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the global leader in Contact Center Consolidation 2.0
I have no idea what this means.
I suspect no one else does either.
"the global leader in Contact Center Consolidation 2.0" joins "paradigm violence" as one of those tag lines that no doubt excited the people who created them and left the rest of us scratching our heads and wondering just what they do.
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A dozen beautiful images of Saturn
To my mind the rings of Saturn are one of the Solar System's most amazing wonders. They seem to give a glimpse into what might have been the start of our solar system. Yet at the same time they are a thing of beauty.
For the past half decade or so NASA has had Cassini in orbit around the gas giant, helping us learn more about this amazing galactic display. Wired has collected together some of the best shots taken by the spacecraft and put them into a 12 shot gallery.
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Setting up shop in a new country: beyond the website
Supporting multiple languages and cultural references is the theme of a fascinating post on the DesignM blog. The author makes an important point about the need to design websites around not only a different language but also the differing expectations from websites, design motifs and local expectations. Approached from a purely design oriented view of the world the article makes perfect sense and is, in my view, essential reading.
It is, however, something that comes towards the end of a long journey. Setting up a website to attract readers from Russia, Japan, India or wherever else is the current hotbed of Internet growth, is a relatively easy part to deliver in a somewhat complex strategic decision. Important business decisions have to be made that will result in an increased cost base and a more complex business operation than simply translating content and firing web pages at a search engine.
The logistics of the sale must be supported. Having sold your online application to Russian speakers you then need to remember that your application must also "speak Russian." Physical products will need to be shipped, and whilst you may have got away with the odd overseas shipment here or there in the past, a regular stream may not only increase costs significantly, but may draw the attention of local tax collectors eager for you to pay your share of import duty.
If you are reaching into another country you have to ask how will customers be supported? Getting blog posts translated or firing pages at local language search engines is relatively easy. When customers call or ask questions things get more complex. You may find yourself having to set up call centres or employing native speakers to answer such queries, and remember the cultural context as well. When slang is used it has to be understood and replied to, something that "cheating" and using Google's language tools may not help with.
As an aside to this I dealt with a firm that had decided to reach out into India as one of the staff came from the country and was willing to do the native translation from Hindi to English and back again. For a while that worked, until she got married and left! At that point the company realised it had no way of answering the messages coming in from the new market, and ended up employing a (much more expensive) translation service.
There can also be compliance related issues. As I mentioned, local customs may insist on import duties being paid which can add significantly to the cost of shipping products. It could be that the product is banned in that country, or that it is a legal requirement that any company selling the product must be registered with a specific authority or body. One-off sales may slip through the net, but an concerted effort to promote the business to that market can easily bring it into the glare of official attention!
My suggestion is that whilst the design of a website to support other languages and cultures is a noble idea, it is not just about brand stretch. What it amounts to is deciding to set up business in a new country, and doing that requires thought, planning and understanding of the chosen market.
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Why call centre staff deserve your respect
Management attitudes towards call centre staff continue to confound and amaze me. For many businesses it is the people manning the phones who are the first point of contact, who set the first impression and who guide a new customer into the revenue chain. It is these people who are there when customers need help, or have complaints. It is these people who, regardless of how much you spend on branding and websites, form the lasting relationships between firm and customer.
Yet so many businesses treat these workers as second class citizens. They are often poorly paid, poorly trained and poorly motivated. Management culture can emerge around them that creates a hostile environment where they are expected to work harder than anyone else in the company, and managed with a hand of iron. Performance targets are set that induce stress and which are designed to weed out all but the top performers. Frankly, this has to change.
I wonder if there are companies who are willing to think in more enlightened terms about these people. I recently had a conversation with a call centre manager who baulked at the idea of spending five days training an agent "to answer the phone." Either they got it or they got out was his attitude. The idea that his undertrained staff were representing the client badly didn't register. He had numbers to make, so adopted a "fittest survive" attitude.
Clearly to me this was an unsustainable approach. He would burn through agents and exhaust his pool of potential workers, creating a reputation as a bad employer (particularly as his worker pool was a collection of universities). At some point it was inevitable that his clients would start to take a more active interest in his practices and before long he would be found out. He would argue he was meeting his sales targets. His clients might argue he's got 90 days notice of termination and the data could dry up sooner.
Perhaps the problem doesn't lie with the call centre management, but rather with those who set their targets. I sat down and worked through some contact rates that were being touted by a friend of mine as possible targets. The maths didn't work out - it would be impossible to attain them without having an agent work a full, zero break, no time for coaching shift. To attain the target would require whichever call centre took up the challenge to create a culture that would induce stress, poor performance and quality problems from the outset. He would quickly find himself in a position where he had to fix a problem of his own making.
My experience tells me that operational management gets too tied up in the day to day charging around to step back and think more widely. Dropping the contact rate a little on outbound, or increasing average call duration targets can reduce stress in agents and give them a little more space to pursue prospects in more subtle ways. Spending more time on training an agent at the outset and revisiting that training throughout their probation period can reduce staff turnover and increase confidence. Approaching agents with respect for the skills they bring to the business alone can improve morale and performance.
Call centre staff set the real impression prospects and customers have of your business. As such they deserve more than simple high performance targets and stress inducing working environments. Remember that the next time you speak to an agent.
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Becoming a Specialist? A hard decision to make ...
A post on the SAMBA blog suggested the easiest way of differentiating your business is to "specialise." The author suggests that businesses who do only one thing are instantly worth talking about. And perhaps they are. But the examples and the simplicity of this rather crass statement hides a massive strategic decision that has to be taken.
What does it take to specialise? Is it "just doing that one thing?" Is it, as the author suggests, being a pizza parlour that only sells pizzas with anchovies? Far from being a "lazy option", effective specialisation requires a deep understanding of the market segment that is being serviced.
Effective specialisation requires some important strategic decisions to be made. A specialist is, by nature, a business that is recognised in some way as unique. It may produce products that match a highly specific customer need, or have services that are particularly important to a particular industry or customer group. The important thing to remember is a specialist doesn't just do "one thing" - it meets a unique need that is identified and understood by its customer base.
To achieve this the business owner cannot just sit back, declare specialism and wait for business to come in. A specialist needs to shout about its uniqueness, and that requires an investment in marketing that goes beyond dollars. Smart marketing is required, often highly targeted and with a different ROI model to the business chasing a mass market. Those customers with that highly specific need have to be found, and remember these same customers are often adequately serviced by firms with a broader reach.
Which leads to the second quandary that the specialist faces: the cost difference between specialist and generalist increases. Generalists can compromise, extending their services to attract more customers, or trading the quality of their products against what a more general market might tolerate. The volume this creates feeds into economies of scale, driving down prices and making their general products more attractive to customers who might otherwise be drawn to specialist.
If a specialist does start to build a foothold it is relatively easy for a generalist to adjust its marketing strategy or service offering to draw in their market. A simple tweak of a product feature, or an extra emphasis on a service can suddenly shrink a market segment. And as such the specialist must concentrate on building loyalty, on doing whatever they do so much better than their generalist competitors that when the competition start to move in customers don't even notice.
There is also the need to constantly invest in maintaining the specialism. Customer needs will adapt and change as time passes, and so too must the specialist adapt. Skills, knowledge, products, they all have to evolve, which requires a firm commitment to research and development. Without this commitment the specialist will become "out of date" and lose their value to their customers.
A case in point is a friend of mine whose specialism is hair styling for black women. She has a loyal clique of customers who appreciate her ability to work with hair that is naturally "frizzy" (as she describes it). For her customers this is a godsend as general hair dressers can usually make a reasonable job, but she goes that extra mile. And it takes time and effort for her to learn new styles, test new products, research new ways of working with black women's hair and keep ahead of the competition on the high street.
Far from being an "easy way out", becoming a specialist is a key strategic decision. It requires the pursuit of something that is genuinely unique that a specific customer segment will value. It requires commitment to marketing to promote that specialism. It requires commitment to invest in maintain that specialism.
So not a lazy option. In fact one that hides a lot of hard work.
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When good people move on
A former member of my team has left today. She got herself a better job, one that will challenge her, give her more opportunities and - hopefully - help her grow as a person. When I saw the message come in off Facebook I gave a little "whoop" of joy.
At which point my daughter, sat opposite me playing some online game or other, asked, "why are you glad to see her go?"
An interesting question. True, I no longer manage that team so I don't have a vested interest. Yet my attitude has always been that when a member of my team is clearly capable of more than I can challenge them with then the right thing to do is support their onward move. It can seem counter-intuitive - after all, surely I should be keeping all the talent I can?
Perhaps, but the benefits of showing staff I care about their careers has wider benefits. I can lift the performance of a team by showing them I am interested in how they develop, regardless of how that turns out. Self-confidence grows, loyalty builds, team working improves. My role as manager shifts to one of leader.
Which is why, when I see people who are clearly not doing all they can do I will challenge them to do more. If that means the moment of self-realisation comes when they decide to move on then do be it. And this is the true test of whether I think I've done a good job while I've had care of their career: do they want to stay in touch.
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The quest for quality in Agile Software Development
There are times when I think project managers should be taken outside and shot! There is such a thing as loyalty to the team, and it is important. But there does come a point where excuses have to end and the PM has to admit to their own failures.
Quality seems to be one area where this happens regularly. I've become a little tired over the years of "Agile" being used as an excuse for not testing something thoroughly before it is handed to a client, or not documenting the way something works at least at an architectural level. And I've grown tired of project managers who think that "shouting and escalation" is the best way to get people to meet goals they haven't really bought in to.
When I was managing projects (rather than programmes) the idea of showing a client something that had not been checked, reviewed and signed off would have been alien to me. When I sat with a member of the client's staff to rough up screens, structure functionality or check a feature, they would see the rough cut, and that would be understood and expected. But at the key milestones, when I delivered an iteration or concluded a timebox (ValueFrame as we called them in the Accelerated Value Method I favoured) I made damned sure fields aligned, text was spelt correctly and the colours were consistent. I certainly would not have allowed a system generated error message to appear unless that was what the client wanted.
Yet Agile as applied seems to have robbed this sense of self-respect from projects. Half finished artefacts are handed over with a shrug and a "we ran out of time." QA is abandoned in favour of developers testing their code. Instead of handing it to a UAT specialist to give it a shake-down software is provided to clients untested and unknown.
This has to stop. Agile is a powerful approach to developing software - but that doesn't mean a sense of pride should be left at the door. What you present to your client says a lot about you and if it is anything less than polished and complete you are, I'm afraid, not going to impress anyone. And as soon as anything starts to go wrong the business will come down on you harder than a supplier that has displayed commitment to quality and respect for the brand of the client who is paying their salaries.
So project managers (whether you go by the name scrum master or not) remember to retain that sense of pride in your work. Remember it is your client's business that you have in your hands, and if you want to impress them and engender longer term trust and mutual benefit include quality assurance as an integral part of everything you do. Good quality is noticeable in not being noticed : poor quality stands out a mile.
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Balancing needs: why smart Operations Directors reduce costs for the long term
A key part of the role of Operations Director is to effectively manage costs. The way a firm spends its money, allocates it resources and diverts its attention must be appropriately balanced between the desire to keep costs to a minimum in support of business activity, whilst at the same time investing in all those things that will help the business survive into the future. Unfortunately I have all too often seen a desire to drive the first without appreciating the second.
It is a fact of business life that keeping costs to a minimum will, by definition, reduce the amount of flex a business has to drive its strategy forward. Even for a business whose entire strategy is based around cost leadership there must be a part of the strategy that allows for growth and development (or imitation) of new capabilities or products. If the business has cut costs to the point where there is no fat, where everyone is focussed 100% on the day job, there is no - or little - scope for any form of innovation or review. Firms who have chosen a path of innovation or diversification must have a sensible allowance for business as unusual.
Keeping a degree of flex in the budget can be difficult, particularly when times are hard. There will be pressure to hold or reduce budgets, make staff redundant and dispose of any consultants, contractors or suppliers who are not contributing directly to the bottom line.
The majority of Operations Directors will, my experience suggests, reach for the knife and start slashing. Yet this is a fool's game, a short-term tactic that will do more harm than good. Costs need to be managed down in a way that both supports the business's long-term strategy and tackles the costs in the business's value chain.
Careful analysis of the value chain and the costs within it will show where there are opportunities for real long-term savings and improved controls. Reengineering processes that may have become indulgent over time can take significant inefficiencies out, while smarter use of technology can improve workflow or provide common access to information.
If this analysis is completed the majority will reach for the largest costs and start cutting. Smart Operations Directors will find where they can safely reduce their costs and start there. Improving linkages between departments, improving a process so that quality increases and reworking costs fall, integrating two IT systems to reduce maintenance costs, these are steps that will gain long-term, sustainable savings.
A medium sized business decided to reduce costs by cutting 10% of its staff across the board. All departments were affected, and when the dust settled a quarter of the staff had gone. But it wasn't uniform across the business: sensing a demise, the sales team had left almost en masse, the warehousing staff had shrunk dramatically and yet there were as many finance people as ever. With no one to sell products the orders started to dry up, while those that were on the books ran into fulfilment problems as there wasn't enough staff to load the lorries.
Yet sat on the COO's desk was a report that showed substantial sums of money were being wasted by orders being incorrectly shipped, incorrect invoices going out and non-payment not being pursued with any particular vigour. The resulting costs savings and improvements to cash flow would have gone a long way to meeting the cost saving objectives of the business. Such crude cutting, not only displayed a lack of operational control, it actually did a lot of long lasting harm.
To my mind the key to developing as an Operations Manager and showing you are capable of taking that next step up the corporate ladder is to move away from pure tactics and start to think strategically. A smart Operations Director is going to find a balance between the short-term need to cut its cost base to survive today and the longer term objective of reducing its cost base in a way that is sustainable and leaves the business able to pursue its strategy.
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Older Entries
Previously on this blog...
the global leader in Contact Center Consolidation 2.0
2.0 has become a meaningless addition to already poor tag lines.
A dozen beautiful images of Saturn
Wired presents a dozen of the best images from the Cassini mission
Setting up shop in a new country: beyond the website
Building a website for multiple languages is not just about translation. It is a critical business decision that has to be taken carefully.
Why call centre staff deserve your respect
If call centre staff set the first impression for your business, why do we treat them so badly?
Becoming a Specialist? A hard decision to make ...
Specialising requires hard strategic decisions to be made about your business.
When good people move on
Losing a member of staff to another company is not necessarily a bad thing
The quest for quality in Agile Software Development
Why quality assurance remains a central part of project management, regardless of the use of Agile methods
© 2010 Ross Hall. All Rights Reserved.
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About Ross Hall