April 2009 Archives

The other day I came across a contact center expansion story where the employer, whose name will not be revealed to save them from the embarrassment of being singled out, preferred to have applicants for its contact center agent positions to have college degrees.

My jaw dropped. A two-or four-year degree just to answer and make calls and handle chats and e-mails in a contact center? Is this overkill or what?

Then again, given too many reports about how poor the American--and to a lesser extent the Canadian--public education system is, such employers may sadly be onto something.

Yes, that company, and others who look for college educations in their applicants can get away with that in today's downturn. Yet is that a wise move? Is that not setting up such contact centers for another round of escalating turnover, higher costs, and pressure to move the work once again to offshore and more into self-service?

Once the economy turns around and higher paid openings that more closely match the responsibilities and room to grow with applicants' education, training, and aspirations college-educated individuals will be out contact centers' doors faster than one can type 'job board'. So will many others who took jobs in contact centers as a last resort.

As essential as contact center work is the tasks at hand is not exactly rocket science. All these positions require for the most part is a reasonable level of comprehension, reading, writing, and speaking. That goes for today's demanding multichannel environments where agents must juggle calls, chats, and e-mails and SMSes from customers who have in many cases have gone through the Web and IVR/speech rec self-service and want answers now.

Only when the responsibilities are highly specialized and where there are some serious consequences if there are errors made are formal qualifications: certifications, licenses, and degrees needed. In these ranks are engineering, Level 3 support, insurance, securities, and telemedicine.

And it isn't that working in a contact center is the first step to an exciting career that may require higher education or other qualifications to prepare themselves for. The opportunities for advancement into management or to other positions are extremely limited. Not with high agent to supervisor ratios, no lateral career paths into other fields, like accounting or sales, and with centers' physical locations offsite and far removed from regional and central headquarters.

That's one of the reasons why contact center employment is not exactly seen by many people as desirable, and why other service work: hospitality and retail in particular, draw the more go-getting individuals. One can--and one is encouraged in these other industries--to start at the bottom and work their way to the top, learning every aspect of that business and have an appreciation when they are in management of the individuals below them. In contact centers in contrast one starts and with few exceptions stays at the bottom.

At the same time the college degree 'preferred' or 'required' stipulation in employment postings is too often lazy HR. It is much easier, faster, and less expensive to wordspot 'college' and dump those applications and applicants that don't have that term than to actually read, review, and analyze what these individuals have to offer.

Unfortunately the HR departments may be right in seeking some college education or degrees. I have talked to many people in the contact center business over the past 14 years and the general consensus is that too many of the applicants who walk into contact centers out of high school cannot cut it on the call floor both in basic skills and work ethic. That basically they have wasted their years, and huge sums of taxpayers' dollars in glorified babysitting services that has ill-prepared them for the real world.

It is not that long ago when a high school education counted for something. That even finishing junior high i.e. Grade 8 enabled the aptitudes and gave one the tools to make a decent living. Is the work world that complex to demand 4 to 8 years of additional schooling for individuals to be at the same level as their parents and grandparents were? So much for technology and communications...

A poor educational system has serious consequences for contact centers. More firms want to keep and/or bring back their work onshore. Yet how can they justify this if the quality they get, especially when the economy rebounds and the college types leave, is mediocre to terrible?

The public education system is too far gone for anything to be done with it. The self-interested parties: teachers, unions, and bureaucracies nothing to be gained and everything to lose from meaningful reform. They have cemented themselves in their unassailable ivory towers.

There are two options for contact centers: making sure that they locate their sites where there are good high schools whose graduates are not all college-bound, and, more likely, tearing down the bricks-and-mortar and going home-based. The latter is far more doable and likely than the former.

Study after study continue to demonstrate that home agents are the ideal contact center workforce because they have higher skills, better work ethic (they tend to be ages 40+), are more productive, and are not career minded. Because they know a little bit of the world unlike the fresh-out-of-college 20-somethings they can easily answer sales objections and solve problems. And they don't need the constant supervision nor require workplace socialization. They know how to work and have their own lives outside of work.

When the economy recovers there will be demand growth for contact center services, not as big or widespread as that in what can be accurately termed as the 'Ponzi Bubble' but sufficient to require more and high quality agents. Going home meets these needs without worrying about finding and housing these employees, while saving money on facilities costs and turnover expenses, thereby freeing up resources to create products and services that people and businesses want to buy. Items that customers will need agents to help them.

Telemarketing is rarely in the news these days, and that's a good thing. The advent and acceptance of Do Not Call (DNC) and predictive dialer abandonment regulations in the U.S. and Canada appear to have had the intended effects. That is they have lowered--but not eliminated--annoying calls that had turned off more customers and had prompted them to spend their money elsewhere that they had attracted and revenue generated.

In doing so the DNC legislation also saved the telemarketing industry and the jobs it creates. So ticked off were lawmakers who were being bombarded with consumer complaints that they didn't care about the risk of employment losses. And that's unusual for politicians.

Tom Cardella, founder of Thomas M. Cardella Associates, and one of the teleservices industry's leading lights, called it right in a recent article on TMCnet:

"There has been much hand-wringing about the effects of the national Do Not Call list. It has been blamed by some as the cause of huge job losses in the teleservices industry."
 
"I don't agree. Those jobs would have been gone anyway because consumers were getting annoyed with unwanted calls and were hanging up, not answering, and otherwise not buying, which was making outbound teleservices more costly and less profitable."

Concerns about annoying telemarketing calls appear to have been superseded by more pressing worries: like keeping jobs including in teleservices, hence the interest in preventing more them from going offshore and bringing those back that have left.

That does not mean that telemarketing is finally free of hassles, and resulting attention of lawmakers. Because there continues to be other aggravating and costly-to-consumer telemarketing practices which are on their radar screens. Once the big targets of the economy and employment have been knocked off it is a safe bet that they will turn their sights to these issues such as:

1. Random calling and DNC list abuse. Fraudsters and greedy, irresponsible if lawful businesses are or are paying teleservices companies to make random calls even to individuals who put their names on DNC lists. Some have used the DNC lists to make calls

2. Continuing stupid telemarketing/outbound practices. High on the list: not having their names show up and 'Number Unavailables' on called parties' Caller ID

Yes, stupid. Many consumers use Caller ID to screen calls. If they don't know who the caller is they don't answer. And consumers are getting ticked off at the dumb firms who don't let them know who they are. Many would no doubt love to see those practices banned or deploy a ready tech fix that blocks all unidentified calls with the option of programming from phones or computers lists of acceptable numbers.

3. Calling to wireless numbers. Prohibited except for emergencies and or if there is prior express consent, this issue is much more problematic as more people are using, forwarding calls to, and increasingly ripping out their landlines (like the infamous definitely don't-do this-at home T-Mobile ad with the woman chainsawing telephone [actually 3-phase power, no phone lines] poles) for wireless.

The FCC is looking at, in response to a petition filed by Paul D.S. Edwards, whether creditors can place autodialed or prerecorded message calls to a telephone number associated with wireless service that was provided to the creditor initially as a telephone number associated with landlines.

It will be interesting to see how the FCC rules on this issue. Requiring express consent for all wireless calls including ported will accelerate wireless adoption--and be a boon to cell firms.

Yet regulators are usually loath to let rules stand in the way of legitimate activity such as collecting debts, and to let those who have such obligations to hide behind regulatory language to avoid meeting them.

There is also the issue of fairness to businesses who in good faith call landlines only to have the transmissions answered on cellphones.

Does the FCC open the gates to wireless users, who pay for their inbound calls, to receive many more calls on their devices at their expense by providing such 'safe harbors' for creditors and others e.g. telemarketers making lawful calls via autodialers?

Or does it decide to go beyond the Do Not Call list and make all outbound calls opt-in with express consent because such calls, wanted, undesired but lawful and proper i.e. collections, and unwanted cost consumers money?

Steve Brubaker, senior vice president, corporate affairs of InfoCision, a leading teleservices firm, pointed out in a recent blog and had informed the FCC that "it is ludicrous to think that a consumer would want to abolish all existing business relationship pertaining to a phone number just because he or she moved the number from their home phone to their cell phone.  Think about it... if the petition goes through, then every consumer that wants to retain its existing business relationships, and allow those companies to call it using that same phone number would have to contact those companies to give them express consent to do so.  What a waste of consumers' time!

"And we're not just talking about collection and solicitation calls, but also notifications of credit card fraud, interruptions in telecommunication service, and many other issues of which the consumer typically wants to be notified. 

"In addition, the detailed lists that teleservices companies like InfoCision have painstakingly built over time would be rendered useless, unless we contacted each of the consumers on the lists by some other method to reestablish consent to be contacted by their recently ported cell phone number.  It would be nearly impossible and terribly expensive to undertake such a task."

There has been a powerful call for industry self-regulation to handle issues such as these. It can and has been argued that had there been an effective self-regulatory regime 10-15 years ago the present DNC and other rules could have been avoided.

The advocates of this viewpoint are correct in one sense: developing best practices standards, educating the industry on them, and backing them with penalties such as expulsion from trade organizations that adopt these standards can and will reduce violations. There has been excellent work in this area by the American Teleservices Association through its SRO (Self-Regulatory Organization) and by the Canadian Marketing Association (CMA).

There is certainly a need to get and keep the legitimate players on their toes. Witness the recent regulatory actions involving certain cable and satellite entertainment firms, whose names need not be repeated here.

The CMA has one of the most stringent set of telemarketing best practices/self-regulation there is. The CMA, unlike its U.S. counterparts, has taken a smarter, more politically astute approach to regulations. Instead of confrontation and foot dragging it took an accurate reading of the situation and chose to work with elected officials and departments. It got what it wanted including the canning of a proposal to include B2B in Canada's DNCL.

Yet not even the CMA was able to forestall regulations or prevent ongoing telemarketing problems. That's because of the biggest weakness of self-regulation in this industry which is the lack of barriers to entry. Anyone can set up a telemarketing business and many do, and they don't have to join a trade organization and many don't. Their clientele could care less, especially those that don't mind them working the gray areas in boosting results.

The CMA has shown one way forward and that is to create or set the basis for doable legislation. Most of the CMA's best practices, including calling hours got adopted into Canada's revamped telemarketing laws.

In doing so the CMA has followed the route of many other organizations in creating consensus rules and standards that have become accepted and enforceable regulations. For example the offices that we work in have been wired in accordance with legally mandated electrical codes and government workplace safety regulations that have their origin in private consensus standards such as ANSI in the U.S. and the CSA in Canada.

To ensure that the next set of regulations that will be coming down the pipeline from legislators are fair and effective the telemarketing industry needs to devise some solutions of their own, use their self-regulatory mechanisms to test them and build consensus and at the same time sit down with lawmakers to go over these issues. That the industry is already taking proactive steps to come up with answers that could offer them guidance acknowledges the pain the lawmakers are getting from their constituents, which gets them onside.

In that fashion, by working together the industry and government will have a fair set of future rules that address needs which everyone can live with.

UPDATE:

The Canadian government has introduced Bill C-27, Electronic Commerce Protection Act (ECPA) designed to deter spam but which also repeals the Canadian Do Not Call List, which has been criticized by privacy advocates for not doing enough to stop unwanted phone calls.

One important difference that could shape telemarketing as the legislation winds itself through Parliament: the ECPA is opt-in wheras DNCL is opt-out, as pointed out in Michael Geist's article in today's Toronto Star. I wouldn't be surprise to see telemarketing made opt-in to get rid of both the DNCL and the issue of reaching cellphones.

One more company, this time Primus Telecommunications Canada is repatriating its customer care from an unnamed outsourcer in India back home.

The company announced Tuesday that it will no longer have any of their customer service or technical support calls handled by offshore agents. This is in addition to the exclusive Canadian-based customer care that Primus' Wireless and TalkBroadband VoIP customers have received for some time.

In turn and to handle these calls Primus is expanding its Edmundston, New Brunswick contact center creating 113 new jobs, adding to over 200 employees currently in place. The provincial government will provide Primus Telecommunications Canada with a forgivable loan of $7,500 for each of the new positions.

"Every company with customer service operations that are partly outsourced, has heard some complaints from customers, for a variety of reasons, with respect to dealing with customer service representatives located overseas," says Rob Warden, VP Residential Marketing for Primus Canada. "Our customers have told us they prefer to deal with Canadian representatives and we're responding to their feedback.  While we hold all our representatives - wherever they are located - to a high standard, we have also come to believe that the best way to serve our customers is to locate as much of our customer service operation as possible in this country.

"We are also delighted to be able to play a part in local job creation during these challenging economic times."

There is irony in this news. New Brunswick, and Ireland, helped begin the move to nearshore/offshore contact center operations from the U.S. and other countries like the U.K. by offering their communities as berths with plenty of willing, able, educated, and low-cost labor. Both Ireland and New Brunswick are essentially rural, have many workers but too few opportunities; their best and brightest were being lured elsewhere to Britain and to Ontario respectively.

Former provincial premier (and later ambassador to the U.S.) Frank McKenna had seen what Ireland had done in attracting contact centers and followed suit, attracting outsourcers but also in-house customer service and sales. Other provinces saw what New Brunswick had accomplished and began seeking contact centers as well.

Unfortunately, New Brunswick, and by extension much of Canada (and other countries) that sought out contact centers had missed the lesson of Ireland, and that is to aggressively capitalize on contact centers as gateways to higher-value/higher-paid IT jobs. This is a lesson that India, despite being suffocated by decades of stifling neosocialist rule coupled with a notoriously slow bureaucracy has learned well.

Ireland and India, despite being battered by the downturn, have therefore moved on to become tech hubs in their own right. That is why there has been no major hand-wringing in India and in Ireland at the loss of contact center jobs as they have moved on.

Unfortunately, Canadian provinces like New Brunswick, and Canada has a whole have not taken advantage of the unique opening that nearshore contact centers had given them to make their economies more higher-valued through a stronger IT focus.

Canada failed to move on the very low Canadian dollar relative to the U.S. currency 7-8 years ago (it was at one time 1/3rd less than the American dollar) to draw and lock in higher-valued, more stable, and less easily moved IT investments. It did not strongly promote the country in coordination with other provinces especially in comparison to other nations including Australia, France, and the U.K. There have been no coordinated educational/economic strategies.

As a result New Brunswick, rural/northern Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador, and interior/mid-north coastal British Columbia especially have remained mired as technology backwaters at a time when the forestry and mining industries that they have depended on have taken a beating and may never come back.

And unfortunately that is typical of Canada, a nation that despite the prowess if mixed of companies like Bell, Corel, Mitel, Nortel, RIM, Rogers, and Telus, can never seem to get beyond being a branch plant 'hewers of wood and drawers of water', with a cautious, decidedly unentrepreneurial culture. One that prefers that others take the risks and live on the residuals, seeking instead the safer investments of finance, real estate, resources (other than oil/gas--too risky), transportation, and utilities.

Ireland and India have taken in contrast the nothing-to-lose mentality. Irish and Indian entrepreneurs are hungry and will do what it takes. I've lost count how many offers I've had for trips to India; I could have ended up living there (if I had been covering this field earlier I would have been in Ireland--I have a maroon EU passport via my British citizenship and my roots are in Eire with a name to match).

Canada's culture won't change. The country, even in the current downturn, is still too comfortable. The one upside of its cautious approach is that its domestic markets haven't tanked to the same extreme as that in the U.S., leaving it with a still troubling but more secure financial and real estate sectors.

There is a tide against nearshoring and offshoring, but there are shoals for nations that offer strong and unique contact center value propositions: in education, skillsets, and languages, such as Egypt, Guatemala, Honduras, and, if/when there is lasting stability, Sri Lanka. Other countries with smart, educated workforces such as Kenya and South Africa are posed to jump more into the IT/higher end BPO space directly.

These nations should look at Ireland and India, and at Canada when formulating their economic development strategies, adopting and adapting from the first group and avoiding the errors of the latter.

One of the highest 'time/ROI' communications products TMC has is our Webinars. I've moderated quite a few of them over the past year.

From my behind the scenes seat, preparing and giving the intros, working with the presenters and equally if not more importantly fielding the questions from the attendees/participants I've found every one worth while.

The topics and discussions have led to more than one article and have enriched many others. Some of the subjects covered are still generating heat and interest many months later.

Here are three Webinars coming up over the next two weeks that promises to be in this league: in timely information, knowledge, and insight:

* Selling in Tough Times: Increasing Your Sales Productivity, Not Costs (April 22, 2pm ET). Presenter: Martin Schneider, Director of Product Marketing, SugarCRM

This event focuses on doing more with less, and on how new Web-based solutions written to commercial open source software can help firms do just that. The applications discussed identify leads, segment customer bases for targeted marketing, and use Web 2.0 technologies to leverage more data and build customer relationships.

* E-LOAN's $2M Annual Payback with Speech Analytics (April 23, 1pm ET). Presenter: Michael Miller, VP Customer Care, E-LOAN

This webinar, sponsored by Utopy, is an instructive case study of how E-LOAN, a subsidiary of Banco Popular NA, has seen a 41 percent improvement in sales conversion and a $2M increase in incremental revenue annually by applying speech analytics. E-LOAN used this tool to identify the contributing factors to successful sales conversions and determine the skills that differentiate the top from the bottom performers and to fine-tune the sales process and the training program. The financial services firm also used it to coach and measure the effectiveness of the training on agent performance and to recruit and evaluate new agents.

* 5 Ways To Stop The Flow Of Money Out Of Your Contact Center (April 28, 2pm ET). Presenters: Elizabeth Herrell, Forrester Analyst and Steve Pollock, TuVox Founder

This webinar will provide timely tips on helping contact centers cope with customers calling while both revenues and budgets are down, putting them in a squeeze. The event will explore ways to dramatically reduce service costs without compromising quality and how next-generation IVR has changed the way customers are engaged. It will also examine new market research and customer service techniques.

Check and clear your schedules and register today!

Whenever there is a downturn either within the economy and/or within an enterprise the first people to be let go, hours reduced, and/or wages/salaries hacked are almost invariably those who produce the goods and services that enable the firm, and the economy to be in business.

Only when enough of that blood--and usually too much of that for the organization's and the economy's own good-- has been allowed to gush out only then are the supervisors and managers led to the chopping block. These are the ones who don't generate directly the goods and services.

The first supervisors/management to go are usually the ones that know what they are doing. The others: the cube/office spaceholders who have risen to and roil around in the Peter Principle's 'level of incompetence' and who often stay to the end: making sure they suck every cc of blood from their host they can before they crawl off to infest another body.

The hard reality is that in many organizations is that there too many managers who drive performance down because they make lousy decisions and who waste scarce resources. These personnel lack the abilities for their jobs. What typically happens is that they get hired or recommended because they were good at their production tasks: which has nothing to do with how they will perform in supervisory rules. That sets up the "vortex of incompetence": bad longer-time managers bring on board underperforming newbies--they would never approve someone who is equal to or who outperforms them--who when they get promoted selects the next generation of nincompoops.

The one thing poor managers are good as is self-preservation, in blamedeflecting and denials, kissing the right people and their body parts, and in making themselves look good. They act like viruses fighting off T-cells as they infect and debilitate the rest of their host organizations.

Contact centers are an excellent illustration of management incompetence at (dis)work. The number one cause of high staff attrition, escalating costs, and terrible performance are poor supervisors and managers. Individuals who should never been hired or promoted in those jobs in the first place.

No wonder why contact center agents bolt at the first opportunity they can to work from home. At least they don't have to see or smell them around their hairlines or what remains of them.

And one wonders why too many firms, and government departments, are poorly run and deliver lousy ROI. Why they are slow on the uptake when it comes to adopting new methods and solutions that could benefit them.

Like teleworking. The methods, technology, and ROI are there. Instead the biggest obstacles are the manager and management who think they need to 'see' their people and breathe down their necks at no notice to be assured that they are working: despite having tools like IM, e-mail, QM, and performance measurements at their disposal.

What firms and departments commonly do not understand is that managing is not a skill that can be learned, like how to write an e-mail or use a new application. It is instead a talent, namely leadership that only a very small subset of the population has.

You can't teach someone to be a leader. They either have it or they don't. Leadership training for someone who lacks it is equivalent of teaching computer programming to someone who has never used a computer and who has no skills in logic.

Herein is a prescription to help companies and the economy pull out of the downturn: take a hard look how they are managed and who is managing them.

* Deploy management-by-performance, to objective realizable standards rather by some arbitrary manager-to-worker or other ratios. Set goals and expect your staff to meet them. Bring management-by-performance to the HR level by hiring and keeping only those experienced either internally or brought from outside staff who are independent motivated self-starters who are also team players (think sports like basketball and hockey with stars).

With management-by-performance you can slice your administrative overhead (i.e. lay off managers and cobweb their offices and cubes) while boosting output. Home-based contact center agents are an excellent illustration of this. Firms that deploy them can achieve agent to supervisor ratios as high as 22:1 as opposed to 12:1 or as low as 8:1. Why? Because to work from home successfully you must be independent, self-motivated, and know how to meet objectives.

* Develop and implement proven effective management screening including assessing for leadership. Leadership need not be equated with career experience. Look for, for example whether they have coached a team, led a choir, or organized a fundraiser. You can also source e-screening simulations that sift for leadership talents. Once you have your cadre--chances are that it will be much smaller than before--then provide them with training that enhances what they have, like conflict resolution.

Then evaluate the existing management stock, mark for elimination those that do not make the cut, and give them a choice of returning to the line work that they had started from or lay them off in a downsizing or restructuring--such as when implementing management by performance.

* Minimize the expensive perqs that also draws poor managers like five-day-old fruit to flies. Mothball or sell to condo developers the ego-baths known as Class A offices. Keep a nice but small showcase office space if you need this for investors and customers, though the smart ones will appreciate not wasting their money. Limit your buildings for manufacturing, R&D, and shipping/receiving, and telework or put in smaller, less fancy space the rest of your functions. The true corporate status symbol is no longer the corner office but the home office. Managers who cannot see you, and you cannot see them, but they know where you are and what they are doing are more effective than those who are visible like the spectre that is there and present.

By taking this harsh medicine now organizations, perhaps like yours, will have a great likelihood of getting better, and so will the economy.