Chris Crosby

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.

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

“The process of discovering what you don’t Know you need to Know.”

-Chris Crosby