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