October 2009 Archives

Are contact center agents, which are still known as 'operators' in the answering service world going the way of elevator operators? For every contact center opening and expansion heralded there have been the understandably less trumpeted closures and cutbacks thanks to automation.

The automated trend is logical and seemingly inevitable. It costs less than $1 for a Web or IVR/speech-rec-handle transaction or outbound notification call versus $5 or more for that taken care or made by a live agent. While a home agent strategy can slice a guesstimated 50 to 75 cents or so from that sum and offshoring may chop that to say $4, with repeat and longer calls offsetting labor savings, they still do not effectively outbalance the savings from automatic tools.

The automated trend had been masked during the 'Ponzi boom' when companies added contact center staff and sites as demand and call volume bubbled. Yet these firms have also been slicing the rise with agentless solutions. Hiding the movement too have been downturn-driven call volumes resulting from financial and healthcare insurance worries, prompting these organizations to divert more calls into self-service and notifications.

Not surprisingly even live agent-designed contact center solutions are being aimed at and used to shrink headcount. For example presence/UC tools are being marketed to enable organizations tap idle 'available' counter and front desk staff to take calls, which avoids having separate agents and facilities to handle them.

There are many new self-service tools coming onto the market. One example is avatars which personalize and enable interactions with computers, which self service actually is. At the same time hosted offerings cut product capital costs and install times while permitting greater flexibility.

This trend most recently came to light at the tail end of a Globe and Mail article on Telus (full disclosure, I am a Telus wireless customer), which is one of Canada's largest communications firms on its plans to reduce wireless charges so it can remain competitive. An airwave auction in 2008 is letting more wireless carriers into the Canadian market.

"Two ways Telus plans to support [profit] margins is moving customers to electronic billing and bolstering its online customer support centre so that fewer subscribers need to contact a call centre, he [Joseph Natale, executive vice-president and president of consumer solutions at Telus] said."

Yes, there is no substitute for having individuals handle calls. One can argue that having them take care of customer care and purchases helps organizations stay competitive in today's and tomorrow's no-growth/slow-growth milieu. Yet with reliance on knowledge bases, tight scripting to comply with regulations, and a reluctance to empower and pay for agents who can think and act out of the software box, is there that much difference between live and automated service?

Telus has one of the sharpest contact center operations there is, employing speech rec and home agents. Its staff are well-trained and managed judging from the prompt excellent service I receive from them. If it can't justify keeping the level of live agents presently employed who can?

In today's environment price is equally if not more important as service. As long as the quality is liveable compared to similar offerings, most customers will put up with tolerable if not ideal care--if the sticker amounts match what they think the items are worth and can afford. The airlines, hardware/software firms, retailers, and yes communications including wireless firms have demonstrated proof of that. And if one or more firms can drive more customers to self-service and still maintain if not grow market share and profits others will quickly follow suit.

Does this mean that contact centers and staff will disappear? Not altogether. Only where there is a need for human intelligence, whose contacts can make or break customer relationships with benefits or losses that substantially outweigh the costs, then there will be, and the justification for, people to handle them.

How do environment and climate change issues impact business functions like contact centers? Easily and painfully. For if harmful substances are pumped and dumped into the environment: air, on the ground, and in the water your health and finances, that of your family, your employees and their families, and your customers will suffer.

These impacts also includes higher healthcare costs that shift spending away from other items (like yours), decreased productivity via absenteeism hikes and resulting increased staffing/training expenses, growing disaster risks, and losses.

Here is just one example of how environmental damage hits home. The Canadian Medical Association issued a groundbreaking report last year, No Breathing Room: National Illness Costs of Air Pollution which reports that by 2031 almost 90,000 people will have died from the acute effects of air pollution while some 710,000 will die due to long-term exposure to air pollution. The economic costs: healthcare expenses, loss of productivity and destruction of quality of life resulting from air pollution will have topped $8 billion in 2008. By 2031, they will have accumulated to over $250 billion.

To put that in American terms (Canada's population is 34 million compared with 305 million in the U.S.) the corresponding figures are approximately 720,000 deaths from acute air pollution, 5.7 million from long term exposure at costs of $64 billion in 2008 and $2 trillion by 2031. Who is going to pay the ultimate and financial prices? The same person that always does: the one in the mirror.

Even seemingly benign activities like building a house or an office or buying or leasing one that beautiful piece of land does serious and costly harm.

--The David Suzuki Foundation quantified per hectare/year losses: in erosion control, wildlife habitat, water quality from sprawl: from $12,000 for farmland to $30,000 for wetlands

--The Fiscal Cost of Sprawl: How Sprawl Contributes to Local Governments' Budget Woes by the Environment Colorado Research and Policy Center, Colorado State University, reports that $1 in revenues from sprawl is outweighed by $1.65 in additional service expenditures

That is why the environment, including climate change matters, even to contact centers and their owning or client customers. This isn't a 'free lunch', folks. Crap up our surroundings i.e. our nest, and we all foot the bill.

On climate change the consequences, reports a Wikipedia article, citing UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data, could include more extreme weather e.g. droughts, torrential rains, fewer but more intense storms that pose increase direct and indirect (such as transportation network blockages) disaster risks. Droughts, combined with snowpack retreats may mean water shortages that prompt stringent and expense conservation measures.

Other consequences are more insidious and longer-term, like the rise of sea levels that threaten to inundate coastal communities, reduced agricultural yields and other food chain disruptions, and more diseases. These impacts may be partially offset by milder winters and longer growing seasons in some parts of the world, such as in northern Canada.

The climate change impacts are being quantified, which also illustrates how much damage it is causing to each of us financially directly and indirectly. Says the Wikipedia entry: "The IPCC reports the aggregate net economic costs of damages from climate change globally (discounted to the specified year). In 2005, the average social cost of carbon from 100 peer-reviewed estimates is US$12 per [metric] tonne of CO2, but range -$3 to $95/tCO2.

The IPCC's gives these cost estimates with the caveats, "Aggregate estimates of costs mask significant differences in impacts across sectors, regions and populations and very likely underestimate damage costs because they cannot include many non-quantifiable impacts."

Naturally there are industries that would be harmed by crackdowns on environmental damage like the industries (and vehicle manufacturers) that have dragged their feet on emissions standards, developers who fight against measures to protect open space, and the coal and oil/gas producers on global warming and fouling land and water resources through blowing up mountains and tailing ponds.

And when companies' bottom lines are affected one of the first weapons that come out of their arsenal is junk science backed by misleading and expensive PR campaigns, a technique used for decades by the tobacco lobby and asbestos producers.

That profit-protecting disinformation has long been underway with climate change. As reported in the Green Tech blog, James Hoggan, a Canadian PR executive, has made that charge in his book "Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming" And if his book is to be believed it casts doubt on the validity of the arguments and the basis of them that such man-made destruction is not underway.

Hoggan cited in a story carried last week by Canwest News Service a recent letter-writing campaign, supposedly from various seniors and community organizations protesting the potential increase in energy costs from new U.S. climate-change legislation but which was funded by a coal industry association and managed by Bonner and Associates. A Congressional panel has launched an investigation after discovering the letters were not authentic.

"It's not even so much about climate change for me," said Hoggan, who chairs the desmogblog.com climate-change website. "It's more about the deception and the PR. It was just taken too far."

The industries that benefit i.e. the energy sector especially from sticking the bills to others are not going to suddenly change their ways to become good corporate citizens. They need stiff prodding by governments who need an overwhelming force of harmed citizens and employers to give them the backbone they need to deal with their lobbyists.

These companies also require users to become less so, hurting them where it really counts. Fortunately there are at the contact centers disposal a vast range of solutions to enable them to do just that. They include:

* Switching from premise-working to home-working, from onsite to hosted solutions powered from ultraefficient data centers that cuts energy demand, and environmental damage from transportation and power generation, and e-waste

* Using audio/data/video/web conferencing rather than travel, and cycling, walking, taking mass transit, buses, rail, and in coastal areas walk aboard ferries rather than driving and flying

* Making homes, must-need facilities and remaining offices energy-efficient

* Locating facilities (and homes) on transit routes, in existing buildings and brownfield sites rather than on sprawl developments

* Going paperless

* Switching to more efficient rail and marine from less efficient truck and air for freight

Environmental action is more than 'thinking globally/acting locally'. It is about acting in our true best interests.

I came across this excellent, insightful study of what I term 'cowardly callers' conducted by solutions firm Corizon and YouGov of abusive U.K. callers--the press release says " Contact Centre Rage: Corizon Survey Finds Scots, Men and the under-30s to Be the Worst Offenders" and it got me to thinking: has there been /can there be a similar study in the U.S. and Canada?

The closest that comes to mind was a great New York Times story 10 years ago 'When New York Is On The Line' that reports on how time-pressed/stressed out/cut-the-b.s. New Yorkers react to telemarketing and market survey calls. Anyone who lives/has lived in New York City knows the answer...the article reveals that one outfit gives staff 'danger pay' i.e. supplements when they dial New York numbers.

In fairness to callers, their frustration does have some basis, which also extends here. The Corizon/YouGov surveys "also revealed plenty of frustration with contact centre technology, at both ends of the telephone line. Levels of frustration are directly related to the number of software applications an agent needs to use which causes delays in answering customer queries.

"Nearly 75% of contact centre managers said their agents use an average of five different software applications in a typical working day, with one claiming to use as many as 18. Thirty percent said the problem of 'too many applications' had worsened recently. For their part, 83% of the consumers surveyed said their biggest frustration was long waiting times."

To ward off similar cowardly callers here how about these two sets of solutions and practices:

* Simplify the tools and cut the queues, including employing automated 'step out/step back in if need be' and callback options

* Empower agents to flick the nasties to IVR, deny them the zero-out options, and/or record, trace and sternly follow up with abusers by way of warning e-mails and letters. This method could prove amazingly effective if the abusing calls or e-mails came from the perps' workplaces or on their employer-provided (and monitored) landline or wireless devices

Here is the summary of the Corizon report on U.K.'s 'cowardly callers':

* Scots are the most likely to use inappropriate language (15%), followed by Londoners (12%)

* Welsh people are most likely to hang up on an agent (51%), followed by Easterners (49%)

* Midlanders and Southerners are most likely to hang up before speaking to an agent (61% each)

* Men are more likely than women to use inappropriate language (12% compared with 7%)

* Women are more likely than men to hang up before speaking to an agent (60% compared with 57%)

* 18-30 year-olds are the most likely age group to use inappropriate language

(Some regional pride here: nothing in these results at least indicts Northerners. My family is from Lancashire, in Britain's northwest. We are nice people, though our sense of humor is very black, which keeps up grinning no matter what b.s. we have to put up with. Then again it is our part of the world that was the first to be brutally industrialized (read George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier)

"We may react differently depending on our age, gender and where we live, but one thing's for sure - a great many of our interactions with contact centres are frustrating," said Emma Chablo, marketing director, Corizon. "Consumers might be interested to know that agents find lengthy calls just as annoying, and a lot of the problem is down to the technology they have at their disposal. There's no doubt about it: fewer software applications equal happier agents and happier - and more polite - customers."

My black journalist's heart loves contrarian stuff. And what is darker and more contrarian than this quite correct observation/report from Christopher Null's The Working Guy blog 'Why user reviews are worthless'.

This is one more IED in the social networking field that could blow customer service/marketing/ strategies up in enterprises' faces. It joins firms using social networking (including reviews) to plump their products and diss their competitors.

Mr. Null points out that consumer ratings on websites are next to useless (which doesn't help companies who rely on them to help gauge customer satisfaction), because people are kinder when they put their words to the world. He cited work by the Wall Street Journal that found the average rating for anything online, as judged by the teeming masses, is 4.3 stars out of 5. The goes contrary to the common viewpoint for the web being a cesspit of anonymous anger and hate.

"Why is everyone so effusive about, well, everything?, " he writes. " Chalk it up to human nature, says one marketing research firm, which debunks the myth that people are more likely to offer a negative opinion than a positive one. (The old rule of thumb was that you get 10 times the hate from an angry customer than you get in love from a happy one.) In fact, according to Keller Fay Group's research, 65 percent of word-of-mouth is positive and only 8 percent is negative, quite the opposite of the conventional wisdom.

"Why? As I see it, people have been taught since birth to be nice. You know the rule: If you don't have something good to say, don't say anything at all. It often takes years of toiling as a professional critic before you can really dig your teeth into something."

The same remarks go for social networks. Which are no different than in-person networking, and get togethers. After all, who wants to say something negative in front of others? You step outside for that for those wonderful, secluded, index-fingers-in-the-armpits/toes-just-barely-touching-the- ground kind of chit-chats.

Does this mean disregarding consumer reviews and social networks as means to get readings from customers? No. But you have to apply a modification of the 'bad-news-travels-10X the speed of good' theorem in that for every positive comment review 3X have the same warm and cuddly feeling...but for every negative review assume that 10X more people want to stuff the product, solution, or service back down the proprietors' throats or worse yet make them use it.

And you have to check the validity of such comments/reviews. Figure out what common language is being used to sniff for 'rent a commentators'. I told Donna Fluss of DMG Consulting when she suggested that contact centers should be managing social networking that to do this requires serious political acumen. I hinted that the average contact center person--unless they have political experience (and there are teleservices firms that specialize in political work--hello, this is an opportunity)--are out of their depth here.

Social networking is not a field of buttercups and daisies for marketers. No more than all candidates' and town hall meetings are teacup exchanges of viewpoints. This is warfare for the wallets, folks, and these are desperate times. Competitors will be happy to steer you into an IED-laden field. You therefore, like a sharp soldier, need to know where they are. The consequences of not being so aware, and how to respond for your company could be as dark if not darker as my reporter's soul.

When I was growing up we had a family friend who when she drove had the nerve-wracking habit of turning to you when she spoke. Fortunately this dear individual lived to early 90s.

I also grew up in an era where drunken driving was frowned upon but it was still not uncommon to get behind the wheel bombed out of your skull. My father once weaved 45 miles from an office party to our home. When my mother saw him stagger through the door I thought she was going to murder him. He lived--he's in his 80s now.

Unfortunately all too many people are not as lucky as our friend and my father. And that especially includes the victims: those riding with them and who were out on the road that day. Years later I made my living from these avoidable tragedies: as a newspaper reporter covering horrendous accidents, including one where a brandy bottle had been thrown clear of the scene into a snowbank. I also married a wonderful lady whose son is a paramedic...

It has taken years of a combination of education and tough laws to limit impaired driving, changing the culture from tolerance to disgust. Watch an episode of 'Mad Men' to see what I mean. With the vast increases in motor vehicle use since my youth I'd hate to see what the death tolls and injury stats would have been like if these measures weren't taken. How many more accidents I would had to make sense of for others. Or lives my son would have had to try and save.

So I ask this industry: when are you going to wise up and take a leadership role and get with it on ending driver distraction by technology i.e. to ban and punish harshly those who 'telecommunicate' (phone, text, video, etc.) when operating a motor vehicle? Like the Province of Ontario's new law (yes I used to be an Ontario resident and motorist with a clean driving record and I supported its legislation) that comes into effect Oct.26.

The province cited a Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study that examined a driver's risk of being involved in a "safety critical event" (a crash or near-crash) when using hand-held device. Researchers compared the performance of passenger car drivers and drivers of heavier vehicles such as transport trucks.

Key findings included:

* Dialing and texting is associated with the highest degree of risk of all cell-phone-related activities among car drivers -- increasing their risk of being in a safety critical event by 2.8 times than if they had been focused on the road. Among truck drivers, dialing a cell phone resulted in a 5.9 times greater risk, and text messaging resulted in a 23.2-times greater risk.

* Talking or listening had a lesser impact on car drivers, increasing a driver's risk by 1.3 times and had no impact on truck drivers.

* Reaching for a hand-held electronic device increases crash or near-crash risk among both types of drivers, increasing the risk by 1.4 times among car drivers and 6.7 times among truck drivers.

Nuance recently put out a press release that supports a ban on texting while calling for "In-Car Systems, Devices and Mobile Phones Powered by Speech Technology to Minimize Visual and Manual Driver Distractions " (I wonder which firm makes such technology...)

Nuance correctly points out that texting's "obvious distractions pose a serious danger to drivers, their passengers and others on the road. The practice of texting while driving takes drivers' eyes off the road and their hands off the wheel, which has lead to a number of highly-publicized accidents."

Yet "Nuance also advocates for a federal initiative that drives the increased deployment of these systems, enabling a safer mobile environment via hands-free interfaces requiring limited to no visual confirmation."

Nuance--and other tech firms who promote hands-free tools--miss the point. It is the inattention by sight, sound, and touch to driving the vehicle (like our family friend) that can (and does) kill and injure, not this or that solution. Like the guy who was on his precious device who then ended up in a multivehicle fatality on a recent episode of 'Trauma'.

An opinion piece by journalist John Lorinc that appeared in Canada's Globe and Mail Monday Oct.5 made this point. It contrasted the denial of the tech industry to that of the liquor business. The former is in denial. The latter has, to use its advice 'behaved responsibly'.

"But in the country that invented the BlackBerry, such attention raises a question about corporate responsibility: What is Canada's wireless sector - and leading firms, including Research in Motion, Rogers and Bell - doing to educate its customers about the risks?

"Answer: as little as possible.

"By comparison to the liquor industry's highly visible public education campaigns about the hazards of drunk driving (TV, radio, billboards, print, Internet), the smart-phone sector is disturbingly uncommunicative about the skeletons in its closet."

There is no excuse for 'telecommunicating'. It is risky, dangerous, and deadly. The only device is one that should be allowed or on is a message alert in the form of a flashing indicator (which goes off after five seconds) that is at the peripheral field of vision.

Moreover the injuries and deaths from 'telecommunicating' adds to healthcare and emergency services costs. At a time when the U.S. in particular is focused on health expenses, does it make sense not to crack down on this practice--which, like drunk driving--only increases them? Those of us who make and have made our living in blood and guts sincerely want to see less of them.

For unless you are a professional driver, with a commercial license (and insurance) and using communications device for work and/or you're in a in a life-and-death job (fire/police/first responder, M.D. etc.) on a call, you have no real good reason to drive and communicate at the same time. There is nothing that you do that is so important to the existence of others and to the grand scheme of things that it can't wait for you to pull over to chit-chat when not doing so could have tragic consequences.

Like speeding. When I'm driving at the normal (safe/legal) rate of flow and some moron flashes their lights behind me and I don't see a flashing light on top or on their dashboard my attitude is that they can get lost...and I love it when they get pulled over by the flashing lights.

What Nuance and other tech firms should be doing instead is to take a leadership position in educating the public and pressing for tough and readily enforced regs against distracted driving, and be in it for the long haul. What each of you who are reading this should do is pull over when called or to make a call or contact.

For the hard reality is that very few of you have the skills to do both. And when you combine that with weather, rough road surfaces, and the other idiots that are out there the odds increase astronomically

Do you really want to be the next person to kill and hurt others or be killed or hurt yourself?

One last note--there is no sound like the thump of a human being hit by a vehicle. No sight like watching someone--and their child--bleed to death on the asphalt. No feeling as helpless as not being able to do anything more than what you have already done.

Do you want to be the cause of this because you were on your wireless device?