offered 10,000 calls. Of those, you Answered 9,000. Of the 9,000 that you answered, 80% of those were in less than 20 seconds, or 7,200 calls. Based on this data we know that out of 10,000 callers 7,200 of them listened to less than 20 seconds of elevator music before getting to an agent. It’s probably safe to say that those 7,200 folks are relatively satisfied with that part of their experience.

Accounting for your Service Level Calls looks something like this:

But what about the other 2,800 customers? What was their experience like?

Well, let’s start with what we know:

1,000 of them abandoned in queue at some point. We don’t know if that was at 3 seconds, or 30 minutes. Or even if they called back and eventually got through.

The other 1,800 were answered, but at some point beyond the desired 20 seconds. What happens here can be a gruesome story that often goes untold. Based on Service Level alone, there is no way to ascertain if these callers were in queue for 21 seconds, or two hours…  

So in other words, there are 2800 customers, or roughly 1/3 of your callers, who’s experience you can’t measure or account for.

That excruciating sucking sound you hear right now is your ACD creating a giant data vacuum, void of the vital information you need to get a true picture of your call centers’ performance.

The other dangerous downside to Service Level is over staffing. One bad interval could ruin your results for the day. Often times when Service Level is contractual or regulated you could spend an entire day just trying to raise your % to recover. Or in some cases, you may already be overstaffed trying to insulate yourself from that spike in volume.

By it’s vary definition Service Level is a historical metric. Meaning that it tracks what has already happened. So why is your current staff on the phones compensating for what happened two hours ago? 

Call Center Magazine recently referred to Service Level as “a measure of accessibility” and insinuated that the general consensus is Service Level should no longer be used as a stand alone metric, but should be combined with other things like first call resolution to get a clearer picture of the customer experience.

This is actually disappointing to me as I don’t see any real value in a measuring something that is misleading, regardless of what you couple it with. I say we get rid of Service Level all together and start looking at what really matters to customers. Trust me, not only will your customers be happier, so will your stockholders.

-Chris Crosby