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…

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 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…

Speech Recognition is about identifying what people are speaking.

Speech Analytics is about figuring out what people are saying.

I noticed yesterday on weather.com that the temperature here in Boston was a lovely 92 degrees F, but the Heat Index reflected that it felt like 98 degrees F. This sent me on a tangent that I think is analogous for the call center.

Can a customer interaction look like one thing to you, but feel like something else to your customer? Let’s say that your trusty ACD report shows you that a customer’s handle time was 300 seconds, and 300 seconds happens to be your Handle Time Goal. That would seem acceptable, right? But what if 200 of those seconds the customer was on hold? How would that variable impact the customers perceived experience? Or hypothetically the call was answered in the goal of 20 seconds, but that was only after spending 2 frustrating minutes in the IVR?

The heat index takes variables like humidity and wind and makes a relative, plus or minus, adjustment to the absolute temperature value to reflect how it is actually perceived by people. Sound like a reasonable approach?

If it seems like I’ve been harping on customer experience measurement lately, its because I am. Stick with me here…

DimDim just announced a new version of their open source collaboration suite. Imagine WebEx or GoToMeeting, but thin-client and open source. These guys are the real deal. I spoke with them early on in their venture as I was looking at embedding collaboration into the Latigent BlueVue Architecture. Needless to say we got acquired so that didn’t happen.

DimDim has a free hosted offering which I’ll probably test out for a non-profit I’m working with. Although, they should really partner with somebody like http://www.freeconferencecall.com/ to integrate free voice conferencing in as well (currently they support VOIP via a headset plugged into your PC).

As compelling as free web conferencing is, hosted web collaboration is a rather commoditized market. However, there OEM/ISV approach could be hot. The ability to embed web collab right into applications (like I wanted to do w/ Business Intelligence) could create a new market segment.

Call it Pervasive Collaboration.