Check Danny Singer's view of the Call Centre industry and his opinion of many political and economic developments that affect today's Executives' lives. Easy to read, with a good share of British humor, it makes professional reading an enjoyable part of your day. Managing Director of Noetica, Danny is a veteran of the UK Call Centre industry. Your feedback is highly appreciated! http://www.noetica.com/dannys_blog.htm http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss en-gb Thu, 4 Feb 2010 17:11:49 +0000 Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:28:50 +0000 FeedForAll v2.0 (2.0.2.9) http://www.feedforall.com 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 When PAM went freelance, she really ceased to be PAM (as in Personal Account Manager) and has been replaced by her more intrepid cousin, INGA (the Independently Networked General Assistant).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. http://www.noetica.com/dannys_blog.htm#Saga 3A2CED1C-7CE0-4437-A84E-836FC7E00D9D Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:28:50 +0000 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. http://www.noetica.com/dannys_blog.htm#PAM 1FE14032-BC8B-4C3D-B236-FED765538E25 Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:27:36 +0000 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. http://www.noetica.com/dannys_blog.htm#HomeMade 419BAFFE-AAA3-4516-A867-03EAD68E564E Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:46:20 +0100 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. http://www.noetica.com/dannys_blog.htm#PeoplePower 7F942187-2494-4EFE-B104-E1C87D99313F Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:45:14 +0100 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. http://www.noetica.com/dannys_blog.htm#machine 28416621-5E2B-4EE4-8EA1-896BAC49D3F0 Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:44:15 +0100