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.

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…

Now, as I mentioned, since “agent occupancy” is really measured by “skill group” and not by agent, let’s call it what it is Skill Group Occupancy. Coming back to 1995 and my manager’s (mostly correct) notion that the higher the rate of occupancy the more likely you are to burn out your agents (I also believe the inverse of that to be true); certainly a general rule of 80% doesn’t pass the acid test and there are other variables that impact an agent’s decision to quit; for example, the type of calls an agent handles (billing inquiries typically have a higher rate of agent churn than, say, general technical support). Additionally you will find that Skill Group Occupancy, as we’ve defined it, does not mean the work load is evenly distributed amongst the agents within that Skill Group; and you inevitably find that some agents are busier than others (the problem is compounded if they are multi-skilled).

So here’s the deep thought of the day: Could one build a model that can predict an agent’s likelihood to churn based on their individual “occupancy” data points? My sense is that we can. By taking Skill Group Occupancy down to the Agent level, we should be able to build an algorithm that evaluates factors like the amount of time an agent spends by each Call Type (not Skill Group) and overlay it to when similar agents churn. We could also ascertain their comfort level, and thus “stress level”,  with specific Call Types by looking at the amount/percentage of time the agent puts customers on hold, conference, has longer than normal talk time, or transfers calls to their supervisor or escalation queue as compared to other agents. If this notion is correct, then one could build staffing plans that not only optimize call handling but also prevent attrition.

Any thoughts, feelings or opinions?

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?

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?

Each one of your customers has a unique set of preferences about how they want to interact with your company and what they expect from those interactions. It’s your job to analyze those and discern how to create that customized care in a profitable manner. The end goal should be to provide distinctive and profitable service to each individual customer. It’s no longer safe to assume that one-size-fits-all.

The road to true customer intimacy can be a long one, however there are some things you can do to get started.

• Customer Segmenting: Do you know who your customers are, why they contact you, and what’s important to them? You can probably answer that at a high level today, but start to think in more detail about all the variations and nuances across your customer base, products/services and how they map together.
• Contact Handling: Are you routing calls solely based on what products/services your customers have purchased (or want to purchase) and what language they speak? Do you have one Service Level goal across your lines of business? As the article demonstrates there are other factors, such as cultural preferences, to be considered when setting objectives and designing routing plans.
• Metrics and Reporting: Are you measuring the right things and are you monitoring your success?

This list is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather just a conversation starter. As we kick-off 2009 I’ll be discussing these topics in more detail. Let me know your thoughts.

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.

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.

Every report in CUIS has what’s called a permalink, or distinct URL, that can be directly referenced by other applications or your web browser. Each report actually has four different permalink options that can be accessed depending on how you need to query the data. 

The first step is to create your CUIS report and run it for a filtered and relative date range (usually for a specific set of Skill Groups or Call Types for say “This Month”). Save a copy of this report with the filters intact and then follow the steps below. *Tip- I usually save these reports in their own category folder for easier management.

Step One: Locate the HTML Permalink for the report (make sure that it is a filtered report for a relative date range as mentioned above). Copy it to your clipboard. 

Step Two: Open Excel and find the Data>Import from a Web Query Function. Copy the Report Permalink into the New Web Query Address box. Excel will load a preview of the data. Click “Import”.

Step Three: Highlight the cell that you would like to use as the upper-left starting point for the imported data. Hit “OK”.

Step Four: Your CUIS Report data is now imported into Excel to format as you choose.

It’s truly that easy. I recommend creating an Excel macro to handle the above steps for you. Most customers create a “data” tab that the other formatted tabs reference to get their data and calculations. By using a macro you can have Excel automatically query CUIS and format all the tabs as needed. Then you simply save and email the file to whomever needs it.

Please feel free to reference the Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite End User Guide for additional detail. 

Enjoy.

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…