Every year we look forward to one of the most fascinating data dumps the call center industry produces -- the Global Contact Center Benchmarking Report, published by Dimension Data.

Once upon a time, the practice of running a call center was an offshoot of telecom. The managers in charge of day to day operation had their experience firmly rooted in the world of the call, its routing, distribution and tracking.

In all the media ho-hah over the iPhone, is there anything left for us poor call center/telecom folk to say? Besides "I want one, right away, no matter what the cost"? Yes.

Just released this week is a new report that confirms our gut suspicions about the performance management sector - it's growing, and fast.

Some folks at the blog CRM Lowdown came up with an interesting list of the best and worst call centers of the year; I couldn't help but notice that their number one good center is 1-800-Flowers.com, one of our call center of the year award winners.

I also noticed that Verizon made their best list. At first I was incredulous. Verizon has come closer than any other company to making me turn into a "Super Empowered Angry Customer," using this blog as a bully pulpit.

But CRM Lowdown was circumspect:

Our colleagues on the ICMI Call Center event staff have asked us to extend this Miami offer to our blog readers:

Special offer for Call Center Magazine Blog readers--Save an additional $100 off Premium and Standard Conference Packages at Call Center Demo & Conference Miami. This year's event will be held February 21-23, 2007 at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hotel. Be sure to join us for first-class education, networking opportunities, a dynamic demo hall and much more. Save $300 when combining this offer with the early registration savings on premium and standard packages. Offer expires January 5, 2006. Be sure to use priority code: BLOG

For more details and to sign up, visit our Miami Demo website. Think about it: Palm trees, white sandy beaches, headsets ...

Our friends at DMG Consulting tell us they have a position available as a call center analyst/consultant. More details after the jump...

Our editor Keith Dawson is quoted in an article from the Lexington Herald-Leader (Kentucky) about the emerging trend of using call centers to take fast food orders from drive-thrus.

Miami Management, a company that owns 16 Kentucky Wendy's restaurants, has been testing outsourcing drive-thru orders at two locations. The call center is located elsewhere in the area.

How does it work?

Advertising Age says marketers and consumer research firms are in a panic over America's "opinion fatigue." Most consumers aren't as interested in answering market research questions over the phone anymore, and a small section of the population, the so-called "professional respondents," is all too eager to opine -- for a fee.

So on September 28, thirty market research executives met in Chicago to discuss at the "Research Industry Summit for Improving Respondent Cooperation."

I just had a curious thought.... are there any cases of companies that wanted to use a hosted application for something in their call center, but couldn't because they were afraid of the Sarbanes Oxley repercussions? Please let me know.

Inspired by his teenage son's surprisingly large cell phone bill, Jay Minucci has a few thoughts on text messaging -- a guest post by ICMI's vice president of consulting services.

In a story called "Call Center 2.o?" on Forbes.com, reporter Hannah Clark quotes some Accenture survey numbers that don't look too good:

• 48% of American consumers said call center hold times were longer than five minutes; 43% reported the same last year.
• Half of consumers surveyed defected to other brands after bad service.

Much of this article will be old news to contact center insiders, but it's nice to read about our industry in mainstream magazines.

There were some gems within, however:

• Zachary McGeary of Jupiter Research noted that speech-enabled IVRs double the call center's problem-solving rate, but do not increase customer satisfaction. McGeary added that call centers seem to using technology to "keep up with demand, not to stay ahead of it, not to actually improve customer satisfaction."
• Nice Systems gets a nice plug for their speech analytics tools. The article says that technology like this is a great help in finding useful information from call recordings.
• Elizabeth Herrell of Forrester Research says long hold times are agent scheduling problems, or, simply a shortage of agents. She compares a fancy IVR in an understaffed call center to "putting a clean dress on a dirty body ... It's not going to work."

Frequent readers of this blog know that I have a few favorite technology and call center blogs. I check them often, looking for news, opinions, anecdotes, and controversy, and I often post my findings here.

I'm always looking for more. I'd like to know what technology and call center blogs you read -- e-mail your picks to me at hsheff@cmp.com.

In the meantime, here's a list of a few of my favorites:

Dr. Catriona Wallace, director of the Australian call center web journal Callcentres.net used the callcentres.net blog to pose a question to her compatriots down under after she spoke at a Talisma users conference in Miami, Florida: Why do 56% of North American call centers use web chat and e-mail as a customer contact channel while a mere 20% of Australian centers use these modes?

Sometimes the Voice of the Customer isn't the one you should be listening to. Here's a quote from an article in Time magazine about Nintendo's product development (via the Signal vs Noise blog):

Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don’t listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal — they blog a lot — but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. “[Wii] was unimaginable for them,” Iwata says. “And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them. Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their minds.

The point is, I guess, that sometimes listening to the voice of the customer can be like listening to an echo chamber that reinforces things you already know, or are inclined to hear. A little counterexample for all those VoC fanatics out there...

I got an email from a vendor today, a very typical research type of email asking for my thoughts on general trends: "Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories is curious, what does a contact center technology reporter/editor such as yourself think are the critical business issues facing contact centers today?" I went ahead and answered it, but then I realized that though I like the folks at Genesys, they shouldn't have a monopoly on my thinking on such a broad subject. So here, basically, is what I told them:

1. Collaboration and communication between the call center management and the rest of the organization, particularly IT, HR and finance. Issues of culture and turf come into play, but are exacerbated by differences in the kinds of metrics each wing of the business finds meaningful; there are communication gaps all over. Add to that a lack of clear understanding of the center's role, and the varying criteria for "success" and you have a mess.

2. Analytics and measurement technologies that rely on activity from the switch, hence that are derived from call handling stats, instead of measures that are based on real value of customers, profits, revenues, etc. Flawed metrics play into the communications gap in 1, above.

3. Lack of understanding inside the center of the importance of agents to the health of the customer relationship. Most companies don't know how to assign a value to the customer relationship except on a broad scale; and hence don't know how to quantify the cost/value/profit potential innate in each interaction. So they also don't know how to prioritize resources to their most important customers, and don't know how to allocated call center resources (training, etc.) to agents that are most likely to facilitate longer customer tenure, cross- or up-sell opportunities, and the like.

Does anyone have any more pressing issues? I think these three are pretty key, but I'd be interested in hearing from people who think this is way off. Note, also that the question was phrased to ask about business issues - I deliberately answered it that way, leaving aside some pure technology issues that I know people are wrestling with, like the deployment of IP.

I'm back from Orlando and I've got a pile of glossy brochures, stacks of demo cd-roms, and the same pale complexion I left with. No time in the sun for me; no, I spent my time touring the massive Connextions call center compound and roaming the show floor in search of unique call center ideas -- far from the jaws of hungry alligators.

I haven't received a phone call from a telemarketer in years. Part of that is because I don't have a land line at home. But outgoing call centers are a dying breed. There was a time, I'm told, when this magazine was called "Inbound/Outbound." Now, as inbound call centers multiply exponentially, The Do Not Call List has all but vanquished the old outbound telemarketing industry.

Every once in a while though, we hear a muted peep from the margins. This time, it came from a New Jersey ad agency via Advertising Age magazine. Critic Bob Garfield reviews a series of telemarketing phone spots aimed at businesses. As I understand it, the Hoboken-based ad agency Hammerhead created pre-recorded skits that get played over the phone to potential clients -- businesses.

I'm not the only one who thought Skype's claim of nearly 100 million users was a bit high. Wall Street Journal tech writer Jeremy Wagstaff blogged about it, asking "Where the hell are they?"

Big news today - NICE Systems announced it's buying two American call center software vendors, IEX and Performix.

What are we to make of this?

Here are a few new and noteworthy blogs and blog posts I've come across lately -- most of them corporate, but all of them interesting.

In the latest issue of Harper's, senior editor Bill Wasik reveals that he was the guy who started the "flash mob" phenomenon. A flash mob, if you missed the media coverage, was (as Wasik quotes from the Oxford English Dictionary) “a public gathering of complete strangers, organized via the Internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again.” (See this Wikipedia definition for more) Wasik says the whole thing was a big joke, a commentary on fads and "intended as a metaphor for the hollow hipster culture that spawned it." The climax (and death) of the fad was to be the moment when corporate America adopted the fad to market a product. Ford finally did it -- a year or so after the fad died, Wasik says -- to market the Ford Fusion.

This is a long-winded way of introducing some call center blogs -- corporate blogs. Blogs at their best are stream of consciousness screeds by regular people. It seems that the natural progression of any organic trend is for it to become codified and inorganic. What starts with an enthusiast blogging about technology inevitably spawns blogs produced by the companies who make that technology.

Just minutes after writing that last entry I stumbled across Jeff Pulver's ode to the state of the telecom industry. It's a Suessian hoot, and yes, it's in verse. Rhyming verse.

Baby Bells: Grow up with Dr. Seuss

Well done, Jeff!

Let them merge. Let them try to recapture some of the momentum, market share, technological innovation. It won't matter.

It wouldn't matter if every telecom company in the world banded together now, trying to stave off the inevitable. The fact remains that it is inevitable. There is no economic model I can see that allows for the persistence of regulated common carriers in an IP world. Whatever replaces it, and there are as many options as you can imagine, the attempt to recreate "big" telecom is a sign of the nearing end of the line for those companies.

Ten years from now, the venerable brand may survive, but I'll bet anything that the AT&T of 2016 isn't in the delivery business at all.

In my Are You Getting Tired of Paul English Yet? post earlier this week, I blogged about Fast Company editor William C. Taylor's New York Times article on Paul English and IVRs.

Ted Hopton, membership director at our partner, the Incoming Calls Management Institute (ICMI), saw the Taylor article too and pointed out (in the ICMI member forum) Fast Company's blog and an old-but-good article on call centers. For the benefit of our readers who don't know about ICMI, or aren't members, here's a quick list of some of Fast Company's call center related content.

I had one of the most interesting trade show experiences of my career last week. At the Austin Call Center Demo show, I led a tour group of attendees from booth to booth to try to help them organize their experience. Show floors are designed to be chaotic – and haphazard. Companies are sited across the floor based on factors that are irrelevant to the attendees. You buy a booth early, you get a good spot. But from the attendee point of view, that means that when you walk the aisles, you come across a pretty random collection of vendors from different sectors and it can be hard to figure out where to start, how to approach the variety.

So we came up with this idea that we – Call Center's editors – would lead these "tours" of the floor. We'd gather attendees outside the hall, give them a little talk about what they were about to experience, and then take them on a themed walkabout. In my case, I was taking them around to visit about half a dozen vendors that focused on "people and process" stuff.

A weekly compendium of call centers that are opening, closing, and making the news around the world.

Business X Uses, Likes Business Y's Product / X Acquires Y

Here at the Call Center Magazine news desk, we get a lot of news items reporting on a company -- usually some vertical, say a bank -- using a telecom product/service company's products, usually some call center software. This isn't exactly hard news -- there's no new product, no dramatic shift in the market -- it's just a vendor announcing a successful deal with a client. Other times, we get news of small or foreign market acquisitions. Sometimes these are good opportunities to mention great products or services, but other times they're just not newsworthy. Now, there is finally a place for that lost deal news: The Call Center Deal Report.

Since the beginning of telecommunication, people who have conversations have often wondered, "Is this person really listening to me? Or are they just acting like they are?" During a telephone interview recently, I was actually given confirmation that a participant in a teleconference was not listening to me, except he called what he was doing "multi-tasking."

A semi-regular compendium of call centers that are opening, closing, and making the news around the world.

An irregular compendium of call centers that are opening, closing, and making the news around the world.

An irregular compendium of call centers that are opening, closing, and making the news around the world.

By Harry Sheff

As a new staffer here at Call Center Magazine, and a new initiate to the world of call centers with all their technology and jargon, I've noticed some interesting trends. Have you ever read about a company's "solution" and wondered what the "problem" was? Or if the "solution" was a product or a service, hardware or software? What must have started as industry shorthand, a catch-all term that could stand for any product, service, or combination, has -- I would argue -- become a cliche that obscures our understanding of the things that we need to make call centers run smoothly.

For an upcoming article in Call Center, we're researching centers that have initiated cross-selling and up-selling programs. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. As part of our inquiry, we thought we'd throw our interview questions into the wild and see if anyone wanted to take a look at our thought processes and give us input into the cross-sell/upsell experience. Here's what we're asking call centers:

1. Which industries encourage agents to do the most cross-selling and up-selling?

2. How extensive is cross-selling and up-selling in call centers? Is it typical or atypical? Why?

3. How do you measure the amount of cross-selling and up-selling done in a call center? Is it by quantifiable data (time spent on a call) or qualitative (feedback from customers)?

4. How often do you have evaluations conducted for call centers and their productivity rate in generating sales through up-selling and cross-selling techniques?

5. How is the performance of an agent's ability to cross-sell or up-sell rated?

6. What types of special training programs, if any, prepare agents for better practices in cross-selling and up-selling?

7. What are the purposes of offering incentives to agents who are successful in up-selling and cross-selling?

8. What types of incentives do you recommend?

9. What types of remedies do you recommend to counteract the over zealous agent, who gets carried away with the incentive initiative?

10. Are there stress management techniques and practices that are recommended for the agent that practices up-selling and cross-selling?

11. How does the practice of up-selling or cross-selling, in addition to customer service, affect an agent's performance in the call center? Does the added pressure have any association with agent attrition?
12. In what way does identifying with a customer help an agent in the up- selling/cross-selling process? How does it hinder this practice?

13. What are some examples of inappropriate situations to present the idea of up- selling and cross-selling to a customer?

14. What are some exceptions to these rules?

15. What are some best practices - rules of thumb for cross-selling and up-selling in the call center?

Email us your thoughts and wisdom: aouzoonian@cmp.com with the subject line: Cross-Sell/Upsell Thoughts. Thanks.

A couple of days ago we were pleased to host a visit from some execs at AIM Technology, including Tony Hayward, their president & ceo.

Although they were there to talk about their upcoming product announcement (which we'll have more about presently), what was really interesting was the off-the-cuff conversation we had about performance management tools in general. Why, we wondered, does this category of tool have such a low penetration rate into the market as a whole? Why do call centers (and their managers) not flock to it as a way to bridge the chasm between the center and the rest of the relevant enterprise?

I'm a big proponent of what Tony called "multidimensional analysis" - using data from a wide variety of sources to come to some understanding of root causes and hidden effects. Though it sounds awfully removed from what call centers are doing, I think it's evident that the stream of information call centers provide is becoming more important to people outside the center - to financial people, marketing people, line-of-business managers.

But that stream of data - output largely as activity based statistics that tell a very "call-based" story - need interpretation and augmentation to be meaningful outside the center. The fact is that outside the center people don't care so much about hold time, handle time, speed of answer or that sort of thing. But that's what call centers are best at talking about.

Performance management, and its close cousins, analytics and business intelligence, are very fully developed disciplines. Outside the center, companies are very skilled at collecting and then mining disparate sources of information. Add the call center's data to that mountainous pile, while not a trivial exercise, is a natural outgrowth of current trends.

So why would the call center's managers want to stand idly by while their data - and its interpretation - is handled by someone outside their circle?

That's essentially what's happening. What baffles me - and Tony Hayward, apparently - is the short-sighted approach to measurement within the call center. In his view, call centers are being held to account for a different type of metric than they used to be. Instead of focusing on cost efficiency, with its basis in average handle time, hold time and adherence, companies now care more about operational effectiveness: measuring the customer experience, and the up-sell/cross-sell opportunities.

If that's so, why do 29 out of 30 call centers (his figures) not use performance management? It's a pretty safe bet that in some of those 29 non-users, someone else in the organization is analyzing the call center's data for operational effectiveness trends. Why isn't it happening in the call center? Does the call center manager really understand that if they don't get out in front of their data analysis, someone else will do it for them, and perhaps take away some of the autonomy and expertise that the call center now holds?

Tony spoke to me of what he called a "light-bulb moment" that occurs with some call center managers - the moment when they realize the immense power of the data heaps they have access to, and the collaborative possibilities that emerge from it.

Performance management is made by a number of very interesting, albeit small, companies. They seem to get on fairly well together - AIM and Performix and Merced and several others don't seem to be at the competitive point yet where they bad-mouth each other. Instead, an atmosphere of relative cordiality prevails as they seek to establish themselves and their category as a call center necessity.

I suggest that what they ought to do is band together, at least for the short term, to educate the call center professional about the need and power of analyzing data, and tell them how to do it in a context that will be meaningful for others in their organization. There's never been a more powerful tool for justifying the strategic value of a call center - more should be using it.

So, a standing offer to the execs at (or customers of) the performance management and analytics vendors: let's have an open roundtable discussion. Let's have an industry-wide conversation about the pros and cons of managing the data, about the IT hurdles that are spawned by this approach, about all of these things. Let's talk frankly about the turf battles that come up between call center management and other departments, and make the case, if there is one, for collaboration.

The goal, of course (and the reason that these vendors will probably take me up on this) is to have more call center managers encounter their light bulb moments. And then the vendors will not have to fight over the one out of 30 that get it; they'll all be able to prosper by selling their wares to four or five that get it. And the others will be left behind.

We had a conversation with Gary Barnett of Aspect Software recently. Aspect (which is merging with Concerto) just celebrated its 20th anniversary - 20 years that have seen tremendous changes in the way call centers are managed and outfitted. Here's a small excerpt of what Gary had to say about the past - and the future:

"We've really taken the ACD from something that was very much in the closet, known by the communications directors, and not by the IT professionals, and we've really taken that now, with a high degree of confidence over the past decade even, where the IT professionals really understand what it is that we do. . . .It's really hard to draw the line now between ACD, IVR - as a good example, from the very first day we released the ACD it had IVR capabilities built right into it with our voice subsystem. That was very unique twenty years ago, and remains there to this day. So we knew that you had to take CTI, IVR, ACD capabilities and start to unify those. . . .You can go all the way back to the beginning days of the company to understand how that was a philosophy.

If you're not based on open standards going forwards, you just will not be successful in this industry. And the more and more that we move out to the enterprise and not just to contact center agents, then this openness and industry standards become more important."

Some of the most significant changes that are going on right now, he says: the huge increase in the importance of IT and business professionals in making decisions that affect the call center. "We talk a lot more about the business metrics than about the low level infrastructure metrics," he says.

"A decade ago you very rarely saw any contact center provider pulling other statistics, other metrics into what it is they do. We do that every day now. It is not unusual at all to be pulling information from other systems right inside of our own domain and being able to report on that, to show that real time. That's become something that's embedded in what we do. If you're not adhereing to open standards you won't be able to do that."

And not in a good way.

For several months now, the blogosphere has been watching as noted pundit Jeff Jarvis eviscerates Dell for their customer service. For the specific service that he and his family have received from the company, and from their call centers.

It is documented here, with the latest installment of his story here.

What is interesting - and profound, for all call center professionals - is that this is an example of what can happen to a company when they forget about the extraordinary reach of a super-empowered angry customer.

And in today's world, aren't all angry, unhappy customers superempowered?

All call center managers should write this down: Note to Self: it could be me in the crosshairs. And that would suck.

Datamonitor has some interesting numbers out today about the impact of globalization on American outsourcing:

• In 2004, 37% of the world's outsourced contact center agent positions were in the United States. By 2008, Datamonitor expects that number to shrink to 25%. In fact, the number of US agent positions is expected to drop from 315,000 in 2004 to 291,000 in 2008.

• Nine out of ten jobs lost in the United States contact center outsourcing industry will be outbound telemarketing jobs. This is attributed to the Do-Not-Call registry and the higher revenues offered by inbound work. In addition, the number of agent positions in offshore and nearshore countries will continue to grow, due to the growing demand from US and captive market businesses.

• Contact center outsourcers are introducing new services to grow revenue and compete more effectively in the US market. Firms that were founded as contact center outsourcers are offering services which overlap other business process outsourcing (BPO) areas, and BPO providers are acquiring contact center capability.

Are there really only 300k outsourced stations in the US? That tracks to something like 5-10% of the total agent population, if you use the accepted figure of 3-5 million FTEs in the US. Doesn't that suggest that the industry as a whole - separate from the outsourcers - is pretty healthy? Outsourcers do, after all, operate in a completely different economic model than traditional inhouse centers.

Reader Christopher Barcellos writes:

I am writing in response to Joe Fleischer's piece on How Much Should You Satisfy Customers? in the September edition of Call Center Magazine. ... I am not in the banking industry-far from it, but I am in the Call Center & Customer Relations business and have been for sometime. What the article does not touch upon, unfortunately, is the fact that satisfying customers isn't enough. That is, a satisfied customer is not necessary a loyal customer. I am personally satisfied with my financial institution, but if I am presented with a better, more attractive deal from another institution, the fact that I am "satisfied" isn't going to keep me from jumping ship.

The bottom-line is that satisfied customers are faced with a decision and the decision is whether or not they will remain in a business relationship with your organization. A loyal customer on the other hand, has already made that decision and the task now is for your organization to recognize and maintain their loyalty. The question then should be, not: How Much Should You Satisfy Customers?, but How Do You Maintain Your Customer Loyalty (before someone else does)?

Amit Shankardass of ClientLogic sent me some thoughts about macro trends affecting the call center industry. This was followup to a really interesting conversation we had about the impact of offshoring, how outsourcing is changing, and whether we're watching the birth of a global call center industry. (Rather than a collection of discrete national industries.)

Here's what he says he is seeing:

"

1. Revenue Orientation - The typical role of the call center agent in the US is rapidly changing. Now, more than ever, companies have an acute focus on increasing the revenue per customer. In order to do this, they have begun to look at existing interactions with their customers and ask the question "are we leaving revenue on the table during these interactions". To this end, ClientLogic has helped several of our clients execute up-sell, cross-sell, saves and retention programs on existing customer support AND even tech support desks. For example: At present 25% of our clients take advantage of our Sales and Saves programs - up from 15% at the start of 2004.

2. Six Sigma - While six sigma has been around in the manufacturing industry for a while, it is relatively new to the world of contact centers. More and more of our clients have begun to ask for, and obtain on their own, six sigma resources. We have seen these six sigma resources (at our clients) mostly using the analytics aspect of six sigma towards process improvement initiatives. Keep in mind that it is impossible to ensure a 99.9997% (the measure for six sigma) non-defect rate when it comes to human interactions. It is for this reason that analytics is the most widely used aspect of six sigma in contact centers.

Thanks, Amit!