London, 05.March.2009
The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking
In the second week of February I attended Call Centre World 2010 in Berlin. As usual, first class air travel with EasyJet had been efficiently pre-arranged by Mel, our über-efficient office manager. The stage was set for yet another Noetica sortie into Europe via its more obscure WWII historic airfields conveniently located no further than a two hour easy coach journey from one’s intended destination.
Anyway, as I was carefully considering the correct number of spare pairs of socks to deposit in my travel bag, the news broke. Having been away in the US for the previous week (and weekend) I had been blissfully unaware of the “situation” that was developing around me before it hit me like a TGV train at full tilt… My daughters (Florence – 9 & Alice – 7) were starring in the primary school’s production of “The Pied Piper” in the perhaps understated yet crucial roles of “a villager/treasurer” and “a rat” respectively.
And here’s the rub. My last chance to attend the gala performance was on the very same evening when I was scheduled to return from the cold. Plans had to be changed at short notice if years of therapy were to be avoided later in life. Horrific images of weeping, gaunt, emaciated young women with rotten teeth and crazed hollow eyes being dragged out of some stinking crack den screaming something incoherent about their father’s absence were playing out in my head.
The trouble with budget airlines is that most destinations are serviced by one or occasionally two flights a day (apart from Tuesday if it happens to be a full moon or a leap year) which take off either way before the crack of dawn or just after Ozzy Osbourne’s bedtime. After an eternity spent on the internet trying to find a way of getting back a couple of hours earlier, and having examined all the options including stopovers in Budapest, Kazakhstan and Novosibirsk a solution that didn’t involve bancruptcy or take me to countries that I couldn’t pronounce did eventually emerge.
It was so simple a plan that it’s intrinsic beauty almost made me weep with delight. It meant taking a German high speed ICE train from Berlin’s central station to Dusseldorf, where an Easyjet flight would be waiting to whisk me back to Gatwick. Whizz through the airport to my waiting car and an hour later I would be sitting comfortably in the audience with time to spare! Excellent. Tickets were purchased (I will never understand why continental trains are so much cheaper than ours? I suppose we pay extra for the punctuality and cleanliness…) and peace was restored.
I slipped into Berlin without a glitch, the plane was on time and our undercover contact in Germany (code “Roland”) was there to meet me at the prearranged rendezvous place. I lowered my trilby over the dark sunglasses (it was 21:30 on a dark snowy night after all) and managed to enter the country without raising any suspicion.
Call Centre World passed also more or less without incident as our camouflage strategy appeared to be working like a dream and most visitors didn’t appear to notice our presence in any way. Great stuff! At the agreed time on the second day, I bid farewell to “Roland” and set off with a spring in my step for the central station giggling to myself under my trilby at the brilliance and simplicity of the plan that was about to unfold.
Berlin central station is a genuine thing of beauty. Trains seem to float high in the air as they dart their way across the suspended tracks crisscrossing the light vaulted steel and glass structure of its vast atrium. I easily found the hanging platform where my high speed train would have been waiting for me were it not for another high speed train to a completely different destination that was occupying the same physical space. Confused, I found a Deutche Bahn official and asked where my train was.
“Guten Tag. I’m looking for the 13:05 ICE to Dusseldorf.” I said, smiling and holding up my reservation for him to see.
“It vill be here zoon. It is next train, ja?”
“Is it late?”
“Eh?”
“Late, is the train to Dusseldorf going to be late?” I asked, slowly enunciating each syllable, suddenly realising that my cunning plan didn’t leave me much time to spare at Dusseldorf airport where I assumed that the punctual German train would drop me with its renowned precision.
“Maybe…”
“I see. Vielen dank”, my heart sinking slightly.
Fifteen minutes of anxious pacing up and down and my train crawled onto the platform. We were off! Once on the train, regular announcements came over the PA system in both German and English anticipating each station en route, the precise delay (ranging between 8 and 12 minutes throughout the journey) and a list of all the possible awaiting connections, their precise platforms and times of departure. Information overload, but pretty efficient, I thought.
And so the journey went by quite peacefully… as I only had about 40 minutes to get from train to plane in Dusseldorf I was getting a bit tetchy but I reassured myself that all will be well. The last station, about 8 minutes before Dusseldorf Airport, was Duisburg. I decided that once we left Duisburg I would shut down my laptop, collect all my stuff and get ready to jump off the train as soon as we got to the airport.
We arrived at Duisburg with a delay of no more than 10 minutes, so I was beginning to feel rather pleased with myself and the resilience of my cunning plan. After about 5 minutes of being stationary in Duisburg a rather alarmed and breathless announcement came over the tannoy. This time in German only. I couldn’t understand most of it but I caught the phrases Dusseldorf Flughafen (airport) and Dusseldorf Hauptbanhof (main station). I was waiting for the English translation but it never came. The train didn’t move. I was beginning to panic.
Then I caught a glimpse of our train conductor standing on the platform. She was a remarkably tall, morbidly obese woman who no doubt caused Deutche Bahn’s tailors some considerable headaches when assembling her uniform, let alone the dubious pleasure of measuring her rotund and rather amorphously irregular form. Looking at her it became clear that the miles of silky material inherited from the Luftwaffe together with the proud tradition of German parachute making has managed to find a useful civilian role. Cannons to ploughshares and all that…
After asking a couple of fellow passengers as to the actual meaning of the announcement and drawing blank looks as clearly they struggled to understand my pronunciation of either Dusseldorf or Flughafen, I grabbed all my belongings, and ran off the train propelled as I was by my growing panic.
Our corpulent (I almost wrote porculent, but then I realised it wasn’t really a word… perhaps it should be) conductor, comfortable in her parachute was looking as serene as ever on the snowy platform:
“Dusseldorf Flughafen?...” I ask hopefully.
The answer sounded to me a bit like this:
“Schnauzer sauerkraut schnitzel kartoffeln bier und viele pretzeln Flughafen bratwurst. Ja?”
I thanked her courteously and ran off determined to somehow make it to the airport.
Although Duisburg railway station is a rather large one, it is not necessarily the most salubrious place and at that time of the afternoon, just before the rush hour, it appeared to be populated entirely by what looked like kebab shop owners on their day off, the long term unemployed looking for their seventh beer of the day and greasy haired women with severe dental problems possibly on the lookout for business. As asking any of them for information looked like a choice between a broken nose and an unwanted friendship, I decided against it and ran out of the station in the hope of possibly jumping into a taxi.
The snow was falling peacefully in big fluffy flakes. A long queue of taxis was waiting patiently by the kerb just outside the main entrance. I approached the first one and out popped another of my kebab shop owner friends who had clearly borrowed the cab for the day from his uncle.
“Dusseldorf Flughafen? How long to Dusseldorf Airport?” I asked very slowly, clearly and loudly.
“10 minutes, mate.” he answered in fluent English. God bless the immigrants.
“Step on it.” I always wanted to say that to a taxi driver.
The taxi flew off the rank with a satisfying screech of rubber on tarmac. What followed was slightly less impressive as my driver was clearly no Bruce Willis and the dramatic start to the journey was not matched by a high speed chase against time but followed by a leisurely spin through the Rhein valley countryside.
Time is now quickly running out. 10 minutes into the journey I couldn’t see any sign of the airport. The meter is furiously ticking away and after about 15 minutes I realised that I didn’t have enough Euros to cover it. Ooops. I certainly didn’t have the time to run into the terminal, find a cash machine and return to pay the fare. Mr. Kebab there, with his three day old stubble, humming to himself in the front next to the amber beads dangling from his rear view mirror didn’t look like someone you would want to upset too much. Particularly not in matters related to money.
We glided into the airport about 15 minutes before my flight’s scheduled departure time. In the meantime, I had some kind of plan hastily hatched in my mind regarding my financial dilemma. I decided to risk it and I put all my Euros together with a crisp £20 note in my driver’s greasy palm and explained to him that he would need to go to a bank and exchange it for the currency of his choice.
He looked at the British banknote with what looked like a mixture of confusion, disgust and pain. Before he managed to explain how deeply I insulted his family and in what creative ways he was going to hurt me, I explained to him that he was getting a fantastic deal and that sterling was a massively undervalued currency and if he kept it for a few decades he would become a wealthy man. His children would thank him for being such a shrewd individual.
I don’t believe he understood any of it. So, taking advantage of the moment of confusion that followed, I smiled, grabbed my bag and ran into the terminal. I never looked back. From now on, I will forever feel a frisson of terror whenever I jump into a taxi in the Dusseldorf area…
Looking at the monitor, good old Easyjet was conveniently listed as 25 minutes late. I wanted to kiss Stelios both for being Greek (thus possibly on my side in my monetary dispute with the Turks) and for establishing such an accommodatingly laid back airline. Assuming the delay wasn’t much longer than the announced one, I still stood a pretty good chance of making the school play, assuming no other incidents.
Straight through security and on to the gate. The 25 minutes became 45 as the ground staff kept whipping the waiting crowds into a frenzy with recurring announcements of the flight’s imminent departure followed by unexplained inaction. Sporadic fighting was erupting here and there in the crowd. And here we must take a short detour…
A couple of years ago Easyjet introduced a new money making ruse promisingly branded “Speedy Boarding”. For a fiver or so, Speedy Boarders are offered the dubious privilege of jumping the queue at the gate and thus given a much wider choice of seat once on the plane. What the airline inadvertently managed to do is to separate all the jerks from the rest of the travellers.
As a social experiment it is nothing if not genius. Under the disguise of simply allowing people with longer legs and a slightly less stingy disposition the option of picking the exit seats, it somehow allowed a certain group of its customers to develop a totally misplaced sense of superiority to all the other tight bastards using the airline. Getting these people to pay an extra few pounds somehow manages to bring out the worst in them.
To my mind it manages to illustrate brilliantly the way in which totalitarian and oppressive regimes can transform some of their victims into informants and torturers by simply offering them some minor privileges and therefore the illusion of superiority over their fellow oppressed. The most brutal people in history fall into this category. It is clearly a variant of the now well publicised Stockholm syndrome.
So there I was, standing by the gate and staring quite anxiously at my watch every 30 seconds or so, when a Scottish woman shouldered and elbowed her way past me (in a Gordon Brownian kind of way, I imagine… it must be a Scottish thing) waving her orange boarding pass and boasting that she had paid for Speedy Boarding and us mortals should get out of her way. She was about 5 foot tall, peroxide bouffant hair, heavy makeup and a dangerous looking Louis Vuitton case that she was brutally and intentionally using as a weapon.
At that point, rage erupted… That was the trigger that unleashed hell’s fury. It turns out that about 90% of the passengers waiting by the gate were “Speedy Boarders”. That included me, I’m ashamed to say. What looked until then like well dressed, sedate business men and women morphed suddenly into wild beasts. Frustration spilled over. I was fearing for the woman’s safety. Language was being used in ways that I didn’t hear before. Some of the more educated in the angry lynch mob managed to teach me a thing or two about the more creative usage of invectives.
In the mayhem, while the Speedy Boarding pack were busy verbally shredding the diminutive Scot to pieces, the not so speedy boarders managed to quietly slip onto the plane as boarding had suddenly started completely unannounced. I thought I’d be ironically courteous and allow Mrs. McVuitton to board before me with a smile and a “Ladies first…”. She just swore at me, which I thought was rather sweet of her as she shuffled along leaving behind a combustible cloud of hairspray vapour.
The flight passed without incident. Nearly there now, or so I thought. We landed at Gatwick about 30 minutes late. If I ran through the terminal, then drove like a maniac I would just about be able to make it…
I hate those dead moments when, at the end of a long journey, you are clutching your bag, ready to disembark but need to wait for the doors to open and the passengers in front of you to grab their belongings and shuffle forward. Although typically no longer than a few minutes, this always seems like an eternity to me.
Everybody fiddles with their BlackBerrys, iPhones and plain mobiles and a cacophony of bleeps and tinny tunes drown the traditionally ignored announcement referring to the fact that mobile phones should not be switched on until “well inside the terminal building”. Yeah, sure.
Anyway, there I was, bag in hand and wondering for what seemed like an eternity which of the mobile phones around me would finally fire the lethal spark igniting the airline fuel mist around us, when finally the good news came:
“Ladies and gentlemen, as we are now connected to an air bridge, you will be able to disembark through the left front door of the aircraft only”. Jolly good.
And then very quietly, calmly and sheepishly:
“Once on the air bridge, please follow the stairs down to the tarmac where busses will take you to the right terminal.”
Eh? WHAAT? Are we at the wrong terminal? Why? Gatwick Airport consists of two terminals, known as the North and South terminals. Easyjet always uses the South Terminal so I assumed that we were now parked at the North one for reasons only known to Stelios himself an his close coterie of friends, a group which I wished to distance myself from now.
Two busses were indeed awaiting on the tarmac. One had its doors open so I squeezed in with the other 100 or so passengers on board. The second bus was empty. Once our bus was full to a point somewhere between embarrassing intimacy and immaculate conception, the doors were shut and the second bus opened for business. The two drivers were having a cosy chat on the tarmac.
Once the handful of remaining passengers boarded the second bus, looking smug as they enjoyed the lavish space and allowing themselves a good stretch across several seats, their driver jumped on and off they went. Our driver was nowhere to be seen. It was getting a bit smelly and oxygen was running low. About five minutes later, he suddenly appeared and without a word he drove us to the “right” terminal.
I was now more than 45 minutes behind schedule. If I drove like a kamikaze pilot, I may still be able to catch the second half of the play. As part of BAA’s continuing campaign for passenger fitness, the bus dropped us at the point that is geometrically at the precisely opposite end of the terminal to Passport Control. I smiled and waved at Ms. McVuitton as I ran past her high heeled teetering bouffant on my way to freedom. Sweetly, she showed me her bejewelled middle finger. I think she liked me.
Completely out of breath by the time I reach Passport Control, I manage to somehow beat the queue and get straight through. OK, not all is bad. I can still make it. Maybe. Out into the familiar arrivals hall… Oh… maybe not so familiar. What? Where is the Costa Coffee that’s supposed to be in that corner? No, this doesn’t look right…
I look at the yellow illuminated signs pointing in all directions and I spot a couple of signs pointing to South Terminal. Hang on a second! I thought I WAS in the South Terminal. A simple process of deduction leads me to the conclusion that although we probably landed at South Terminal (where my car was), we have been ferried by bus to North Terminal which for some inexplicable reason was deemed the “right” terminal! Eh?
OK, not to panic. There is a shuttle train operating between the two terminals. It only takes 5 minutes or so. Not the end of the world. I follow the signs to South Terminal which lead me to a lift. Follow the instructions and go up one level to where I thought the shuttle ought to be. The signs point out of the building. No, this must be a mistake. Back to the lift. Inside the lift, I try to figure out which floor am I supposed to aim for when I spot the poster.
“BAA is delighted to announce that a new and refurbished Shuttle will operate between North and South Terminals at Gatwick from August 2010!”. We are now in February. Six months strikes me as a pretty excessive time to wait for a train. Then I spot the small print: “Until then, please use the replacement bus service outside the terminal building”. These three little words: replacement, bus & service are enough to bring horror, dread and despair into the heart of anyone who has lived in the UK long enough to become familiar with their dark and sadistic meaning.
This is beginning to look like defeat… I am now considering my options. Should I now quietly sit down on the floor of the lift and shed a quiet tear or just lose it completely and vandalise the poster? Instead I scream uncontrollably at the stewardess smiling at me from the poster and punch her bang between the eyes. Ouch! That was painful.
Out to the bus stop then. Outside, the wind is whipping the falling snow into a spectacular blizzard. About three hundred people and their luggage are waiting for the bus. About ten minutes later, once everyone in the queue is sufficiently frozen, three busses arrive at once. I manage to jump on to the third one and I’m finally on my way back to the “wrong” terminal. Desperation sets in… I’ll never make it now. The show starts in about 15 minutes…
Later that evening, the school building is completely dark. A single sheet of A4 is flapping in the wind by the front door:
“Dear Parents, due to the adverse weather conditions, tonight’s performance of The Pied Piper has been cancelled.”
London, 18.January.2010
A Norse Saga
My last posting (below) was mostly about ways in which organisations can hope to take advantage of the new world of social networking by trying to inject an element of personalisation (in the shape of PAM and her friend SAM) into their approach to this medium. I then went on to contemplate the possibility of outsourcing this to a “freelance PAM” that would then become the intermediary between you and the various organisations she may directly or indirectly represent.
Well, this thought has not ceased to intrigue me ever since. The possibilities are truly endless and this new approach opens the door to a whole new world of much smarter customer service and intelligent marketing. So let’s explore this a little further.
When PAM went freelance, she really ceased to be PAM (as in Personal Account Manager) and has been replaced by her more intrepid cousin, INGA (the Independently Networked General Assistant). INGA works for herself. She is effectively a double, triple, multiple agent.
On one hand she works for a range of companies which use her services to deliver three main things: customer service for their customers, marketing messages to the world and new sales into intelligently targeted subsets of the vast and varied pool of INGA’s “friends”.
On the other hand she works for you, the consumer, to help you get good, joined up customer service, help you buy things when you need something and suggest things to you when she considers that they are relevant. Of course, she would also remember your wedding anniversary and your mother’s birthday. After all, she is your “friend”.
From the corporate side it looks very similar to customer contact outsourcing. Well, in some aspects it is, with one major difference. This difference is that in contrast to today’s outsourcing models, who go to great lengths so separate and segregate the customer information which they manipulate on behalf of their various corporate clients, INGA will actively amalgamate it and cross reference it. This is a whole new approach and a lot of companies would recoil in horror at such a suggestion. My argument is that they have no reason to be alarmed.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say that a publishing company decides to commission INGA to help them with their customer service for one of their publications. Let’s call it WHATEVA magazine. So when subscribers or potential subscribers to WHATEVA wish to place orders, ask questions about their billing, deliveries, notify the delivery channel of address changes and so on they would simply contact INGA through their preferred social network and she would take it from there.
How would INGA approach this? Well, first of all she would need to establish how many of the current readership of WHATEVA are already amongst her circle of “friends”. It could very well be that INGA already represents WHATEVA’s main competitor: YEAH! magazine. It is quite possible that the demographic of the readership of the two publications overlaps and therefore INGA is already connected to a significant subset of WHATEVA’s audience through her prior engagement with YEAH!.
If INGA is also involved in some capacity with providers of other products aimed at the same demographic, chances are that this will eventually define who INGA actually is, in the sense that her personality can be targeted at this particular demographic. If she is to be an acceptable “friend” on various social networking sites, she needs to speak the language that the people she is serving use to communicate with each other. This is really the only way in which she would gain their trust.
Additionally, if she is to build genuine relationships with her “friends” and “followers” she would also need to make it clear that she is not her masters’ puppet and that she doesn’t simply follow blindly the party line dictated to her by her corporate clients. She needs to be able to demonstrate her independence and her credentials as the champion of her friends and not just the mouthpiece of narrow corporate interests.
Once the trust barrier has been crossed and a particular INGA has managed to persuade you that she is not just another corporate stooge, the real benefits can really begin to show. For instance, she could become an extremely effective provider of consumer advice and at the same time an equally effective source of genuine customer feedback for companies using her services. If one of the organisations she represents wishes to promote a particular product range or make a special offer, she could informally let all her connections know about it before others get to know about it.
More importantly, if she did for instance help you with your travel arrangements, the same INGA will also help you when any of these arrangements go wrong. She would hold more sway with the airline she recommended than you would ever hope to. That hotel that managed to really annoy you would care much more about her opinion of them than about yours. After all, she is responsible for bringing them a considerable amount of business and her opinion counts if they want to keep getting future bookings through her.
Don’t get me wrong. INGA is not equivalent to Confused.com or MoneySupermarket.com or Hotels.com. Like a real person, she has more than one aspect to her personality. In order to have any credibility, she needs to be much more aligned to her target demographic than to a particular vertical or industry. In that sense, one company should use the services of several INGAs for their different target markets in the same way that one INGA should represent several, potentially competitively positioned organisations.
For instance, going back to our publishing example for a moment, the readership of WHATEVA and YEAH! may be connected to an INGA interested in “youf culture” and celebrity gossip, while the readership of the same publishing company’s lifestyle and women’s publication are represented by a completely different one. Perhaps the latter should be a SVEN (Social Virtual Electronic Networker?). By the way, the Nordic theme is purely coincidental…
So, how would this work in reality and how can technology help? Well, to start with, a new INGA or SVEN will need to decide who they are by working out very carefully the specific details of their “personalities”. For instance, we could think of a SVEN called Kevin who is in his thirties, a sports fan, interested in fast cars, a keen follower of Top Gear. Kevin is also at the age when he is probably in a stable relationship and has a couple of small kids. He uses certain jargon, is interested in specific types of music, and so on.
Then we could have an INGA called Maureen who is in her fifties, but still quite active, with a keen interest in interior design, cake recipes but also trekking holidays in the Alps or cookery courses in Tuscany. Her children are probably at university or recently left home and she may be thinking about starting up a new small business. Her mortgage is just about paid now and she is comfortably off. Is she still married, or perhaps divorced, a widow or single mother?
The next step is to register Kevin and Maureen on all the social networking sites that fit their profiles. An outsourcer could (and probably should) unleash a whole army of INGAs and SVENs into the virtual world fitting quite a wide range of finely grained social profiles. Of course, neither Kevin nor Maureen can exist without teams of real people behind them. These are essentially agents that roughly fit either the Kevin or Maureen mould, possibly work from home and monitor the activity of their alter egos on the various sites.
These agents would need to perform a variety of tasks. First of all, they need to cultivate a following and constantly work at increasing their connections. There are many ways of doing this. First of all they should be joining all relevant discussion groups, online campaigns, interest groups and so on that may be relevant to their persona and through these establish new relationships with other members. Of course, they could and should set up their own forums, discussion groups, chat rooms and so on and try and spark an interest in these forums.
In addition, as their profile gains popularity, there would be a large amount of instant messages, chat sessions, emails, texts and other forms of communication that they would need to respond to providing advice, customer care and general support. It is imperative in my view that each INGA and SVEN are pretty open about the organisations that “sponsor” them. Being employed by an outsourcer, Maureen may be “sponsored” by Country Living magazine, Saga Holidays, P&O Cruises while Kevin may be “sponsored” by Adidas, Audi, Pampers and many other organisations which target customer fitting their respective profiles.
Being secretive about these “sponsorship” deals would possibly be counterproductive as concealing the commercial nature of Maureen or Kevin would undermine their credibility and may verge on the illegal in some countries. So, openness is the name of the game. If Roger Federer can be sponsored by Wilson there is no reason to hide the fact that Kevin is sponsored by BMW or British Gas. The main difference is that despite Kevin being of course less of a celebrity he is a great deal more approachable than Roger. For instance, I can see no reason why the logos of all his sponsors would not appear on Kevin’s Facebook profile.
OK, so what’s in it for you? Why would you be prepared to connect to a disembodied artificial so called “friend” on a social network? Doesn’t that sound a bit sad? Why on earth would you want to be connected to Maureen or Kevin? At first glance this looks like a pretty stupid idea.
But hang on a second… would you rather wait for 20 minutes on the phone listening to an infuriating recording telling you how important your call is and repeating ad nauseam the great virtues of the organisation you are unsuccessfully trying to contact or… perhaps you would rather get in touch with Maureen who is currently online on Skype or send her a message on Twitter and mention to her what you need from the company that sponsors her and let her get on with solving your problem while you get on with your life? After all it is a free service to you and Maureen is much more versed in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the company you are trying to contact than you could or indeed ever wish to be.
Kevin would always remember to tell you about new album releases or upcoming gigs from artists that he knows that you like (as he is sponsored by EMI and perhaps iTunes) or sport fixtures that are coming up and he may even be able to offer you tickets at prices you would never find elsewhere. He would also tell you when your mobile company is ready to offer you a free upgrade or perhaps when a rival mobile company can offer you a really good deal. The beauty of this is that he will not call you in the middle of supper and baffle you with a machine gun script spoken in an accent and manner totally alien to you.
Technologically, INGA needs to be “plugged in” to her sponsor’s business processes. She needs to be able to ask you all the right questions when you need customer care and then feed this information into her sponsors’ workflow systems directly without having to go through their contact centres and waste their agent’s time. She needs to be able to receive a logically complex process that she would need to adhere to when running a survey on behalf of her sponsor. She would also need perhaps to have access to some of the specialist systems that her sponsors use internally, and utilise the data stored within these systems when engaging with her “friends”.
In other words, INGA needs to be able to implement easily a diverse range of business processes without having to memorise them. We must not forget that an individual INGA could in reality consist of hundreds of agents spread over an entire country or even around the globe. It makes no economic sense to bring them all together for training each time a new business process needs to be learned or when an old one changes.
Technologies like Synthesys are the solution to this problem. Allowing INGA’s sponsors to build these processes and integrate them with their own easily and without any significant IT effort is key to the success of this whole brave new world. There is gold in them hills, and companies like Noetica hold the map to the treasure.
Danny
London, 10.December.2009
My new friends: Pamela and Samantha
An interesting thing has been happening to me over the last couple of years. It seems that my past is catching up with me. Within the space of a few months, I have re-established contact with several old friends which I had lost touch with long ago (over 20 years, in some cases). Considering that most of these friends are currently scattered in many countries literally across the planet, this is quite something.
Initially, I thought it was a coincidence. Then I started to think that I have reached that point in life where one stops looking forward and begins to gaze nostalgically back into the past. Then it dawned on me. What actually happened was that at some point (probably about a couple of years ago), I decided to try and learn a bit more about the social networking phenomenon and I tentatively registered with some of the usual sites (LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendsReunited, Plaxo, Facebook, Skype, Xing, etc.).
The result was immediate and foolishly unanticipated on my part. All of a sudden, people that I vaguely knew (and in some rare cases went to great lengths to avoid) from high school onwards started contacting me completely out of the blue. In some cases, this was a genuinely pleasant surprise. For instance, only last month I was able to meet up with almost the entire military intelligence unit where I spent (some would say, misspent) most of my twenties. Bearing in mind that last time we all met was about 25 years ago, this was quite something.
As my life has so far taken me on a rather geographically and ethnically dislocated journey, I have managed to collect a great many disrupted friendships along the way. Social networking has allowed me to revisit some of these. In many ways this has enriched my life. I have since met with several of these old friends and we now communicate on a more or less regular basis. It has also brought a sense of continuity and comfort in relation to my somewhat disjointed past.
Why am I telling you all this? I am simply using my own experience as an example of the way in which the phenomenon of social networking is affecting our lives on a daily basis. In some cases, the effect is such that it can become more of an obsession and take over a disproportionate slice of ones life. It ranges from the slightly over-zealous Twitterer to the bleary eyed Second Life addict, via the over-elaborate Facebook profile pedant.
Unsurprisingly, business it trying to cash in on this trend. This goes far beyond the obvious realm of online advertising, which is, of course the main source of income for most of the social networking sites. CRM vendors are becoming increasingly interested in it. Oracle, for instance, is taking it extremely seriously and has made social networking enablement one of the main features of their latest versions of Oracle CRM (read Siebel).
This is hardly surprising. If CRM is indeed a technology (some would say a philosophy) which aims to provide an organisation with a 360° view of its customers (and potential customers) then it would be foolish to ignore all this wealth of information that people are prepared to simply offer quite voluntarily into the public domain for anyone to look at and use as they see fit. The implications of our relatively relaxed attitude to our personal information are just beginning to emerge.
Not long ago, the press here in the UK was awash with photos of the new head of MI6 (that’s the British counter-espionage agency, which didn’t officially “exist” until fairly recently). Not only did it expose his identity but also his rather scrawny bare chest on some beach somewhere. It also provided details of his entire family, private address and so on. It turns out that his wife was a sporadic user of Facebook and the details (including the fact that her husband just got a new job as the master of spooks) were on her personal page for all to see.
This is just the beginning. As business becomes increasingly aware of the veritable goldmine of personal information available now freely online, the use of this information will inevitably become more subtle and in some cases more sinister. What is to stop the average double glazing cold caller from having a quick look at your LinkedIn or Facebook profile before making that call and pretending to be a friend of a friend? Let’s hope no double glazing merchants are regular readers of this blog…
A completely new discipline known as Social Network Mining has recently emerged specifically for the purpose of trawling social networks and retrieving information which is of value to commercial companies. This is truly in it’s infancy at present and very much still in the realm of academic & scientific research, but I cannot imagine that it will be long before usable commercial applications will become widely available. The social networking sites themselves may become complicit in this and see it as an opportunity to cash in on the valuable data they are holding, data which we are all volunteering into the public domain.
Of course, there are dangers in this and the chances of finding and subsequently targeting the wrong John or Jane Smith are very high at present. There is no doubt in my mind though that it is only a matter of time before these techniques become much more reliable and almost commonplace. The temptation presented by this veritable goldmine of information will be far too enticing to the intrepid marketers out there to be ignored.
Forgetting for a moment about the opportunity for abuse, let’s try to think for a moment about the genuine opportunity for legitimate and useful leverage of social networks for more effective customer contact. The possibilities are endless.
You can already “follow” companies on Twitter. An organisation can assume a personality within a social networking site and aim to forge “relationships” with its customers, critics or prospects. The problem with this kind of “social” networking is that companies tend to fall into the trap of facile and rather crude propaganda and self promotion, thus losing any scrap of “street” credibility that using this hip new medium may have given them initially.
I can’t imagine anyone (not even the loneliest, malodorous nerd) who would admit to entertaining the notion of counting their electricity supplier, bank or broadband provider amongst their so called “friends”, even if such “friends” are of the on-line variety. It just smacks of sadness. On the other hand, if organisations could personalise this to the point that each customer can have a “social” relationship with their Personal Account Manager (PAM – thank you, Luke!), then things could be different.
PAM can be human or simply an avatar. I think a real human PAM is probably the better option, even if it is simply a figurehead and her online exploits are coordinated by a whole army of CSRs and marketing execs. I am sure that the Queen does not personally remember the names, birthdates and ages of each and every one of her subjects yet most nonagenarians are still taking their vitamin supplements just in order to receive that landmark telegram (possibly email or text message these days) from the monarch when they eventually reach that elusive century.
So what could PAM do for you? Well, many things. First of all, she would occasionally send you messages with personalised news about the company she works for. She could regularly analyse your social networking profiles and make sure that she gets to know you better. The better she got to know you the more precise and accurately targeted her messages to you could be.
For instance, she could easily find out when your various family birthdays, anniversaries and other important dates are, and suggest to you some special deals on presents, restaurants, city breaks and so on. She could even learn about your family’s tastes and really surprise you with some cracking ideas. PAM could also figure out what time of the year you typically go on holiday and judging by your Facebook holiday snaps also figure out quite easily what kind of holidays you like.
By looking at your blogs, status messages and “twitterings” she could easily figure out when you normally book your holidays (“Hey, I just booked the family on a Tuscan walking holiday in June!”) and approach you around that time of year with some interesting suggestions.
If PAM wasn’t your “friend”, you might be tempted into thinking that she was spying on you. Well, she is of course, but she does have her redeeming features as well. Who do you turn to when her company really annoys you and you need someone to complain to? She’ll be there for you. She will take your grievance seriously and shortcut the bureaucracy by passing it on directly to the right department and keeping you informed on progress at regular intervals.
By doing so, she will not only gain your trust and possibly even your gratitude but also relieve the pressure from her less fortunate colleagues working in the call centre, reducing call volumes and eliminating that exasperating Vivaldi wait. You may be less reluctant to allow her to pry into your social networking life if she proves herself really helpful in times of crisis.
We can, of course, take this one step further. Could PAM go freelance? How about a PAM that is not necessarily the instrument and servant of one company, but is an agent that works on behalf of several such organisations? Companies could simply outsource their PAMs. They would then become simply a “well connected” friend. The same PAM could solve a problem you have with your electricity bill and also offer you timely and well researched options for your next holiday.
Less of a PAM, more of a PA.
If such a PAM could really gain your trust, by not abusing your patience with irrelevant, inappropriate and too frequent “suggestions”, it could also provide a much more effective, efficient and less irritating alternative to the cold call. No need to interrupt your dinner with some idiotic special offer recited nervously by an off-shore agent. You will be logging into your preferred social networking site later and the offer from your trusted PAM will be waiting for you.
Taking this even further, there is no harm in actually talking to PAM every now and again over the phone. The thing is that she will never call you out of the blue, but will send you a message through your social network asking for a convenient time to talk. You could do the same and set a mutually convenient time.
It would be really cool if PAM was always the same person with the same voice. Otherwise, PAM would politely suggest that you may wish to speak to SAM (your Surrogate Account Manager) or wait for an available slot in her diary. Then you can talk to her (or to SAM) at length about the more unclear details of your forthcoming Tuscan holiday.
If we were to take this to it’s natural conclusion, here’s a wild idea. What about social networking for PAMs? How about allowing your various PAMs to talk to each other and cut you out of the bureaucratic loop allowing you to get on with your life? It may seem like a crazy idea, but who knows…?
This could really revolutionise customer contact. I honestly believe that personalisation is the key to genuinely effective customer interaction. The age of brute force is coming to an end. Personal touch and sophistication are the new name of the game. The big question is how to make this work and cut cost at the same time. Perhaps PAM has the answer.
Danny
London, 17.July.2009
Home made software?
Let me start by stating that I am a great believer in private enterprise, competition and free trade. Monopolies and nationalised industries invariably end up abusing their captive customer base and eventually their own workforce. They always become stale, bloated with bureaucracy, delusional and ultimately end up looking solely after their own interests.
On the other hand, there are certain disciplines which simply are very difficult if not impossible to open up to competition and private enterprise. These are known as natural monopolies. The term was allegedly coined by John Stuart Mill in the mid 19th century. The definition of such a monopoly would be that any way of breaking it up would result in a structure which is significantly less efficient than the monopoly.
Here are a couple of examples. The privatisation of British Rail has been pretty much a universally reviled fiasco and has given birth to the natural monopoly of Railtrack and its various reincarnations (I am not even sure what it is called these days). Railtrack is a natural monopoly. There is no way around it. Nobody would be foolish enough to build two parallel rail networks one along the other and then let them compete for the trains to run on them.
For all intents and purposes, even the train companies are monopolistic (even though they perhaps don’t need to be) in the sense that the choice offered to passengers is minimal as the train companies have sole control of their routes. If one wishes to travel from London to Liverpool, Virgin Trains is pretty much the only option. So, privatising the rail network is less efficient than running it as a monopoly, regardless of the way in which it may be split up, therefore it is a natural monopoly until such time when someone figures out how to introduce genuine competition to this industry.
Government is a natural monopoly. Nobody in their right mind would suggest that we have two governments simultaneously (heaven knows, one is more than enough) and then allow citizens to choose which one they would wish to pay their taxes to. It is just not workable. This is why we need to elect new governments every few years (against Gordon’s better judgement), so that they don’t become calcified and too comfortable in their roles. Monopolies are a dangerous thing and need to be kept strictly in check. There is a very short slippery slope from Kilcaldy to Pyong Yang.
This is precisely the kind of problem that has landed both Microsoft and more recently Intel into serious trouble with the US and the EU competition regulatory bodies. Now, I’m not necessarily saying that either Microsoft or Intel are completely blameless, but their operating systems and processors respectively enable most personal computers in the world to work.
Intel has actually made a genuine effort to licence its technology to competitors such as AMD and allow them to manufacture cloned chips. As far as Microsoft is concerned, alternatives such as Linux exist. The problem is that it makes more sense for users to buy into the de facto standard as they benefit from the investment that millions of other users make in the same technology. There are more apps for this technology, it is more tried and tested, more feature rich and most importantly, compatible with everybody else’s.
So, in a way, both Microsoft and Intel are almost natural monopolies. There is no point penalising either company for a state of affairs which is outside their control unless they abuse their position to encroach on other, possibly more competitive areas. Almost everything they do can be seen as anticompetitive because their world cannot naturally be a competitive one. The only thing that regulatory bodies may be able to do is to ring-fence these monopolistic enclaves and not allow them to use their wealth to control other adjacent and possibly not naturally monopolistic spaces.
There is, of course the deeper question of whether all natural monopolies should be nationalised. Private enterprise without the vigilant gaze of the guard dogs of competition is a dangerous and ugly thing. It leads to corruption, greed, bad service and complacency. The only way to resolve this is to first of all recognise natural monopolies and then control them through tight regulation either by nationalising them directly or indirectly through quasi-governmental watchdog bodies.
If you managed to reach this point, you will be wondering what on earth has all this to do with call centres. It has, trust me. Just bear with me.
So, having established that natural monopolies do exist, the question that begs itself is why is that so and how can one identify one? In other words, when is it more efficient to limit or even eliminate choice and competition in favour of a uniform product or service? Again, let’s look at some examples and try to analyse what makes them natural monopolies.
Take the Wintel model for instance. In an ideal market economy, each and every PC manufacturer would write their own operating system and build their own CPU chips. Why not? There was a time, when the personal computer was in its infancy that this actually was the case. I am old enough to remember the eighties when operating systems and CPU makers where as ubiquitous as hardware brands. It was a brave new world, but it was inefficient and almost impossible to move data (let alone applications) across from one proprietary platform to another.
Things have moved a long way since then. Who would have thought that even Apple computers, one of the last bastions of bespoke kit would be powered by Intel chips one day. You can already run Windows on most Macs. How long before they throw in the towel and adopt Windows or Linux as the standard? It’s only a question of time, in my view.
And this is where we are getting to the point of this convoluted story. It makes economic sense for any company not to reinvent the wheel. I know, it sounds like common sense, but for some reason it is much more difficult to convey this idea than it may appear. The reason for this is that most organisations which require wheels for their products still believe that they can make a better wheel than their competitors or possibly a wheel that is perhaps better suited to their product, even if wheels are only a minor part of their offering.
In the software industry this practice is more widespread than in most other places. Software developers (and I know this only too well, I used to be one) are naturally suspicious of any application or component that was not developed by them or their immediate colleagues and invariably choose to develop their own variant of whatever widget they need. Although it is getting better these days, reinventing the wheel is still rife in our industry.
Within large corporations, there is still a propensity to employ vast numbers of software developers in bloated IT departments. Why? The only explanation would be the need to try and gain some advantage against their competition through better computer systems. But if you think about it for a minute, this is crazy. It is as if Tesco decided tomorrow to gain an advantage by getting into vehicle manufacturing in order to build its own vans just for its home delivery service and not sell them to anyone else.
Almost every large enterprise has been through this phase. The trend for in-house developed software has its origins in the past and has three fundamental causes:
1. Luddite corporate executives and their fear of IT.
2. The CIO’s desire to build an IT empire within the enterprise.
3. Evidence of failed or bad software product implementations.
All these conditions are changing rapidly. Top management is no longer afraid of technology. As the old guard moves on to the golf courses (and eventually Countdown and biscuits in the day room), the new generation of executives is much more technology savvy and less inclined to avoid the subject lest they are seen to make complete asses of themselves.
A new breed of CIO/IT Director is also emerging. A whole generation of old boffins (the socks and sandals brigade, with shirt pockets brimming with neatly arrayed multi coloured pens) is going to spend more time with their train sets, whilst a new generation of business aware, more engineering-minded IT executives is emerging.
The role of IT within large organisations is transforming from one of an in-house software development company to an engineering department that simply assembles commercial software components and products into a coherent solution. In some cases they don’t even do that, but simply coordinate the work of external system integrators or IT outsourcers.
The IT department delivers IT to the organisation, but doesn’t have to invent it. Increasingly, writing code is and should be left to software vendors. This is where genuine and healthy competition can develop as different software companies strive to produce better and cheaper widgets than their competitors. No longer will enterprises be held captive by a monopolistic IT department which invariably ends up going the way of all monopolies: bloated, costly, lazy and self-serving.
This where we turn our gaze to the world of call centres. In the same way that no reasonable enterprise would dream of developing their own operating system, networking protocol or database (although some have been known to do it), there is absolutely no rationale that can justify developing one’s own call centre software.
Yet many organisations still insist on doing so. Despite drawing the line at building their own telephone system (although we recently came across one company who did precisely that!), they wouldn’t bat an eyelid at the prospect of developing a software system from scratch for their call centre. Why??
Here’s the main reasoning that is invariably being invoked as a mantra by most enterprises which decide to go down this route: “We have many distinct systems that our call centre agents need to have access to. These systems are very different and some of them are pretty old and proprietary. Others are new but we lost the manual. Fred used to look after one of our critical systems and he retired last year, so we can’t touch it. Two of our systems are written in IBM Assembler. And we lost the source code for the other ones.”
This is pretty twisted logic. It goes a bit like Gordon Brown’s argument: I wrecked the economy, therefore I am the most qualified to fix it. Eh? In other words, what the IT director is saying to the board is: “Yes, we brought the company to a software dead end, therefore you should trust us to develop yet another system that will fix it. Dave & Steve in the basement have been looking after the telephones (and they even took one apart and put it back together) for the last 20 years, so they should be perfectly qualified to write a call centre system.”
What most organisations still fail to understand is that call centres are a discipline in its own right. Just as most people would recognise these days that accounting, office apps (like word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.) or CRM are specialist applications and one should simply buy them from a specialist software vendor, the same applies to call/contact centre applications.
For some obscure reason, despite the fact that nobody in their right mind would write their own word processor these days, people still think that they should write their own call centre systems. There is clearly a reason for this state of affairs and I believe that it is related to the fact that the call centre is an interdisciplinary activity which cuts across almost all other areas of the business.
An HR worker needs access to the HR system. An accountant needs access to the accounting system. A marketer needs access to the customer database or CRM system. An engineer needs access to the trouble ticketing system. And so on. A call centre agent needs access to all these systems, and more. A call centre professional needs access to a good call scripting system, an automated interface to the telephone switch, analytical performance tools for analysing KPIs and SLA adherence, outbound technology, email and other multimedia processing and much more.
Because of the almost infinite number of combinations of these various types systems (as mentioned earlier, some of them old and decrepit) and functionality requirements, most organisations do not believe that any software products can ever satisfy these requirements as well as a home grown system. So they end up attempting to write one. Almost without exception they fail or end up with a substandard solution.
Clearly no software product will integrate with all of a company’s myriad systems out of the box, but it will probably deliver 75% of the functionality, leaving some room for customisation and adaptation. What this provides is a massive shortcut to the solution and a framework within which to deliver an elegant, tried and tested solution.
Perhaps no factory in the world makes the kind of car that you need. Wouldn’t then make sense to buy the one that is nearest to what you’re looking for and then adapt it to your needs rather than buying four wheels and a pile of metal and starting from scratch? Do you know how to build an engine? Will it be fuel efficient? Would you rely on the brakes you put together in your shed when taking a hairpin bend 10,000 feet up in the Alps?
The software industry is maturing. Enterprises of all sizes need to free themselves from the monopoly of their internal IT departments. No organisation should be developing software unless this is how they earn a living. Banks are not software houses. Neither are companies selling anything from media services to insurance and from food to electronics.
As long as the software industry (and the call centre software industry in particular in this case) was in it’s formative years, internal IT departments held a natural monopoly within the enterprise. This led to the creation of a company within a company with the inevitable effects that monopolies invariably create: runaway costs, empire building, stagnation, lack of innovation and worse. Organisations that continue to operate in this way are doomed to fall behind and eventually fail regardless of the quality of their core offering.
Danny
London, 29.April.2009
Power to the people
As you, my faithful reader, may have noticed, there has been something of a lull in my contributions to this blog over the last few weeks. Although secretly I may harbour some hope that you may have missed it, I have a sneaky suspicion that your life has continued to be just as contented and fulfilled as ever without the regular feed of my frivolous ruminations.
So what have I been up to? Well, March is the end of Noetica’s financial year, so most of my time and energy is devoted to concluding new business and making sure that the end of year figures look reasonable and allow us to budget with some confidence for the next year. As you may expect, it is always a mad rush at the last minute to meet targets, convince prospects to finally place that order and raise the last few invoices for the year.
The annual figures are important, as they determine to a large extent the planning of the following year in terms of staff pay, recruitment, investment , marketing spend and so on. So it is quite important to me to be able to apportion as much revenue as possible to the ending year so that not only people can keep their jobs, but allow the company to grow and for staff to grow within it. An arbitrary measure, I know, but the best we have for the time being.
Also, I managed to squeeze in a 10 day holiday with my family to sunnier climates and here is a snap to prove it.
Anyway, I won’t bore you with all that (instead, I’ll bore you with something else).
What I would like to talk about as part of my ongoing discussion about bringing more automation to customer contact centres is wikis. Yes, wikis. For anyone not familiar with the concept, a wiki is essentially a website (or part of a website) where every visitor is free to contribute new pages of content. Usually this is via a simplified mark-up interface that allows the user to contribute text and some basic imagery.
Wikis are in essence warehouses of knowledge. The beauty of the concept is that wikis don’t normally rely on one individual or institution compiling this knowledge repository, but are the result of a common effort made by a self mobilised and motivated collection of people who happen to share an interest or have specific or unique knowledge the sharing of which could benefit the public at large or a specific interest group in particular.
The obvious example of a successful wiki is Wikipedia.org, a fantastically popular site modelled on a classic encyclopaedic format, where one can find explanations for almost any term, concept, person, event, and so on. Anyone can make a contribution to Wikipedia and indeed a lot of people have taken the opportunity to do so.
This leads me to the main problem with wikis and that is their accuracy. As these places are typically not too heavily moderated, edited or censored they are open to abuse. It is actually rather surprising to note how accurate most wikis are. Although one hears stories about pranks and deliberate misinformation, the incidence of these is relatively low. It’s almost enough to restore one’s faith in humankind.
In a way (a pretentious one, I know), wikis are living proof of the ultimate triumph of good over evil in human nature. After all, I could go into Wikipedia right now and change the definition for, say, “Modern French Philosophy” from the thousands of words it most likely holds at present to “A load of incomprehensible self absorbed old cobblers”. I can provide several obscure references to confirm the truth of my statement and hey presto, the new definition is online. The thing is, I can guarantee that within minutes my definition will be removed and replaced with the old one. I may also be taken to the guillotine.
How does this self policing work? Well, it turns out that there are a great deal of good people out there with plenty of time on their hands and real encyclopaedias on their shelves. Anyone can join the Wikipedia police force (or “community” as it is affectionately known). Whenever a new entry is made or an existing one is modified these changes are sent automatically to some of these people and they can usually check them out and remove them if necessary. And they do.
Wikipedia is only one very large specific example of the wonderful world of wikis. Most wikis are much smaller and have much more specific uses. For instance, we use a wiki here at Noetica for the purpose of storing all the company’s internal knowledge. This ranges from technical articles on “how to” perform certain tasks to information about our clients, technical documentation, troubleshooting tips, information about telephony platforms, knowledge about our partners, intelligence about our competitors and much more. Everyone in the company contributes pages to our wiki and as it is in our interest to keep it as up to date and as accurate as possible, we do so. No editorial control is necessary.
Other wikis are public but restricted to specific subjects. There is a variety of them on the web, ranging from information sharing between geeks to fashion tips. The fundamental difference between wikis and the even more ubiquitous bulletin boards and forums is that wikis are not dialogue based and they do not encourage conversation. It is a way of publishing knowledge without asking for feedback.
So why is this in any way relevant to customer contact? Well, part of the whole concept of automation is the reduction of the volume of live contacts and their redirection to automated channels. Judging from my experience in the contact centre space, a large number of inbound calls are simply requests for information.
Now, as much as I have the deepest respect for agents and the work they do, they are not necessarily and without exception omniscient fountains of knowledge and the only way in which they can provide any meaningful answers is by using software tools that allow them to search various sources of information rapidly and accurately. These range from FAQ systems to various types of knowledge bases and intranet sites.
In some cases this is absolutely fine. In other cases, organisations can be slow to react to new types of information requests and by the time a piece of knowledge manages to feed its way back into the FAQ system or knowledge base it could be already out of date and the call centre swamped with unnecessary calls. Let’s also not forget that organisations do not have a monopoly on knowledge and certain individuals at large tend to know more about most subjects than faceless bodies, as benevolent, well intentioned and collectively erudite as they may be.
Wikis can provide the dynamism and sense of camaraderie similar to the one that powers the world of social networking. Let’s look at an example. Imagine a hypothetical media company broadcasting a documentary or current affairs programme which contains some inaccuracy or making a statement that may not necessarily be verifiably true. Some of the audience of such a programme may spot the problem and feel that they wish to set the record straight, so they will probable pick up the phone and call the call centre.
Let’s think about this for a minute. Here is a call arriving into the call centre which is different in nature to what we are used to. The caller is not seeking information, but is actually volunteering to provide information. In such situations, the company needs to react swiftly and assuming that more than one person will call in with this piece of information, they need to make agents aware of this issue by updating FAQ and knowledge system instantly.
Media companies are good examples of organisations where people may call in to provide information rather than ask for it. Utilities are another example where people may call in with information of fallen power cables, burst mains or gas leaks. Technology companies are regularly told about workarounds and solutions that their users managed to ingeniously find around known faults in their products.
Here is the crucial point. The main reason these people call in is not in order to altruistically help the company they are calling but in order to assist their fellow customers. As they have no way of knowing who these fellow customers may be, their only way of doing so is by notifying the company in the hope that it will pass this information on. (OK, I accept that some of these people may be motivated by some kind of “smart alec” urge to prove that they are more knowledgeable than everyone else, or may be seeking publicity in some shape or form, but I am convinced that this is a relatively small minority.)
The call centre agent plays almost no role in this. They have no means of checking whether this information is accurate or not (although one assumes that the higher the number of people volunteering similar information, the more likely it is to be true). All they can do is pass this on to someone within the organisation who can decide whether the information is reliable and whether communicating it to their customer base is helpful.
Intelligent use of wikis can simplify this process dramatically and give customers the sense that their voice is being heard almost instantaneously in a “power to the people” kind of way. This is just another example where technology is opening up new channels for democracy to develop. In the process of doing so it is also generating efficiency gains and savings in the contact centre space. Instead of an army of agents taking hundreds of unnecessary and almost identical calls, a wiki moderator can ensure that information coming from the public is disseminated back to the public after being verified.
And if we’re at it, why not empower the agent to access the wiki as well so that if the customer chooses not to update the wiki directly, the agent can do so on their behalf? It will have the same effect and reduce the number of calls into the call centre. Let’s go a bit further than that and provide call centre agents with up to the minute information on the latest additions to the wiki, so that they can direct the callers to these pages and reduce call durations dramatically.
Ultimately, it makes perfect sense to integrate wikis into the call centre workflow or agent guidance system. As agents use these systems to move through the call, they can easily determine if the call includes any potentially useful information that the caller provided and automatically, without any agent intervention, pass this information behind the scenes to the relevant wiki editorial or moderation team. That piece of information could be on the wiki within minutes and available both to the public (on the website) and to agents (in the contact centre).
It is a classic win-win situation. A way to deliver better customer service and reduce costs at the same time. Perhaps not all organisations will benefit from this kind of technology, but clearly some would. Like any other tool, it is mostly a question of using it wisely and sensibly.
Finally, I just wanted to let you know that from next week (May 5th, to be precise) there will be a new way to comment on these blogs by logging on to the Noetica Online Community and joining the “Danny’s Blog” thread within the main forum. The Noetica Online Community can be found at: http://forum.noetica.com . I would love to hear from you and discuss your comments regarding any of the subjects raised in these blog entries or indeed, anything else.
See you there.
Danny
An interesting thing has been happening to me over the last couple of years. It seems that my past is catching up with me. Within the space of a few months, I have re-established contact with several old friends which I had lost touch with long ago (over 20 years, in some cases). Considering that most of these friends are currently scattered in many countries literally across the planet, this is quite something.
Initially, I thought it was a coincidence. Then I started to think that I have reached that point in life where one stops looking forward and begins to gaze nostalgically back into the past. Then it dawned on me. What actually happened was that at some point (probably about a couple of years ago), I decided to try and learn a bit more about the social networking phenomenon and I tentatively registered with some of the usual sites (LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendsReunited, Plaxo, Facebook, Skype, Xing, etc.).
The result was immediate and foolishly unanticipated on my part. All of a sudden, people that I vaguely knew (and in some rare cases went to great lengths to avoid) from high school onwards started contacting me completely out of the blue. In some cases, this was a genuinely pleasant surprise. For instance, only last month I was able to meet up with almost the entire military intelligence unit where I spent (some would say, misspent) most of my twenties. Bearing in mind that last time we all met was about 25 years ago, this was quite something.
As my life has so far taken me on a rather geographically and ethnically dislocated journey, I have managed to collect a great many disrupted friendships along the way. Social networking has allowed me to revisit some of these. In many ways this has enriched my life. I have since met with several of these old friends and we now communicate on a more or less regular basis. It has also brought a sense of continuity and comfort in relation to my somewhat disjointed past.
Why am I telling you all this? I am simply using my own experience as an example of the way in which the phenomenon of social networking is affecting our lives on a daily basis. In some cases, the effect is such that it can become more of an obsession and take over a disproportionate slice of ones life. It ranges from the slightly over-zealous Twitterer to the bleary eyed Second Life addict, via the over-elaborate Facebook profile pedant.
Unsurprisingly, business it trying to cash in on this trend. This goes far beyond the obvious realm of online advertising, which is, of course the main source of income for most of the social networking sites. CRM vendors are becoming increasingly interested in it. Oracle, for instance, is taking it extremely seriously and has made social networking enablement one of the main features of their latest versions of Oracle CRM (read Siebel).
This is hardly surprising. If CRM is indeed a technology (some would say a philosophy) which aims to provide an organisation with a 360° view of its customers (and potential customers) then it would be foolish to ignore all this wealth of information that people are prepared to simply offer quite voluntarily into the public domain for anyone to look at and use as they see fit. The implications of our relatively relaxed attitude to our personal information are just beginning to emerge.
Not long ago, the press here in the UK was awash with photos of the new head of MI6 (that’s the British counter-espionage agency, which didn’t officially “exist” until fairly recently). Not only did it expose his identity but also his rather scrawny bare chest on some beach somewhere. It also provided details of his entire family, private address and so on. It turns out that his wife was a sporadic user of Facebook and the details (including the fact that her husband just got a new job as the master of spooks) were on her personal page for all to see.
This is just the beginning. As business becomes increasingly aware of the veritable goldmine of personal information available now freely online, the use of this information will inevitably become more subtle and in some cases more sinister. What is to stop the average double glazing cold caller from having a quick look at your LinkedIn or Facebook profile before making that call and pretending to be a friend of a friend? Let’s hope no double glazing merchants are regular readers of this blog…
A completely new discipline known as Social Network Mining has recently emerged specifically for the purpose of trawling social networks and retrieving information which is of value to commercial companies. This is truly in it’s infancy at present and very much still in the realm of academic & scientific research, but I cannot imagine that it will be long before usable commercial applications will become widely available. The social networking sites themselves may become complicit in this and see it as an opportunity to cash in on the valuable data they are holding, data which we are all volunteering into the public domain.
Of course, there are dangers in this and the chances of finding and subsequently targeting the wrong John or Jane Smith are very high at present. There is no doubt in my mind though that it is only a matter of time before these techniques become much more reliable and almost commonplace. The temptation presented by this veritable goldmine of information will be far too enticing to the intrepid marketers out there to be ignored.
Forgetting for a moment about the opportunity for abuse, let’s try to think for a moment about the genuine opportunity for legitimate and useful leverage of social networks for more effective customer contact. The possibilities are endless.
You can already “follow” companies on Twitter. An organisation can assume a personality within a social networking site and aim to forge “relationships” with its customers, critics or prospects. The problem with this kind of “social” networking is that companies tend to fall into the trap of facile and rather crude propaganda and self promotion, thus losing any scrap of “street” credibility that using this hip new medium may have given them initially.
I can’t imagine anyone (not even the loneliest, malodorous nerd) who would admit to entertaining the notion of counting their electricity supplier, bank or broadband provider amongst their so called “friends”, even if such “friends” are of the on-line variety. It just smacks of sadness. On the other hand, if organisations could personalise this to the point that each customer can have a “social” relationship with their Personal Account Manager (PAM – thank you, Luke!), then things could be different.
PAM can be human or simply an avatar. I think a real human PAM is probably the better option, even if it is simply a figurehead and her online exploits are coordinated by a whole army of CSRs and marketing execs. I am sure that the Queen does not personally remember the names, birthdates and ages of each and every one of her subjects yet most nonagenarians are still taking their vitamin supplements just in order to receive that landmark telegram (possibly email or text message these days) from the monarch when they eventually reach that elusive century.
So what could PAM do for you? Well, many things. First of all, she would occasionally send you messages with personalised news about the company she works for. She could regularly analyse your social networking profiles and make sure that she gets to know you better. The better she got to know you the more precise and accurately targeted her messages to you could be.
For instance, she could easily find out when your various family birthdays, anniversaries and other important dates are, and suggest to you some special deals on presents, restaurants, city breaks and so on. She could even learn about your family’s tastes and really surprise you with some cracking ideas. PAM could also figure out what time of the year you typically go on holiday and judging by your Facebook holiday snaps also figure out quite easily what kind of holidays you like.
By looking at your blogs, status messages and “twitterings” she could easily figure out when you normally book your holidays (“Hey, I just booked the family on a Tuscan walking holiday in June!”) and approach you around that time of year with some interesting suggestions.
If PAM wasn’t your “friend”, you might be tempted into thinking that she was spying on you. Well, she is of course, but she does have her redeeming features as well. Who do you turn to when her company really annoys you and you need someone to complain to? She’ll be there for you. She will take your grievance seriously and shortcut the bureaucracy by passing it on directly to the right department and keeping you informed on progress at regular intervals.
By doing so, she will not only gain your trust and possibly even your gratitude but also relieve the pressure from her less fortunate colleagues working in the call centre, reducing call volumes and eliminating that exasperating Vivaldi wait. You may be less reluctant to allow her to pry into your social networking life if she proves herself really helpful in times of crisis.
We can, of course, take this one step further. Could PAM go freelance? How about a PAM that is not necessarily the instrument and servant of one company, but is an agent that works on behalf of several such organisations? Companies could simply outsource their PAMs. They would then become simply a “well connected” friend. The same PAM could solve a problem you have with your electricity bill and also offer you timely and well researched options for your next holiday.
Less of a PAM, more of a PA.
If such a PAM could really gain your trust, by not abusing your patience with irrelevant, inappropriate and too frequent “suggestions”, it could also provide a much more effective, efficient and less irritating alternative to the cold call. No need to interrupt your dinner with some idiotic special offer recited nervously by an off-shore agent. You will be logging into your preferred social networking site later and the offer from your trusted PAM will be waiting for you.
Taking this even further, there is no harm in actually talking to PAM every now and again over the phone. The thing is that she will never call you out of the blue, but will send you a message through your social network asking for a convenient time to talk. You could do the same and set a mutually convenient time.
It would be really cool if PAM was always the same person with the same voice. Otherwise, PAM would politely suggest that you may wish to speak to SAM (your Surrogate Account Manager) or wait for an available slot in her diary. Then you can talk to her (or to SAM) at length about the more unclear details of your forthcoming Tuscan holiday.
If we were to take this to it’s natural conclusion, here’s a wild idea. What about social networking for PAMs? How about allowing your various PAMs to talk to each other and cut you out of the bureaucratic loop allowing you to get on with your life? It may seem like a crazy idea, but who knows…?
This could really revolutionise customer contact. I honestly believe that personalisation is the key to genuinely effective customer interaction. The age of brute force is coming to an end. Personal touch and sophistication are the new name of the game. The big question is how to make this work and cut cost at the same time. Perhaps PAM has the answer.
Danny
London, 11.February.2009
Welcome to the machine
About a year ago, I found myself in an Italian restaurant in London having a chat over dinner with the CEO of one of the main global technology suppliers to the call centre industry. Let’s call him Bob (not his real name). I know, it sounds like fraternising with the competition, but the call centre industry is still a pretty friendly place and competitors (in the technology space, at least) still maintain a selective yet mostly genuine regard and respect for each other. There is still some honour left on this battlefield. Long may it last.
Anyway, as I was saying, we were having a pretty nerdy chat about the future of CRM, CIM, CEM and all the rest of it, when Bob told me a story that made me think again about what our industry is all about. It’s a pretty simple story, and I can’t guarantee that all the details are entirely accurate (that fine bottle of Barolo was clearly having an effect), but here is the gist of it.
In preparation for his trip to Europe (did I mention Bob was American?), he went on to his chosen airline’s website (let’s call it Hot Air) chose a complex itinerary (London was not his only destination on that trip), and was about to go through the usual booking process (seats, connections, etc.) and as he also wanted to redeem some of his Hot Air Miles the transaction was getting a bit complex, but being a proud technology guy, he persevered.
As a frequent traveller, Bob had a loyalty card membership (he was actually a Gold customer) with the airline and in order to redeem his air miles he had to log into his account. So there he was, clicking away, when…
All of a sudden, a message popped onto his screen. It said something along these lines: “Hi Bob, this is the Hot Air support desk, my name is Beth, I can see that you are trying to complete a pretty complicated transaction, would you like me to help you? I may be able to get you an additional discount. Also, I can see that a slight change to your itinerary may give you a saving of a few hundred bucks on this trip.”
The pop up on his screen offered him several ways of talking to Beth. There was an Instant Messaging box for him to respond to her by simply typing his answer in. There was the option of talking to her through his computer using VoIP (that had the dubious (?) advantage that he would be able to actually see Beth as well) if he had a headset (or speakers and a microphone) connected to his workstation. Alternatively, he could ask Beth to simply call him on the number of his choice there and then.
So, more out of curiosity I believe, he took her up on her offer. Beth indeed managed to save him quite a bit of money on the trip and actually find him better connections than he managed to find himself. As they seemed to have “hit it off” quite nicely and Bob found Beth very pleasant, professional and helpful, she managed to set things up for him so that next time he is on the website, she would personally know about it and if he called, she would be his preferred point of contact, if she was around.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I was impressed. Not as impressed as Bob though. He was ecstatic about it and not only would he never consider using another airline ever again, but he was essentially trying to convince everyone he met (and would bother listening to him) to do so. He was an evangelist and a missionary converting everyone to the new Hot Air creed. He had seen the promised land. I know we are a little more reserved on this side of the pond, but this story stayed with me and made me think…
Let’s try to analyse this and see where it takes us…
Why was Bob so surprised about being approached by Beth in the first place? That’s pretty easy to answer. Websites are not supposed to talk back to us. Part of the attraction of the internet is the anonymity and privacy that it offers. You could compare the experience to being alone in a vast library. You can browse through all the books you may wish to and nobody bothers you. It’s just pictures and words on a page. Or rather billions of pages.
There is a lot to be said for this and there is something rather seductive about the experience of being able to wander around this virtual universe, completely unnoticed. A bit like walking through an Oriental market without being accosted by carpet merchants.
Well, thinking about it, this is not entirely true. There are many sites that will try and take on the persona of the trinket salesman by automatically and rather randomly attacking you with various pop-ups and ever more ingenious devices (things floating across your screen, banners changing colours and shapes, bogus competitions which you have instantly won, etc.) trying to attract your attention to the latest laptop, potion or mobile phone.
These things are really annoying and I can think of very few people (not even Bob) who would be drawn by them to go and buy any of this stuff. It is simply just another form of advertising, and nothing more. It is not directed at you personally, but anyone who happens to wander through this or that web page. It is getting cleverer by the day, but the point is that there is no human being behind the website, just a robotic street vendor accosting innocent passers by.
On the other hand it is absolute madness that companies are spending serious sums of money on trying to recruit new customers or retain their existing ones by using ever more aggressive methods of approaching the public almost at random, while completely ignoring the thousands that wander through their website at all times of day or night.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting for a minute that organisations start pestering all visitors to their websites. On the other hand, if for instance somebody bothered to register and log in to your site (and therefore you know who they are), and you know what they have been doing on your site and for how long, there is no harm in my view in drawing them in by using a live agent. You may even get a few Bobs.
Even if you don’t know who they are yet, it makes sense to begin some sort of live dialogue with them. Some may object, but as long as you are never too pushy or intrusive, very few would raise an eyebrow. After all, it is a hell of a lot less intrusive than calling them at home in the middle of supper or bombarding them with junk mail and spam.
And let’s not forget one basic thing. If you would be remotely interested in anything offered to you by a piece of direct mail or unsolicited email, what would be the first thing that you might do? Come on, be honest… you will simply go on their website and check it out before you do anything else.
Now, the main reasons you do this rather than calling is because you don’t want the hard sell or to wait in a queue for 20 minutes for something you’re not sure you really want or need. You want to be able to read about it, look at it and make up your mind in your own time before you talk to these people. You are also more likely to find the correct information on a website that has been created and is being kept up to date by experts, rather than the call centre agent (remember Rita?) who had three hours training and is not likely to have any idea of what you may be talking about.
And for some people that is fine. If someone accosts you while on their website, simply do what I do on the rare occasions when I set foot in clothes shops and am invariably accosted by the spotty teenager with the ubiquitous silver stud through their tongue: “May I help you, thir?”. “No, just looking, thank you.”. You know the drill…
There is a lot that can be deduced by analysing the trace that visitors leave on the website. Let’s think about it. If they came to you from a search engine, you can probably pick up the search terms they used to find you. If they used the “search” feature on your site, you would get an even better idea of what they were after. You will know what is in their shopping cart, even though they haven’t yet approached the “check out”. You will also have a pretty good idea of what products they looked at and for how long. You will roughly know their location, so will probably be able to infer the language or local dialect you should be addressing them in.
Similar information can be deduced from IVR. How about spotting who of your customers or prospects is trapped in your IVR maze and may need rescuing. Oh, and how about using the information captured in IVR and not asking the same questions again? What’s the point in tapping in your 20 digit account number if the first person you will speak to will ask you to quote it again? That really annoys me.
And why is IVR limited to the preamble of a call? Why do I get the distinct impression that in many cases IVR is simply used as a delaying device, in order to make the queue seem shorter? The general impression that companies try to convey is that IVR is basically used for call routing so that the few simple choice that you are asked to make would be used to connect you to a specialist in the area that you need help with.
Hmmm? It seems to me that whatever you choose you end up talking to somebody that is not particularly specialised or they need to transfer you anyway. Whatever options you enter you normally end up talking to the same person. So why bother with IVR? This is what annoys people about IVR, not the technology itself.
Again, people are not afraid of technology. They are afraid of badly implemented technology.
Now, let’s assume that the visitor to your website ends up talking to one of your agents. Is it an inbound call or an outbound call? Well, it’s neither, really. If it’s a VoIP call the visitor may have pushed a button that simply connected the call, but it certainly wasn’t a classic inbound call or outbound call. It blurs the boundaries that have been so entrenched in call centre culture for so long.
In the end, this is really what this is all about. The essence of the brave new world that is just around the corner is precisely the introduction of a level of refinement and intelligence to customer interaction that will remove the distinctions that are so ingrained today. Call centres are still divided places: inbound agents, outbound agents, chat & email agents, etc. are all segregated and regarded as incompatible skill sets.
The purpose of new technology in customer contact is simple. Our values as a society are rooted in the basic principles of human dignity and the intrinsic importance of each human life. This applies both to call centre agents as well as to customers. It is therefore the role of technology to ensure that each and every person working in a call centre is given the dignity of fulfilling, useful and meaningful employment.
In order to achieve this, it is necessary that these agents become experts in the subjects that they are supposed to discuss with the public and are treated as such, by being provided with tools and training that allow them to fulfil their task intelligently and offer a service which the company they work for can be proud of.
On the other hand, the way to ensure that the dignity and humanity of the customer is also recognised is for organisations to keep in mind that every 20 minute period of somebody’s life is important and if Albert Einstein would have had to wait 20 minutes to speak to an agent when trying to figure out why his electricity bill was so high he may have never discovered relativity, Mozart may never have written a note and Monet wouldn’t have ever touched a canvas.
How is this to be achieved? The answer is simpler than you may think. The idea is that people should only speak to a human being when they really need an expert. Everything else can be and should be automated. Not to do so is inefficient and to some degree undignified. The age of low skilled or unskilled labour is well and truly over.
Shipping all these unskilled jobs abroad to what is pretentiously known as the “emerging markets” was the last gasp of this shameful practice of using low paid people for menial, repetitive jobs. If we object to the sweatshops that pump out our cheap T-shirts, footballs, trainers and so on why shouldn’t we object to the practice of asking people on a low wage to do no more than provide the equivalent of the talking clock? Never mind about the forced lies and indignity of Anglicising their perfectly good foreign names, trying to conceal their accents, their location or the fact that the sun is always shining outside their windows (if indeed the hangar they work in has the luxury of windows)
This trend is now coming to an end as it became abundantly clear that not only is it a morally dubious practice, but can also backfire in various ways. Some organisations are making PR capital out of the boast of “UK only call centres”. This should tell you something…
To end on a positive note, we are entering a new era in customer contact. The world is changing and this industry will change with it. Technology has a big part to play in this transformation and we, as the craftsmen that create these new tools should be leading from the front.
Danny
London, 30.January.2009
Lovely Rita
“Hello, you are through to ABC Services Ltd, my name is Rita, how may I help you?”. This is how it usually begins. Reetah is either a mild mannered Bangalore resident with a doctorate in Law, English and Aristotelian Philosophy, or a plucky Geordie with an O-level in Sex Education and several trophies from various wet T-shirt and drinking competitions won last summer in some part of the Balearics much blessed with fried breakfasts.
Only joking. The reality is much worse. The Indian Ph.D. is probably not genuine and Geordie Rita is most likely to have never made it to her O-level exam as her hands-on practice session overran.
There is a serious side to this though. Working in a call centre is not taken seriously by almost anyone as a profession or indeed a career choice. Ask any child what they would like to be when they grow up and you will get some pretty wild choices (train driver, astronaut, rock star, WAG, secret agent, etc.) but never call centre agent.
Working in a call centre verges these days on insult and can be seen by some as a term of abuse. It is almost synonymous with failure and the butt of countless comedy routines (“After working for 5 years in a call centre I got so depressed I called the Samaritans and got through to a call centre in Pakistan. When I told them I was suicidal they got all excited and asked if I could drive a truck.”). Working in a call centre is seen as something to be ashamed of and certainly a conversation killer at parties.
“And what do you do?”
“I work in a call centre”
“Really? How fascinating. Only the other day I had this awful experience with someone in a call centre. I called to complain that… (half an hour later)… and you know what he said…?
“Oh, please excuse me, I just spotted some wet paint over there, I’ll just go and watch it dry for a while.”
“Wait, let me introduce you to Herbert here. He is a career advisor. Maybe he can help you.”
It is an industry that doesn’t dare speak its name. Even individuals occupying more senior positions in the call centre industry tend to hide behind anodyne job titles such as Customer Experience Manager, Customer Services Director and so on. The middle management suffer from the same identity crisis. Call centres are full of Team Captains, Program Managers, Supreme Telephony Rear Admirals and any odd job titles that would not divulge the fact that they work in a call centre.
Some people have made the parallel between today’s call centres and the mills or mines of the industrial revolution. Although I can see the logic in that, as it is one of the few mass industries today where one can be employed without any qualifications and get quickly trained on the job, there are major differences and most of them for the worse.
There was no shame associated with working in a mine or a mill. One can imagine a sense of pride and camaraderie associated with it. These were professions spanning several generations where sons would follow their fathers down the pit or daughters would walk in their mothers’ footsteps over at the mill.
I know I am romanticising this quite a bit but I’m trying to make the point that there was a certain pride associated with such working class traditions. A whole new fabric of society was created around them. Brass bands, choirs, trade unions, working mens’ clubs, and much else besides were a direct consequence of the sense of pride and community that came with these jobs.
Not so in call centres today. If call centres are the new home of the working class, then the working class has clearly lost it’s sense of purpose. But I don’t believe for a moment that this has anything to do with class but everything to do with image.
Estate agents for instance have been suffering from this problem for a very long time. In my experience, with very few exceptions, most estate agents are pretty decent, honest and hard working people. I know this is not a popular view, but these days (particularly after the massive cull of the last few months) it is nevertheless true. Sometime during the 80s boom, and the previous property bubble, some estate agents resorted to rather unpopular yet completely legal practices (such as gazumping, falsely driving prices up, etc.). The profession has never managed to recover its image.
I have a feeling that something similar may be about to happen to bankers. The credit crunch has exposed some of them as greedy, irresponsible amateurs, gambling away vast amounts of other people’s money. It may take many years before we trust anyone in a pinstriped suit again.
Back in call centre world, is there anything that can be done to rehabilitate the image of the call centre professional? Of course there is. Call centres need to brighten up a bit and inject a modicum of glamour and true excellence in an industry currently dominated by cost cutting, grim penny pinching and efficiency gains.
Mostly though, they need to introduce technology that will eliminate the need for the most low skilled agents altogether and even more technology that will allow agents to perform the tasks that require higher skills more effectively and with a clear focus on the customer rather than desperately trying to remember their training. The general idea is that the agent’s image (and self esteem) will only improve if they are genuinely viewed as experts at what they do and not just talking machines.
What do people want, when they call (or are being called by) a company? In my view, they want to talk to somebody that is prepared to have a normal conversation and help them with a problem in a competent and sympathetic manner, without trying to sell them things they don’t want or reciting words they don’t mean and sometimes even understand. If the task is trivial, they probably don’t want to talk to anyone at all, but simply get the information they want or perform the simple transaction they need quickly and without being held in a queue for an eternity.
They probably want to converse with somebody who does not rush them, talk at them and sound like they hate every minute of being in the human hellhole they are in. The gains that companies can achieve by presenting an image that is relaxed yet effortlessly efficient, delivered by people that can connect on a human level, be amusing without being vulgar or patronising are considerable. Such a company would clearly benefit from returning customers and instant growth. Good news can spread just as fast as bad news, providing it is remarkable enough.
Here’s an example. In the first years of its existence, FirstDirect developed a reputation of a call centre culture very much along the lines I just described. There were many other reasons why FirstDirect succeeded (the branchless concept, the 24 hour service, a great deal of advertising hype, large media budgets, etc.), but the perception that the call centre was important to the organisation and positioned at its very heart, properly staffed by people that had the time to talk to you had been created and persists to this day.
I have recently attended a call centre event where one of the more interesting workshops (run by Ken Wheeler, EMEA Sales Director at Sitel) was about the link between brands and customer service. It is surprising how brand image and the public’s expectations of the call centre are interlinked. One can reinforce the other or weaken the other.
FirstDirect came up as one of the success stories as far as this idea is concerned. Even though the market is these days awash with telephone banking services, FirstDirect retains a soft spot in the public’s emotions and stories of almost unexplainable customer loyalty to the brand as a result of a very positive call centre experience in the distant past abounded. A good experience can be just as powerful and memorable as a bad one, if it exceeds the norm.
Of course, good experiences create higher expectations and therefore a higher propensity to fail in the future. The bar is being constantly raised. What is surprising is that as long as standards don’t drop too much, customers that have been treated well in the past can be remarkably tolerant. They become supportive and can even begin to imagine that the service is not as bad as it really is and start making excuses on behalf of the company (“Oh, it must be a blip, they have always been so good.”). Wishful thinking, perhaps?
What does all this really tell us? A few things, actually.
First, that the negative and much ridiculed image of the call centre industry stems mainly from employing low skilled people to do repetitive, trivial and soul destroying tasks. Recent history tells us that these kind of jobs are much better and more consistently performed by machines. How many people go into their bank to withdraw cash over the counter? Not very many. Even the near illiterate can use an ATM these days.
Technology and its unstoppable progress is forcing everyone to rethink their roles in society. The unskilled labourer has a diminishing and rapidly fading role to play in our world. Although manufacturing will continue to play a major role in world economy, factories require less and less manual labour as technology moves on. What happened to agriculture (mechanisation) and manufacturing (automation) is now happening to services (self service automation).
Yes, I know, there is this general feeling that nobody wants to “talk to a machine” and the usage of IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems has been generally vilified. Everybody knows the stories of getting lost in an endless loop of options and selections (“If you want to be asked to press 1, please press 1, etc…”). Bad use of technology does not negate the technology’s potential.
People are not afraid of technology. People are afraid of bad technology.
A fundamental philosophical shift has taken place in Western attitudes over the last few decades and has accelerated considerably in the last few years. We are becoming far less tolerant of exploitation and the human cost of it regardless of the distance between the consumer and the exploited.
We want to drink ethically sourced coffee and buy clothes from socially responsible companies. We don’t wish to consume goods produced by underpaid, overworked desperate people (even if by doing so we may be depriving them of their only means of survival). We want clear consciences and a good night’s sleep.
With very few exceptions (Russian oligarchs, some Premiership footballers, etc.), the employment of an army of low paid, low skilled servants to cater for menial tasks is universally frowned upon. Nobody in their right mind would entertain the idea of a household full of butlers, maids, chauffeurs and cooks even it they could easily afford it. In a way, it is an admirable trend. We have a much higher regard for human potential and the value of each single human life. It is in many ways what defines us in the West as a deeply humanistic culture.
As Barack Obama said in his inaugural speech: ”The time has come to reaffirm […] that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness “. And as a figure with which an entire population descended from slaves clearly identifies, he should know.
So, the big question is, why do we still expect an army of low paid, unskilled servants to be there for us at the touch of a few buttons at the other end of a phone line ? The truth is that we don’t. Not really.
Let’s face it, wouldn’t you rather press a few buttons than wait for half an hour on the line just in order to speak to someone that has had three days of training and will simply press the same buttons on your behalf. Normally, they don’t know much more than you do about the company they work in. The only advantage they present is the fact that they can be verbally abused and clearly that is far more satisfying than shouting obscenities into an IVR system.
The problem with that is that these types of agents (of the low skilled variety) have about as much of a connection to the company that you wish to vent your frustration at as you do. It is highly likely that you will be talking to an outsourcer and not the company itself. And even if it is an employee of the company, chances are they haven’t been there for more than three months and not likely to be there next time you call. Attrition rates in call centres continue to be atrocious. Staff replacement rates of 30-50% are still not that unusual in the industry.
So, save your breath. You are shouting at the hand. These low skilled front line agents are in a way the sacrificial lambs that organisations are prepared to expose to your wrath thus diverting all this unpleasantness from core staff. Even better, outsource it. In a way, this is a General Hague approach to customer interaction. Send the cannon fodder over the top hoping that the enemy will eventually run out of ammunition.
In my next blog entry I will try to provide a glimpse into my personal vision of the future of customer interaction and what technology may be able to do in order to reduce this reliance on a much maligned, unskilled army of unhappy and transient call centre agents.
In the meantime, spare a thought for the millions of Ritas and Reetahs out there.
Danny
London, 14.January.2009
January Blues
Is “slump” an economic technical term? If so, when does a recession officially become a slump? And is a slump better than a depression? If that is indeed the case, then at what point does a slump formally morph into a depression? Finally, when diagnosed with economic depression is there some kind of fiscal or monetary Prozac that we may be able to mix with the fluoride in the national water supply to cheer us up collectively?
These are the kind of thoughts that mark the beginning of 2009. The press is full of it. The gloom is stretching into the horizon as far as the economists can see and to top it all, a blast of Arctic weather that has been with us for several weeks has driven temperatures well under freezing point and is slowly bringing the transport system to a standstill as we are yet again surprised by the fact that it is generally cold in winter.
Gordon “Prudence” Brown and his accomplice, Alistair “Eyebrows” Darling, are seriously considering printing money to pay their way out of economic trouble. How is this different from forgery exactly? And why does the law allow them to print money but not anyone else? Why isn’t the Queen allowed to print it? After all, it is her picture on the banknotes and she is formally in charge of the Royal Mint?
My worry is that as money printers go, we are in pretty dodgy company. Apart from the Weimar Republic and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe I can think of very few other example where the government resorted to money printing as a means of keeping the country going. The result is usually hyper-inflation and as the pound is already heading South at an alarming rate, I wonder how long it will be before you will be able to buy £10 or even £100 with 1 Euro.
Not all is lost. There will be winners as well. The tourism industry is likely to benefit as hordes of European visitors will be attracted to our shores to enjoy the tremendous bargains that are already beginning to be on offer. In the process, they will discover that Britain has changed and that not only do we produce some tremendous English wines but that our farm output is largely organic and of great quality and our restaurants are among the best in the world.
The goods that they will buy in our shops are likely to be made in Britain as we will be unable to afford to pay for imports and our products and services will become extremely competitive abroad. Exporters will thrive. This will also be good for the environment as we will stop flying things half way around the world more cheaply than it would cost to make them here in the first place.
In the call centre industry, I would hazard some predictions as well. First of all, off-shore outsourcing will become a less attractive proposition. The increase in the standards of living in the Far East, combined with the drastic fall in the value of Sterling will make it uneconomic to outsource abroad. This is likely to benefit UK outsourcers who are likely to see a significant revival over the next few years.
The trend of bringing outsourced call centre work back into the UK is already well established for reasons of quality, control and customer demand. This trend will only be accelerated by the economic situation and the rising cost of off-shoring. If the government had any sense, and they were genuinely interested in curbing unemployment they should be thinking about investing some money into grants and assistance for UK call centre outsourcers who could locate their growing operations in high unemployment areas as they’ve done so successfully in the past.
My second prediction is also pretty positive. Indigenous suppliers to the call centre industry (like us) will become much more competitive against imports of software and equipment from abroad (mainly the US and EU). The larger corporate vendors will struggle to cut prices and will focus their efforts elsewhere leaving more room for local companies to grow. We will also be able to expand much more successfully into other territories while software exports become more and more profitable as the pound plummets.
So, what is there to be afraid of? Well, a couple of things spring immediately to mind. First of all, quite a lot of companies will go to the wall or merge over the next year or two. Others will shrink considerably. Their in house call centre operations will either be reduced in size or closed down (or outsourced). We will lose existing business as will most systems suppliers. It is inevitable. All we can do is hope for a bit of luck (like not too many customers in the retail sector) and be careful not to lose any business unnecessarily.
The second danger is uncertainty. There is nothing worse for business than uncertainty. It is the lethal detonator for a downward spiral of decline. Uncertainty causes companies to freeze. Decisions are postponed indefinitely and particularly such decisions that may involve any kind of spending. This slows down the economy even further as suppliers starved of any new business collapse or consolidate and calcify into large, incoherent monoliths.
For a small to medium supplier (like us) the deferral of new business is much worse than losing it altogether as the cost of sale keeps mounting but no sales materialise. You know the scenario. Meeting follows meeting, lengthy RFQ follows interminable RFI (don’t get me started on tendering again!) and travel and entertainment expenses keep mounting as no new business is generated. Uncertainty is a killer and the knowledge that things will be bad is much better than not knowing what’s around the corner.
To end on a positive note, despite all this economic gloom and weird weather patterns, we (Noetica that is) are experiencing one of our best years yet. We are preparing to run several pilots with companies that we always wanted to work with and generally we are busier than ever before. Long may it continue. If all the new business that we have in the final stages of closing will actually come in, we will have no choice but to pull together, work a little harder and possibly grow (modestly and cautiously, may I add).
Recession, slump, depression, or whatever you care to call it, is not necessarily a bad thing for everyone. These downward spells are in my view periods of reflection and adjustment when a country (in this case, possibly the world) reassesses its values and goals, before embarking on the next big adventure (or bubble). And a period of true collective introspection cannot be bad for a company that has truly something exceptional to offer. Watch this space.
Danny
London, 17.December.2008
What's in a name?
One of the inevitable effects of the global financial crisis is a severe tightening of regulation surrounding the world of finance, insurance, mortgages and investments. For the next decade we will be living in a much more Kafkaesque world of bureaucratic hell and endless small print.
Organisations within and on the fringes of the financial sphere will be bombarding us with disclaimers and reassuring words making us aware that they are controlled an regulated by various obscure acronyms which we never heard of and not likely to ever show any interest in.
Heaven knows what new regulatory bodies will be emerging over the next few years and what draconian measures they may come up with in order to protect us from ourselves and the dangers of the shark infested waters of the financial oceans. In the meantime, the FSA is busily installing sophisticated locks and security devices on the financial barn door. Sadly the golden horse had bolted long before.
Now, whatever these new rules introduced by the current troika consisting of the Government, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, I can more or less guarantee that they will fall into two main categories: legal words and impenetrable logic.
The “legal words” are basically the stuff that is read out at breakneck speed at the end of radio commercials and nobody ever listens to. You know the kind of stuff I mean: “…not keeping up with the payments on your mortgage may result in incurable leprosy, your children taken in to slavery and the possibility of sharing a house with the mother in law for all eternity…”.
These offensive crimes against the English language will become longer, more convoluted and increasingly meaningless (“In case of an aardvark, the Rulers of the Universe reserve the right to retreat behind their ancestral baboon and the instruments shall be revealed to the followers of Tosh, the Great Lord of Meaningless Babble…”).
The “impenetrable logic” bit will be the result of the evolution of the current relatively vague rules and limitations regarding financial products into a set of much more complex interrelated principles and caveats intended to ensure that financial products are correctly matched to each customer’s needs and abilities to pay.
The kind of logic I have in mind goes along the lines: “You want a loan? Great, you came to the right place. Now, I will need to ask you about 380 questions in order to establish your eligibility as a borrower. This will only take around 3 hours. OK?”.
So, after providing all your vital details (including your second removed great uncle Herbert’s shoe size and sexual habits), your lifestyle information (sorry, no loans for vegans or left handed people), and your up to the minute financial status (such as your bank balance in the last hour, and the precise APR on all your credit cards) some complex set of rules will determine your financial fate.
Why am I interested in all this? After all, it has nothing to do with contact centres and the software that they use. Or does it? In my opinion, all this new state of affairs will have a profound effect on contact centres within and on the periphery of the financial universe. More importantly, it may signal the redemption of the technology that hadn’t dared speak it’s name for a few years now, i.e. call scripting.
Call scripting means many things to many people. It is one of the most misunderstood and misused terms in the world of customer contact centres. To most people the world “script” immediately evokes cinematic or theatrical images of actors reciting pre-written lines. It also reminds us of some of the most infuriating experiences involving call centre agents that never listen but keep reciting the same inanities back at you, regardless of what you may wish to ask or tell them.
I will not deny that this does happen and may even be prevalent in some types of call centre. On the other hand, any technology has the propensity of being misused. Lasers can be used to save lives with high precision surgery or to destroy life when utilised in weapon targeting systems. The same technology that put a man on the moon is used for ballistic nuclear missiles. And so on. The list is endless.
Call scripting was never intended to become a device that would turn call centre agents into automatons. In other words, apart from the unfortunate choice of name, there is very little in common between the concept of an actor’s script and that of a call script. With very few exceptions (and the financial world’s boilerplate legal statements is one of them), call scripts should never instruct agents to read out anything verbatim from the screen. It is unnecessary, infuriating and soul destroying for the agent.
So if call scripting does not involve any “recitation”, what does it involve? Surprisingly enough, it involves logic. More specifically, it involves the logic of the business processes that should be the basis of each and every interaction between a call centre agent and a customer. Unless a call script exists, all this business logic only resides in the agents’ heads and is the result of relentless training and subject to endless errors. In a way, the same business logic needs to be replicated hundreds of times in each agent’s memory. The call script takes that away.
If you think of an interaction as a journey between “Hello” and “Goodbye”, an intelligent and well constructed script provides the satellite navigation system guiding the agent through each conversation in the most nonintrusive, low key yet effective manner possible. At certain points it will provide useful hints and snippets of information that will move the conversation forward and present the customer with a flattering image of the agent as a well-informed, unflappable expert.
When agents don’t have to worry about what they should be saying next, what system to use, how to cut and paste customer details from one system to another, where to find bits of information and so on, they are more confident and able to concentrate on the person that they are talking to rather than trying to remember the more arcane details of their training or fathom the systems they are using.
The conversation flows and is more natural. The customer feels that they are talking to a real human being that pays attention to them and not a stressed out nervous wreck with an attention disorder. So, in a paradoxical way, call scripts, when utilised wisely, have precisely the opposite effect to what their problematic image may suggest.
There are many other benefits that the use of call scripting technology brings. Amongst them are more accurate KPI reports on call centre activity, reduced call durations (not at the expense of customer satisfaction, may I add), reductions in training requirements, flexible and instantly modifiable business processes, less errors, more consistency and much more.
So, what is in a name? Quite a lot, it seems. I have no idea who coined the term, but I imagine that whoever came up with “scripting” was hoping that some Hollywood glamour might rub off on to what is after all a relatively unglamorous technique. Of course, it backfired rather badly. I can think of many other possibly less damaging names for it.
We have been trying to introduce the term “call flow” (and “web flow” for the web based variants) for the last 8 years or so with limited success. How about “intermap” (as in “interaction map”), “callnav” (as in “call navigation system”), “interlog” (as in “interaction logic”), “interithm” (as in “interaction algorithm”) or “noerithm” (as in “noetic algorithm” – for those of you not yet familiar with the term, “noetic” is the main characteristic of something that you know but you don’t know why you know it as you never learned it)?
Anyway, a box of M&S’s best mince pies is on offer for the person that can come up with the best new name for call scripting. A name that will remove the stigma from a much maligned technology. My thoughts go to all the unfortunate Osama Bin Ladens (there must have been hundreds of the poor buggers around the Arab world), Pol Pots, Idi Amins or Radko Mladics who had to change their name by deed poll over the years hoping to shake the CIA off their backs.
As I don’t imagine that I will be posting another entry before Christmas, let me take this opportunity to wish you, my reader, a very peaceful and happy festive season and a successful and prosperous 2009, hopefully as free of financial legalese babble as the regulations would permit.
Danny
London, 09.December.2008
A noetic vision of Christmas
Last Friday, as I was propping up the bar at our annual Noetica Christmas bash (trying to ignore the frowsty ambience enveloping our area of the venue at the beginning of the evening), I allowed myself a brief moment of quiet self satisfied contemplation. Looking around the room, at the several groups engrossed in animated conversations it became abundantly clear to me that at no time in our 12 year history did we field such good and strong a team as we are now.
Of course, being realistic, nothing is ever perfect and there is always room for improvement (even for platitudes such as this one), but I am certain that the passage of time has made us stronger, more experienced and simply better at our jobs. The people that didn’t really fit the mould of Noetica have been and gone (and, boy, do we have some stories to tell!) and we are now a homogenous, coherent and much more efficient bunch than we ever have been. Let’s take a tour and count our blessings for once.
Where do I start? I think the best example of how much things have improved is Mel. This also gives me the opportunity to thank her on all our behalves for organising the Christmas party and in particular the rounds of shots that kept appearing at regular intervals containing a variety of obscure sounding cocktails that we were told in no uncertain terms to down without the use of our hands (which was just as well, considering the shaky state of our limbs by that stage…).
We can be a rather infuriating bunch to look after. We don’t like bureaucracy of any kind (filling in forms in particular). We work under pressure most of the time and tend to snap at the first person we come across. We need awkward and sometimes impossible last minute travel arrangements organised at the drop of a hat and we are fussy about which hotel, airline, train or restaurant is to be booked. And we want it cheap. The list of our whims goes on and on.
Nothing is too much trouble for Mel. It is all done in a manner that looks effortless and with a smile on top. At last, Noetica has a face we can all be proud of. And I don’t think this is just us being grateful for any improvement after the regime of the previous 9 years. It is genuinely a pleasure to work with Mel . For the Catholics amongst us, please could you have a quiet word with the Holy See in Rome with a view to a canonisation. I don’t think that there has been a St. Melanie yet, has there?
Just checked and yes, there has been one. And he was male! Born in Placet, Brittany, he was a monk in the see of Rennes. He wiped out idolatry in his diocese , helped draw up the canons of the Council of Orleans in 511 and was highly revered by King Clovis. Feast day: January 6. Perhaps we should have a special feast (mini muffins and flapjacks?) each January 6th.
The next stop on my tour is Kamil (let’s hope he can make it to next year’s party), who despite only being with us for a relatively short time has rapidly grown into his role and is providing tremendous support for our technical infrastructure. Kamil has managed to learn pretty quickly the intricacies of Synthesys installations, the Aculab hardware and the complexities of our constantly changing and frankly bafflingly named array of physical and virtual servers. I truly believe that Kamil has a bright future in the company.
Now, to our core development team (Paul, Martin, Mark & Camelia). This has been a tough year for them. As Synthesys.NET emerged from cosy childhood into petulant puberty the stress on the communal parents has been palpable. We are ending the year with a much more solid and manageable product and that is in no small measure thanks to them. The development “crew” is now a close knit team of very experienced and talented people and I sincerely do hope that they will have an easier and more rewarding time next year as a more mature product will hopefully allow us to start writing more interesting new code again.
Talking about the difficult transition of Synthesys.NET into adolescence, I have to mention the tremendous pressure that this has been putting on Joe and his testing lab (“Joe and the Robots” sounds like a pretty good name for a band, don’t you think?). He has always managed to keep his cool and good humour under pretty adverse circumstances. In many ways, he has passed his test of fire and has grown to become a crucial member of the team.
Let’s not forget our Russian colleagues (Vladimir, Sasha, Oleg, Max & Yaroslav). Over the last year we have seen an increase in productivity there and we are relying more and more on the Russian team for Synthesys projects and more recently for .NET development. Although we rarely see them, their impact is great.
On the operations side, it has been a year of flux. In Stephen and Emmanuel we have finally found the kind of people that fit the Noetica culture to join Yagna and Matt, who are now relatively “old hands” (not old people though, OK?) and together form a team of product specialists that allows me to sleep much better at night. A special thank you to Matt for his super human efforts earlier this year during and after the Microsoft upgrade.
Our all female team of project managers (Rebecca & Su) are constantly bringing not only grace and beauty to the harsh world of systems’ implementation, but also cool thinking under fire. Rebecca will be temporarily leaving us at the end of March to put the finishing touches on a different kind of project, and I’m sure everyone in the company will join me in wishing her a smooth project delivery… I’m sure she has a detailed plan…
A special word for Wendy and Darroll on the Noetica helpdesk. 2008 has seen dramatic changes for the better in the way in which the helpdesk is managed. Our customers are benefiting from all these improvements and the company presents a much more professional image. That aside, and not undervaluing it one bit, I will always be firm in my belief that the overwhelming contribution that Wendy and Darroll have been and are continuing to make is to our general wellbeing by keeping us all on our toes and making sure we never take ourselves too seriously. If wit and humour is the highest form of intelligence then we couldn’t hope for a more intelligent helpdesk.
Brigitte is a Noetica institution. Her hard work and professionalism are legendary. As is the strict discipline she imposes on her students. I have never heard anything but praise (possibly accompanied occasionally by a muffled scream, pleading for mercy) from anyone that has ever taken a Noetica training course. I’m sure that we are all delighted to see her walking again after her operation earlier this year and I very much regret that there was no dancing at the Christmas bash, as she had promised me the first dance.
This year we also implemented a major shift in our approach to sales. The main aspect of this change is the decision to stop employing sales people as such. This reflects our belief that Synthesys is not a product that can be sold in isolation but as part of a consultative approach and this can only work when skilled, technically capable people are in charge of the process.
The net result is that we have placed a great burden of responsibility on Sandee’s shoulders as she is solely responsible for new sales and needs to draw on other company resources as and when we achieve traction on any new accounts. I must say that Sandee has responded extremely well to this challenge and has taken on this task with the energy and determination that had always characterised her. In a roundabout way, her sporting career must have honed these competitive qualities in her and we are benefiting as a result.
Despite his protests and arguments to the contrary, Daniel has become over the last few years a crucially committed mujahid dedicated to the Noetica cause. He is our guerrilla soldier, our Mossad agent and terrorist (freedom fighter?) all rolled into one. I think that his tenaciousness has done a great service to us all and his extensive knowledge of the market (he now knows everyone in the contact centre industry personally) has been instrumental to our progress.
One of this year’s great revelations has been Alun. He is living proof that the well known cliché about round and square holes and pegs is absolutely spot on. Since taking over the responsibility of looking after our customers and channels from a business perspective, Alun hasn’t looked back. An absolute joy to work with, and extremely knowledgeable about anything even if it’s not always related to Liverpool FC, Alun has single handedly been able to revolutionise the way in which we relate to our customers and partners and significantly increase our revenue stream and customer satisfaction. All in the space of one short year. Not a mean feat.
Jens has continued to improve his artistry in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), and ensured that Noetica is always on the first page of Google, whether anyone may be searching anything from “call centre software” to “CTI” and from “CRM” to “Unified Agent Front End”. You, of course, realise that by simply mentioning these terms (as well as “call scripting”, “predictive dialling” and so on) on this blog, I have made my own small contribution to our rankings. Of course, Jens is doing a great deal more along the lines of our new strategy of focussing almost exclusively on the web for our marketing communications.
In Germany, Roland has been concentrating his limited time on a few high quality, high volume opportunities and as a result, we are now on the verge of closing some very significant deals. I am very optimistic about the possibility of expanding further into Germany and perhaps leveraging our success there to create a European bridgehead for Noetica in Europe.
Finally, last but not least, our management team. Luke, Kim, Elliot, Oran & Steven have managed (excuse the pun…) to put in place the structures and processes necessary in order to allow us to mature as a company. I must confess that it hasn’t always been easy, and the arguments have always been passionate, heated and let’s face it, loud. On the other hand, it is a testimony to the fact that these are important issues and that they all care deeply about the future of our company. I cannot thank them enough for putting in the long hours, coping with the stress, and possibly worst of all, coping with me.
We are facing uncertain times. The world economy is in turmoil. The experts cannot agree whether what is coming is a cataclysm or just a disaster. Whatever it is, one thing is certain. When we eventually emerge from this recession, the markets that we operate in will look nothing like they look today. The dinosaurs of today will disappear and the most nimble, well adjusted and efficient creatures will dominate the new landscape. If we navigate correctly through this storm, I am confident that with the quality of our team and a little bit of luck, we could be amongst the winners in this brave new world.
Danny
London, 01.12.2008
C?M
First of all, my apologies to anyone that may have been offended by last week’s tirade against the barbaric practice of competitive tendering. None of it was intended as a criticism directed at the good, talented and hard working people who get lumbered with this extra-curricular task, but as a general critique of the system itself, which in my view does not work and is utterly discredited.
I was surprised to have received a few emails of comment (I didn’t dare hope that anyone might actually be reading this blog), most of them in encouragement and complete support of my views, but one or two suggesting that I may have offended some people. If I did, my apologies. The fact that I may occasionally be critical of totalitarian communist regimes does not mean that I have anything against the good people of Pyongyang.
Moving on, this week I will try to look at the ever growing family of TLAs (three letter acronyms) that the wonderful world of customer contact centres is blessed with and to belatedly rejoice in the arrival of a new addition to this happy and growing family.
In the beginning there was chaos. Contact centres had telephones and bits of paper that eventually evolved into post-it notes. Then, over many years, the hideous, humungous and excruciatingly slow dinosaurs known as home grown software systems emerged. Like the original dinosaurs, they took an inordinately long time to become extinct. Rumour has it that some of them still roam the earth in remote corners of the industry.
Then, just as the twentieth century was coming to an end, a couple of interesting mutations were to change all that overnight. CIM (Customer Interaction Management) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) were born. For a long time, nobody could tell which was which. Like identical twins, almost everyone had been confusing one with the other and could never tell them apart.
By the turn of the century, it became pretty clear that CRM was getting most of the attention as it had really pushy parents who invested a great deal in drama lessons, voice training, violin practice and private tutors. Little CRM had to grow up pretty quickly as his parents wanted to cash in on their huge investment in school fees, stripy blazers and boaters.
And indeed CRM grew into a promising young man with a glowing future. He was everything that everyone ever wanted or dreamt of. The young girls who were at the time leading most multinational corporations were furtively writing his name in curly letters in their secret diaries surrounded by pink hearts and coded messages of eternal love.
His parents were delighted. They bought a house in Beverly Hills, one in St. Tropez and a large rambling mansion in Surrey. There was the Bentley, two Ferraris and the private jet. Life was good. Young CRM was on the VIP list at all the trendy clubs, invited to all the “in” parties and generally feeling on top of the world.
Then a terrible thing happened. He fell in with a bad crowd. Drink, drugs and fake sheiks followed. The tabloids were full of pictures of a dishevelled CRM arriving home at 5am shouting obscenities at the paparazzi. The young girls’ parents discovered the secret diaries and banned them from getting anywhere near young CRM ever again and cut their weekly pocket money allowance.
Several spells in rehab, promises of good behaviour and an entire team of PR gurus didn’t really help. CRM was discredited. Then one day, a wonderful thing happened. He met a girl and fell in love. She was pure of heart and as fair as Snow White. Her name was CIM. Remember her? She was the one nobody could tell apart from CRM at the maternity unit.
It was a whirlwind affair. Love at first site. A classic story. The real love of his life had been there in front of him all his life. He just couldn’t see it with all the glamour models chasing after him. Elvis officiated the marriage in Vegas and they honeymooned at a secret tropical location.
A few months later, a baby was born. They called it CEM (Customer Experience Management). It is unclear yet whether the genetic proximity of its parents has adversely affected little CEM (in ways similar to rumoured trends in the less reachable parts of Norfolk and the more remote areas of Alaska) as nobody really knows yet what he is about.
The main question is in what way is CEM different from CRM or CIM? Well, I have been asking this very question recently at an industry event and the answer was that CEM is CRM in reverse! (shouldn’t it be called MRC, then?)
To elaborate on this theory a little, the meaning of it is apparently that in the same way that CRM offers the enterprise a complete 360° view of the customer, CEM offers the customer a 360° view of the enterprise. Make of it what you will.
It sounds to me that the pushy grandparents have been meddling a little. Now that CRM has settled down and moved to suburbia, they are trying to push CEM in the same way that drove little CRM into the arms of Amy Winehouse. My personal feeling is that the fans have moved on and having had their fingers burned once they will probably think twice before deciding to join the club.
On the other hand, it may very well turn out that little CEM is a little smarter and more balanced than his parents and it may be able to strike that wonderful middle path between indifference and hysteria. If that turns out to be the case, I think everybody will benefit.
Danny
London, 25.11.2008
Tender is the night
Credit crunch, global financial crisis, subprime mortgages, the rise and rise of Robert Peston… Gosh, hasn’t the world changed since my last entry on this blog?! In the US, Obamania gripped a dazed nation as the chosen one is expected to walk on water (or perhaps do a Michael Jackson style “moonwalk”) and deliver the overweight children of America into the promised land. Or perhaps OUT of the promised land if a relatively quick exit from Iraq is indeed on the cards.
In the meantime, trying to steer a small-ish call centre (or shall I say “call center” as we are all US friendly these days?) software company through these treacherous waters is becoming more of a challenge every day. Customers and prospects are becoming increasingly careful to commit to anything as their IT budgets shrink and shrivel into nothing.
Here at Noetica, despite having our best year ever, we had our fair share of disappointments since the start of our financial year in March. Most painfully perhaps, we managed to lose at least three or four tenders (with a medium sized outsourcer, a public body and a large publisher) after investing inordinate amounts of time and money responding to literally hundreds of pages of questions and producing vast amounts of architecture documents, diagrams and the usual paraphernalia that needs to accompany these cumbersome documents.
In the end we lost these deals for silly reasons despite, in my humble opinion, being clearly the most suitable solution to the problem in each case. But I would say that, wouldn’t I? Sour grapes and all that… but I don’t think so. I think that the economic climate is panicking organisations into false economies. Bad decisions made today in the name of corporate frugality are most likely to haunt those organisations long after the people that took those unfortunate decisions and the financial crisis that drove them to take them are truly gone and forgotten.
Looking at the slightly bigger picture, I strongly believe that there is something intrinsically wrong with the process of tendering for contracts. Smaller suppliers are clearly at a disadvantage as they cannot afford teams of specialists dedicated to the sole task of answering lengthy and complex tender documents or the investment required in order to develop the specialist expertise needed in order to be successful at this game. And a ridiculous game it is.
And what a waste! A tender document is first of all a huge drain on the company issuing the tender. Months and sometimes years of delay are introduced before a selection process can even start. There is no better way of kicking a project into the long grass than saying that it will require a tendering process. Even once the decision to issue a tender has been taken, the process requires endless meetings involving everyone in the organisation from the CEO to the tea lady to ensure “buy in” (another way of saying bottom cover) from all involved.
As in anything designed by a large committee, the resulting document is usually an amalgam of irrelevant badly spelled information, endless legal boilerplate jargon, and a litany of repetitious, self contradicting and clearly irrelevant set of “requirements”. Senior management rarely have the time to get involved in the creation of these documents and clearly don’t bother to read them let alone participate in the writing, so it is typically left to a junior hapless and bemused member of staff who managed to pull the short straw and is lumbered with this joyful task in addition to her/his day job.
In some unfortunate cases, an “independent consultant” is drafted in at great expense to put together the tender document. I can only assume that this only happens when no junior is available for the task or anyone asked to do the job internally goes on long term sick leave, resigns or commits suicide. The “independent consultant” typically turns up to be an old mate of the MD (or some other director) who is simply unemployed or unemployable (possibly due to a recent spell at Her Majesty’s pleasure for fraud, pillage or murder). As to their independence and impartiality, let’s not even go there…
What happens next is even more bizarre. As the document approaches completion, the question of who will actually be asked to respond emerges. This is where it gets truly ridiculous. There is no method to this madness. First of all, there are normally some incumbent suppliers who already do business with the issuing organisation and they hear it by the water cooler. They will ask to be included regardless of what the tender may be for. After all, they are a “known quantity” (i.e. better the devil you know).
Then, the junior in charge of the tender will undertake some in-depth “research” to find the best and most suitable possible suppliers. This usually involves a couple of Google searches. So, as long as I manage to appear on the first page of Google when anyone searches for “enriched uranium rods”, I am more than likely to be invited to tender for anything in the nuclear industry. I must try that one, and see if I get any tenders in Iranian. On the other hand, the Iranians are probably better organised at this than us.
At this stage, as most of the senior people are on their summer vacation or at some conference in Barcelona, all of the suppliers that have been trying for years to beat a path to their door and may have sparked the interest that triggered the tender in the first place are promptly forgotten. Little wonder that this is happening, as the senior management have probably forgotten by now that a tender is about to be issued as many months have now passed since the need for such a tender managed to flash briefly before their eyes.
So, a bunch of totally unsuitable possible suppliers are invited to tender. This is where 5 to 10 companies need to start spending significant time and money (usually at a time of the year when they have hundreds of other, more profitable things to do) to put together an answer to the hundreds of “requirements” and assemble a response to the tender. I estimate that the total cost for each company to put together such a document is in the region of £10,000.
This is before you start counting the site visits, lavish client entertainment, endless presentations and the time and travel costs associated with them, if you happen to have the misfortune to be selected for the shortlist. The costs then quickly double to something approaching £20,000. So if a company makes 10 bids each year and is selected for the shortlist in 5 of these cases, the annual cost of tendering is well in excess of £150,000 per annum. Just to put it into perspective, this sum is larger than the total amount bid for some of these tenders.
You can calculate this the other way around as well. For one single tender, the tendering company will probably spend something in the region of £40,000 (if you include the time of all the people that are involved plus the “consultant” fees, expenses, etc.) to produce the tender. Then, if 10 bidders emerge, each one will spend £15,000 on average. All in all, including the selection process and so on, a relatively small tender would involve costs (on all sides) of well in excess of £200,000. This is sometimes more than the value of the contract itself. What’s the point?!!
Ah, but this process guarantees a wise choice of supplier and an excellent price, I hear you say. Really? Only yesterday I read in the paper that the government has spent £200million last year on IT contracts that were later ditched, stopped or never delivered. £200million! In one year! And you know what? I am absolutely sure that all these contracts were awarded following an exhaustive and formal tendering process with all the checks and balances in place.
It is about time that someone put this old sacred cow of “competitive tendering” out of its misery. The process doesn’t work, it is simply an arse covering exercise and it is a huge drain on the economy. It stops smaller companies from growing and getting access to contracts and it allows larger companies to become fat, wasteful and complacent. It is a huge waste of time and money.
The main source of waste is that each Invitation to Tender has its own different format and asks questions in a different way (after all, the “independent consultant” must justify her/his exorbitant fee). This means that very little work that has been invested in one response can be reused for another. So, apart from some product documentation and legal blurb, each response needs to be written from scratch. This can put an enormous strain on smaller suppliers.
In this day and age, the internet should provide much better solutions for the selection of the right supplier without the need for all this Kafkaesque anachronism. I would suggest a central moderated repository of company documents where suppliers can post a “standard tender response” document written to a predefined format (the same format for all suppliers) including a knowledge base where potential customers can find answers to most of their requirements without even contacting the supplier until they are reasonably satisfied that it can satisfy most of their requirements.
This can, of course, be followed by specific discussions and additional questions as each customer clearly has unique and specific requirements. But 90% of the tedious, expensive and totally unnecessary work can be easily eliminated.
Anyway, apologies for this rant, but I had to get it off my chest and I truly believe that something needs to be done about this madness.
I will be posting on a weekly or bi-weekly basis blog entries (not all as lengthy or as bilious as this one) on this blog from now on. Promise. Really. Unless I have a long tender response to write, of course…
Danny
London, June 4th, 2008
Six months later…
Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? At the time of writing the first entry of this blog (below, in January!) the general premise was that the new Noetica website would go live imminently. Then things happened…
In February, we issued a new release of Synthesys.NET (2.2). This was mainly a maintenance release, consolidating a lot of improvements to the back end of the system and adding a few cool features to the Interaction Studio (such as cut/copy/paste of entire screens and decision blocks), plus separating the supervisor/administrator function from the rest of the system through the brand new Management Studio module.
The main purpose of it though was to put the product on a more rigid versioning regime by slowing down (and possibly stopping altogether) the constant changes/hotfixes to the live version which was making support and maintenance a living nightmare.
The new version was installed and deployed at a couple of customer sites in March and we spent the rest of that month and most of April ironing out any teething problems that the new release brought up. Version 2.2 is now solid and available on general release for all old and new customers. The next release (Version 3.1) is scheduled for end of summer this year.
Anyway, the net result of all this (and the end of our financial year at the end of March) was that the new website deployment went on to the back burner and got delayed time and again until the beginning of May at which point we decided that we needed some new mug shots of the Noetica team so that everybody can see what we look like.
As it happens, it turned out that there is no end to the talent in the Brooks family. Not only is Steven our ever vigilant CFO, his brother Martyn is photographer to the stars and giving Mario Testino a serious run for his money (and he’s got loads of it…). You can see the results of his valiant efforts (he even managed, assisted by Mel’s antipodean humour, to get the grumpiest of us to smile) on the “About-> Our Team” part of the new website.
Anyway, after much prevarication the website went live towards the middle of May and so far the feedback has been pretty good. I know that there still are a few rough edges and that there is much product documentation missing, but Rome wasn’t built in a day…
If you find anything obviously wrong with it or if you have any suggestions on how we may be able to improve it, please drop me a direct email (Danny.Singer@noetica.com) and I will look into it. The big idea of the new site is that it is dynamic and it will change on an almost daily basis, so please come and visit regularly as there will always be something new to explore.
Next week, I will try to concentrate a bit more on the operational side of things as there are quite a few interesting stories to tell there. We are thrilled to have acquired quite a few new interesting customers over the last few months. But as I don’t want to try your patience, my only reader, I will stop here for now.
Until next time...
Danny
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