Brendan Read
TMC
November 2009
You are browsing the archive for November 2009.
May Nortel Execs' Stockings Be Laden With Coal
November 30, 2009While Americans were stuffing themselves with turkey, the turkeys that are brooding over the maggot-infested remains of Canadian-HQ'ed Nortel have decided to munch on what meat is left.
Canada's CBC reported Thursday that Nortel's management approved a plan earlier this fall to reward themselves with salary increases, investments or bonuses. An internal document obtained by the broadcaster outlines a new compensation scheme for 72 Nortel executives that will see them get a total of $7.5 million on top of their current salaries in 2009.
Of those 72, 14 will be getting compensation of $500,000 or more. The fattest feaster is former treasurer John Doolittle, who took over from its last CEO Mike Zafirovski. Doolittle's total compensation has been bumped to $1.68 million this year, an increase of 1.12 million over 2008, when he earned $390,000 in salary and an estimated $170,000 in investment and bonus money.
This greedy self-serving, yet not surprising move given Nortel's record of incompetent, questionably ethical governance--one whose carelessness, shortsightedness and stupidity is matched only by its board who failed in its duties to properly oversee this outfit--comes out at a time when those that actually did their jobs well--its pensioners and long-term unemployed--are being denied what is rightfully theirs.
Who Needs Telemarketers? Pay People To Tweet and Post Instead
November 23, 2009
Here's a budding new and potentially more profitable and much less costly option to those hated (and in turn heavily regulated) cold-call telemarketing calls: paying people to pitch goodies via their social networks i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc.
A story published in the Nov.21 New York Times reports that Amazon.com will start "paying commissions to individuals who refer buyers to the site via Twitter messages. (People must first sign up for Amazon Associates, a program in which Amazon pays Web publishers for referrals to its site.)".
But the bigger opportunity, it says "may be in matching advertisers with so-called influencers -- the more popular users of services like Twitter."
The Times story opens with how Vancouver, B.C., Canada blogger and Web entrepreneur John Chow earned $200 by telling his 50,000 Twitter followers, amidst a discussion of his city's typically wet, miserable weather where they could purchase M&Ms with customized faces, messages and colors.
Want To Make Money? Shape Up Your Voice Self-Service
November 18, 2009OK contact center managers and execs, here's a winner of a tip to make money and not leave it on the table: clean up your automated voice a.k.a. IVR self-service and quit treating it as the back of the bus for all those 80 percent of non-elite customers who generate the 20 percent of revenues.
Because if you don't you're going to lose that 20 percent who can easily go elsewhere. And they may not come back when they do qualify to speak promptly to a live agent.
Make Customers Smile? Give Them Low Priced Half-Decent Products
November 13, 2009Image via Wikipedia
A Nov.11 Los Angeles Times column by David Lazarus makes more kicks at the commonly stated (if not truly believed, and for good reason) assumption of organizations, their contact centers, and their suppliers that customers really give a rat's hindquarters about customer service especially in this tough economy.
In the piece, titled 'The sad illusion of happy customers' Mr. Lazarus takes a sharp look at electronics retailer Best Buy's new nationwide marketing campaign 'They'll be happy, you'll be happy, we'll be happy.'
"What they're saying is that the company will bend over backward to help you shop for gifts this holiday season and will do whatever it takes to ensure that gift recipients are pleased with what they get. This, in turn, will warm the hearts of Best Buy shareholders.
"Happy customers is a long-term strategy for us," Best Buy's chief marketing officer, Barry Judge, told me. "If they're happy, they'll want to buy more."
"That's the idea anyway.
Lest We Forget...
November 11, 2009Take a moment today, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, to think about and honor those who sacrificed, and who are willing to sacrifice their lives for our freedoms, for our nations.
The most moving words that have written about those who fought and died in war, and who continue to do so is arguably the poem 'In Flanders Fields'. It was written, reports Wikipedia by a Canadian military physician, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae on May 3, 1915 during the infamous 'War to End All Wars' i.e. the First World War, after he had watched his friend, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, only 22 years old, die in battle the day before in Belgium.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead.
Automation Dooming Indian Outsourced Contact Center Jobs?
November 9, 2009
About a dozen years ago I heard a comment ascribed to a longtime CEO of a leading global teleservices firm who reputedly said: "I don't care where in the world you go, self-service will always be cheaper."
Well thanks to technologies such as electronic order entry, improved IVR, speech recognition but more importantly web self-service and more recently outbound notifications there is a growing realization that automation could doom many jobs, such as in contact centers, even in India, long the land of low-cost offshore outsourcing.
A blog entry that appeared in the New York Times last week by Vikas Bajaj says that India too is worried about where the jobs will come from in future (thanks Rich for the tip)
S. Gopalakrishnan, the chief executive of Infosys, told the Times blogger that "he worried that over the next 20 years to 30 years, smarter computers and increased automation could do away with many of the back-office jobs that companies have moved to his country to take advantage of lower labor costs and greater economies of scale.
"He recalled the example of an outsourcing deal his company took on to enter orders into an electronic system for a customer. When the contract started, Infosys put 300 people on the job, but after a short while it dropped that to just 100 people, even though the workers were processing more orders, faster and more efficiently.
"What happened? I asked.
"He said that a greater percentage of the orders were now being submitted electronically by the customer's customers. In other cases previously separate computer systems were connected to each other, so more orders were flowing electronically with no human intervention.
Why Treat Contact Center (and Other Service) Employees Well In Tough Times
November 3, 2009Ask anyone who works in the service sector: contact centers, hospitality, retail, and transportation especially, the one thing besides lousy supervisors and managers that drives them up the wall and that is wild scheduling--days, times, even locations worked changed on a moment's notice--resulting in fewer hours and less income.
Too often employees apply for and are hired for jobs that employers tell them will pay X for a given number of hours: 20-30-40/week. What happens though is that many of these 'hours' become 'on call' i.e. they have to be 'Janey or Jimmy on the spot' but they don't get paid.
These practices, often undertaken (you guessed it, by incompetent supervisors and managers) wreak havoc on workers' lives, especially in today's tough economy where both pay, and the money for job-related clothing and transportation, and for child care expenses are tight.
