Customer Service King

A Computeractive article states, “British businesses must bring their offshore calls centers back to , said anti-fraud specialists Early Warning.”  This is due to a theft of consumer’s personal information which includes credit card details and even bank details.

This is a real concern and has been going on for years.  I’ve experienced and witnessed this kind of situation and the picture is ugly.  There is a difference now from years ago.  The regulations and contracts are stricter.  This has made financial institutions felt more secured when outsourcing their businesses to call centers in other countries.

So, what do we do to prevent it?

Background Checks When Hiring
Everyone to be hired for the project should go through a full background check before they are hired.  This includes previous jobs, character references and possible criminal records.

Outsourcing to countries like India, South Africa, and the Philippines was a solution to cut costs mainly on labor.  Everyone knows that.  Since it has been so successful and large companies have decided it was worth investing to put their own centers instead of outsourcing, labor cost has increased.

This could mean a good thing for those working in these centers, but is this really going long term?  Maybe not.

Right now, I’m happy that I am able to compete with my other counterparts and give them the best I’ve got.  I’ve written a post about Dell doing such a thing and it is natural that people go to where the money is.  This not only increases their market value, it also makes it so hard for outsourced centers to compete.

In How to Succeed in Business, CIO Editor in Chief Abbie Lundberg interviews Kevin Turner who has occupied three of the most senior offices in the corporate C-suite: CIO, CEO and COO. In the interview Mr. Turner talks about what's different and what's the same, and shares the secrets of his success.  Here are several excerpts:

CIO: When you were Wal-Mart's CIO, what were the three most important things you did to prepare yourself for a broader role in the business?
Kevin Turner: When you're in a company that believes in the value of IT and where there are high expectations on the delivery of that value to the business, the ability to work with people and teams [is critical. You need to be able to] pull together a focused agenda with clear definitions of success. So building self-managed, high-performing teams in IT was a necessity that proved very useful on the business side.

Next would be building relationships with peers in the business group. When you work closely with people to deliver results, audit the payback, review what's been implemented and come up with a mechanism to drive improvement, it gives you a good understanding at a high level of how the company or the operation works. That became something I relied heavily upon in my next role [as CEO of Sam's Clubs]. Finally, an understanding of what's possible with technology and the ability to map it to business problems and solutions to drive results [is critical]. Applying that knowledge in the business role was instrumental for me.

What it takes to be a successful CIO sounds similar to what it takes to be successful moving into that broader business role.
You have to tailor your terminology and your approach, but the principles are solid and they very much transport.

Has technology hit a tipping point in terms of its relevance and importance to the business?
I think so. In the early '90s, I would have characterized the CIO grade card [this way]: being under budget, enabling the company to grow and keeping the systems running. Those were the main drivers that could get you a decent grade as a CIO.

You still have to do those things. But now the world-class companies are saying, "How can IT really help us change the world? How can IT help me change my business model and change our game against the competition?" That's the biggest fundamental shift.

Wal-Mart was perhaps on the front side of that change. It is in a very low-margin business [where you have to make] sure that every dollar spent is accounted for and that we got the payback out of it. I had a lot of help from senior management to say whether we got what we said we'd get, and if not, why? Was it a bad decision, or was it something that we simply didn't execute as well as we should have? Having that follow-up was important.

Of the positions you've had since being a CIO—COO and CEO—which is the more natural next step for an IT executive?
The CIO could graduate into either of those roles, or head of a division or head of procurement or marketing, depending upon the operation. The sophistication of what's required [to run a business] is escalating like crazy. Staying on top of that is something CIOs are used to doing.

They're used to a lot of change coming their way. That dynamic environment really puts them at an advantage as they go into the business.

Which is the harder job: CIO or CEO?
Well, it depends upon the amount of change you're trying to introduce and the results that you're up against. They both have their moments. With everything the CEO faces today from the standpoints of governance, competition and shareholder expectation—let's just say there's less under your direct control than with the CIO role. The CEO role has a lot of external complexities. But the CIO has some moments that would be very comparable to the most difficult day of the CEO.

What advice would you give CIOs who are ready to move to a different role?
Take inventory of what you've been exposed to and learned. Make sure you have an understanding of how the business operates, the external marketplace and how the customer responds. And remember: Creating and driving business value is really meaningful to taking that next step.

For the complete interview, check out the source article.

Here are several excerpts from an article by Jan Matlis, Predicting Customer Behavior:

Predictive analytics is a set of mathematical techniques applied to a data set for determining the probability that some scenario is likely to happen or be true. These techniques are applied to many research areas, including meteorology, genetics and marketing -- areas in which there's an abundance of data and a need to forecast the future.

In business, predictive analytics are often used to answer questions about customer behavior. For example, companies often want to know whether or not a particular customer is likely to be interested in a direct-mail offer. Or a business might want to know whether, given a certain set of premiums and benefits, a new customer will become a long-term customer. Ultimately, businesses want predictive analytics to suggest how to best target resources for maximum return.

Many Uses

Cross-selling, upselling, determining customer profitability and promoting customer loyalty  are the best-known uses of this technology, according to a report by Forrester Research analyst Lou Agosta. But there are many other applications, he notes, including credit scoring, predicting machine failures and making the supply chain more efficient.

Plenty of high-level mathematics are involved, but stated simply, predictive analytics is used to ask which characteristics, called predictors, in a data set are clustered together. The technique is also used to determine whether, given a set of predictors, the value for some other characteristic is likely to fall within a desired range.

Though these two questions sound very similar, in practice, they're quite different.

See the source article for several examples.

The More Data the Better

One key to making models like this work is having plenty of clean data to work with. "Without examples of fraud, the neural network cannot be trained on what to look for," says Agosta. And without historical examples of sales of a new product, a model can't predict a new market opportunity, he says. This is a case where more data is better, to smooth out idiosyncrasies and reveal information that might otherwise be lost in the noise.

Predictive analytics is full of other challenges, too -- from organizational politics to model design, validation and data preparation. "Data preparation can be up to 80 percent of the effort of predictive analytics, and many firms are not getting beyond it," Agosta says.

A major goal of predictive analytics is to move away from seat-of-the-pants decision-making. But that can run afoul of organizational politics if, say, the brand manager doesn't agree with the conclusions. Models should be revised as needed, but not just because the results don't support the brand manager's theory.

"Do not second-guess validated test results without cause and consideration," Agosta cautions. "Be true to your predictive model."

Two companies offering industry-leading predictive analytic technology solutions are SPSS and SAS. Check out their web sites to learn more about predictive analytics and the types of solutions that these companies have to offer.

Here are the past week's most interesting CRM marketplace news items:

• NetSuite Flexes Its Muscles
• NetSuite launches SuiteFlex to build out verticals
• OnSite Announces 'POS for NetSuite'
• Marketworks Provides Multi-Channel E-Commerce Solutions For NetSuite
• News from this week's OracleWorld Conference:
• Oracle previews Fusion user experience
• Oracle's on-demand lineup adds Siebel, PeopleSoft tools
• Oracle Buying MetaSolv for $219.2 Million
• Nokia and Oracle Help Mobile Professionals Improve Customer Service
• Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Validated with Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise EPM 8.9
• Business Objects Introduces BusinessObjects Data Quality XI for Siebel CRM
• Citrix Solutions Achieve Integration Validation With Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM and PeopleSoft Tools
• Oracle's Siebel CRM On Demand to Offer myMarketSpace
• Siebel users seek better road map from Oracle
• Neocase Software Closes New Financing to Support U.S. Expansion
• Microsoft Partners Still Fuming over Vista
• Surado CRM announces support for ShoreTel Telephone Systems
• New QuickBase Release Puts More Power at the Fingertips of Corporate Workgroups
• Xactly Extends On-Demand Sales Compensation Mgmt App With Powerful Analytics and Reporting
• Bluefolder's Service Automates Service Calls for Small Biz
• FileVision Announces New Version of Office Productivity Solution for SMBs
• ZapCreator Enables Self-Build Micro-Sites for Marketeers
• Smart Online Releases Its Enhanced Software-as-a-Service Group Calendar Application for Small Businesses
• WhatCounts 6.0 Updated For CRM Integration
• Vendio Launches Free Service to Help eBay(TM) Merchants Thank Bidders
• SitePal Avator's Take Your Leads to Your Live (Human) Sales Team
• SAS Model Manager to Speed Value of Predictive Analytics
• Epicor Unveils New Desktop Productivity Solution
• Google Debuts Customizable Search Engine
• Online Retail Spending Projected To Top A Record $100 Billion This Year  

Here are several excerpts from Henry Canady's article, Make Contact - How changing technology assesses call center operations, from B-to-B to new teleweb centers, that recently appeared in SellingPower.com:

The telemarketing operation of yesterday has given way to the call center of tomorrow. How does your call center stack up? Let’s compare. If your customers cannot easily and quickly reach your organization at any time from any point on the globe, and at no cost, your call center is in trouble. And your customers will soon be looking elsewhere to do business.

The best companies in America understand. They operate in the electronic world where distance is irrelevant: they transform in-person transactions into customer contact ‘touch points’ by telephone, email, fax, kiosk and the Internet.

In the process, call centers are changing. They have become a kind of multimode, 24/7, 360-degree search engine enabling companies to reach their customers and customers to learn about or buy whatever they want from companies.

It’s not complicated. In fact, some university professors are collecting data on call centers, tracking results and explaining such changes every day. Best of all, you can access this information from your own computer.

Measuring Peer Group Performance:

Dr. Jon Anton at Purdue University maintains that no matter what you sell, your customers should be able to reach you – anytime, from anywhere, in any form they want, for free. Anton teaches at Purdue’s Department of Consumer Sciences and conducts research for Purdue’s Center for Customer-Driven Quality. Although junior colleges often train supervisors and agents for call centers, Purdue is the only four-year university with a program devoted specifically to call centers, customer contact centers and general customer access options.

True to its vision of the 21st-century marketplace, Purdue hosts what might be called a customer contact center for customer contact managers. The center’s Website allows companies to sign on and become subscribers. A wide range of research papers and studies are available on best-practice call center techniques, some for free and others for a fee based on the number of seats in your center.

This Website features an even niftier tool: benchmarking. Simply enter your own call center’s data and you can obtain a comparison of your performance with that of other call centers, including a peer group of companies similar to yours.

Purdue collects data on two basic types of call-center measures: 1) the efficiency of each center’s operations and 2) its effectiveness in bringing in revenue for the selling firm.

Of course, the complexity of customer contacts will affect the pure efficiency measures. For example, technical support or claim-adjustment contacts take much longer to handle than simple requests for prices or standard product information.

Purdue thus allows its subscribers to compare themselves to a set of companies having equally complex customer contacts. Each call center is profiled by the types of customer contacts it handles. For example, inbound call centers are described by the portion of calls they receive in 12 different categories, from simple call routing all the way up to technical support for business customers.

This analysis enables you to compare your operation to other companies that do similar work with a similar budget. Call center efficiency is measured in a wide variety of ways, including speed of answer, cost per call and service level. Effectiveness is measured by customer satisfaction, revenue per shift and cross-selling opportunities and closes.

The Purdue Center’s Web tools then take the analysis further. The gap between your center and the average or best-in-practice center in your peer group is calculated for each measure. A financial report is provided showing where you may be able to improve and how much money, in saved costs or increased revenues, you might make from the improvements.

The collection of good data on relevant peer group performance allows Purdue to highlight potential areas of improvement for each subscriber. For example, you can compare your customers’ time-in-queue with the average queue time for companies that do similar work. The Purdue Finance Gap Analysis will estimate the dollar cost of lost business from excessive waits. Similar estimates can be made for spending too much to bring a TSR on board, having low call productivity, sloppy data entry or below-par customer satisfaction.

Of course, these figures are just rough estimates. But they can be very useful for focusing your efforts on the most rewarding areas of improvement. And the more you know about your competitors, the better you can assess the effectiveness of your own customer contact units.

For much more, I highly recommend that you check out the complete source article as well as Purdue's Call Center Web Site.

Hear ye! Hear ye!  Calling all agents out there!  It’s time to start ranting and raving about the daily grind in your center.  As you walk through the door, move towards your station and start receiving or making calls, anything can happen.

There is a venue to start submitting your stories.  Call Center Information Site, an avid reader of this humble blog, has started a page dedicated to agent stories called "Call Center Agent Confessions".  What’s interesting about this page is that it will be filled with “gossip”!  I’m excited already!

Here are some examples that were posted on the site to get you started:

• Does the person who sits next to you give out the wrong information all day long?
• Have you caught a co-worker leaving his desk and staying logged into the system thereby sending the callers to an empty line, but keeping up his daily call volumes?
• Do your colleagues lie about supervisors being available in order to prevent customers from complaining about them?

To help start it off, I will be submitting a story or two (under a different name of course).  You’ll never know, your story might be famous and might just get a chance to be featured here as well (with my comments and perspective). 

Details to submit your stories are found in the Confessions Page!

I’ve conducted several client presentations and this is the first time I’ve met a client that is interested in process improvement, other than quality compliance.  I can still remember the question, “So, who is responsible for improving our processes?  This is something we are interested in doing and hope you can help us.”  This is great news!

I had a huge smile and started to explain the responsibilities and tasks of the Quality team.  It felt so good.

It’s pretty basic but we’ve managed to include a quality form to check their current processes in relation to the calls we listen to.  It’s more difficult and tedious because you need to assign a certain process to one form.  We tried making a form that was more generic but it wasn’t as effective as we thought it would be.  It was a hard lesson we had to learn.

In Social Networks Forcing Customer Service Change, Barney Beal,News Director at SearchCRM.com notes the following:

It's a good time to be in service and support, said presenters talking about the future of the industry here at Oracle OpenWorld.
 
"I love being in service now -- we're grabbing hold," said Mike Betzer, vice president of CRM for service at Oracle Corp. "The drive for efficiency is clearly behind us. Our leading customers are clearly thinking about [a new approach to service] at a C-level."

Betzer, who co-founded hosted call center firm Ineto before it was acquired by Siebel and joined Oracle when it in turn acquired Siebel, sees major changes ahead in the service industry. With reducing costs and improving efficiencies in the contact center now taking a back seat to priorities like improving customer loyalty, new technology and challenges are emerging. Key among these is the arrival of social networks, said Michael Maoz, research vice president at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., who preceded Betzer at a session here.

Organizations need to rethink their services processes from a customer perspective, Maoz said. A company perspective typically progresses from targeting customers, to inquiring, acquiring, to welcoming and eventually developing and managing them. Customers, on the other hand, see their relationships with companies evolving from awareness, to searching to selecting, ordering, paying and set up, to eventually using support and upgrading, Maoz said.

According to Maoz, there are a number of trends pushing companies toward rethinking customer service. Customers expect a seamless experience, one that reaches across channels, whether they contact a company first via the Web or online, they want to be able to continue that process in the other channel.

Additionally, "secret" service is enabling this process, acting as an unseen person in the communication loop aiding the experience, whether it's through proactive chat when someone abandons an online shopping cart or a premier customer struggling with the IVR. Service avoidance is also emerging as customers are turning to communities of their peers to help solve problems.

"All of our IT efforts pale in comparison to what's happening with social communities and social networks," Maoz said.

For some here, the shift in the contact center from cost center to profit center and the emerging importance of social networking is already underway.

As organizations look to invest in this new wave of customer service, they should turn to outsourcers for efficiencies and basic service while maintaining in-house control over things like proactive service. Those efforts tend to be more expensive, but the ROI is two-to-three times as high, Maoz said.

In the next year, Gartner predicts companies will invest heavily in Customer Data Integration, business process management and industry specific services-oriented architectures and using technology like enterprise feedback management, analytics, and Web and IVR self-service.

For more on the subject, check out the complete source article. 

Here's a great post from John Dodds, Geek Marketing 101, whose weblog, Make Marketing History, I recently discovered thanks to Guy Kawaski's Signal Without Noise Blog:

I see amongst many geeks a pervasive misunderstanding and consequent distrust of what marketing is, and a failure to recognise that much technology marketing is no longer geek to geek since complex products are increasingly being bought by non-geeks. Of course, these observations are equally applicable to geek to geek and non-geek businesses.

1) Marketing is not a department.
Marketing is a combination of elements that creates the environment in which it is possible to meet a customer need (starting right back at product development). Promotion and sales are just sub-sets of marketing.

2) Marketing is a conversation, but most people don't speak geek.
Successful technology marketing must translate the creations of the uncommunicative into the needs of the untechnical. Spin is not good marketing. Lucid two-way communication is.

3) Simplicity does not negate complexity.
Reductive marketing that simplifies ideas does not undersell your complex creation. It facilitates an entree to your world. You can't have passionate users until they start using.

4) Think what, not how?
Think of the "product" in terms of what it does, not how it does it. You may be interested in the latter, but your users generally aren't. Portable computer memory is not a difficult concept to enunciate, yet flash drive and USB drive nomenclature is predicated on technological aspects not the actual function. Long words confuse, don't they?

5) Think will, not can.
Think of the "product" in terms of what most people will be happy doing with it and not in the myriad possibilities it offers. You may think speed and multiple settings are hot, but outside the lab such attributes may not provide the greatest satisfaction. Simple, intuitive interfaces will.

6) Only you RTFM.
Regular people don't read the manual. It's too big (see 5), too complicated (see 3) and thus incomprehensible. It's not that people are averse to science and technology - they're averse to being made to feel helpless. The demand for books that simplify science is huge the world over. Your manual is marketing.

7) Technical Support is marketing.
In the absence of all of the above, your users inevitably need help. A technical support department speaking in non-technical, hand-holding language transforms their purchase from waste of money to life-enhancing boon and is the greatest marketing tool you have.

8) You're not marketing to people who hate marketing.
Don't allow your misguided prejudices about advertising and snake-oil to infect your approach and damage sales. People hate hype, spin and unfulfilled expectations. They do not hate having their needs met (see 1).

9) You're not marketing to people who hate technology products.
They're not Luddites, but nor are they geeks - that's what you're paid to be. However, they often hate how technology products make them feel because blinding with science is as bad as baffling with bullshit.

10) Marketing demystifies.
As the conversations develop, the users comprehend your products better and you better understand their needs. With increased confidence, they utilise more and more of your geekiness and, with increased awareness, you are better able to adapt to their behaviours. They feel more warmly about geeks and you may get the chance to buy them a drink. That doesn't sound so bad, does it?

For many more marketing insights, check out the Make Marketing History blog.