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OK 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.

Don't believe me? Then check out this new report from Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, The Cost of Poor Customer Service. It estimates that lousy treatment of those who put money in the hands of businesses ding the U.S. economy to the tune of $83 billion. Where is this coming from? 71 percent of consumers have ended a relationship due to a poor customer service experience.

What is the impact to enterprises? How about an average value of $289 in one year of each customer relationship lost to a competitor or abandoned. Add those up and we're talking serious money.

So why do customers leave? The Genesys reports points to having them repeat themselves, being trapped in automated self-service, forced to wait too long for service, contact centers that don't their history and value and an ability to switch channels easily.

Which is the most problematic channel? You got it. Automated voice self-service, where 33 percent of respondents cited it as the most challenging mode. Moreover 38 percent said "it is critical to improve voice self-service to make it more intelligently integrated with human assisted service."

One reason is the nightmares of busy consumers trying to get out of automated Hades to reach live agents. The Genesys report revealed that spent more than 9.5 minutes trying to reach a person.

"As a result, even paper mail is preferred to poorly implemented voice self-service," says the paper. "Consumers say the biggest issues are that voice self-service does not recognize the value of the consumer, lacks context, and needs to recognize customer needs and intent better. Another consumer said: "I don't mind automated systems but...I hate it when I am unable to reach a human, and the automated voice continues to make me repeat over and over, and when I finally get close to being connected to a human, I am disconnected and have to start over again."

In contrast while not surprisingly most people are happy with live agents, more were satisfied with Web self-service than not. If anything they were neutral.

So what gives, folks? Why can't you make automated voice self-service as pleasing or at best not as offensive as web self-service?

The solutions are there. They include 'trimming the menu trees' and making it easy for customers to zero out: throwing obstacles in their way is only going to make them consider tossing your business into the recycle bin so don't be stupid. They also include going to user-friendly speech rec. Microsoft has an increasingly sophisticated and affordable array of premises-installed and hosted (via its Tellme subsidiary) speech products.

So what are you waiting for? Your competitors to take the money off your table?

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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. But after visiting a couple of Best Buy stores and chatting with customers, I'd say the company still has some work to do on the happiness front.

"The trade-off is that you get the selection and square footage, but you have to hunt to find someone to help you," said Glendale resident Howard Erickson after buying a mini-fridge at the Best Buy in Los Feliz.

So how'd he do?

"I had to hunt to find someone to help me."

"I had a similar experience in the computer section until I finally spotted a salesguy and asked if he could show me a computer for under $500. He steered me toward a Hewlett-Packard model. I asked if there was anything else. The salesguy pointed me toward a Dell model for about the same price. I asked which was better.

"I don't know," the salesguy replied. "I guess they're about the same."

"Not that I'm picking on Best Buy, even though this week's TV and print ads all but dare consumers to judge the company by the quality of their shopping experience.

Customer support, says Mr. Lazarus" makes you feel like an uninvited dinner guest. A general indifference among employees as to whether you'll ever shop there again. Sometimes it feels like companies are determined to chase us away, rather than do everything in their power -- especially at times like these -- to build customer loyalty."

"Customer satisfaction has always been a major concern for most companies," Lars Perner, an assistant professor of marketing at USC's Marshall School of Business told the L-A Times journo. "But it's fairly difficult to implement. It's pretty labor intensive."

"He said that as long as low-low-low prices remain consumers' main priority, and as long as turnover remains relatively high among workers at service-oriented businesses, most companies just can't afford to keep sufficient numbers of well-trained staff on hand to meet customers' needs," reported Lazarus.

Columnist Lazarus and Prof. Perner got that right. Great customer-retaining service is nice to have but not if it means having high prices.

The message for contact centers and their parent or contractor organizations are really very simple. Your customers care first about price, second about products/service, and third about service. Therefore orient your business strategies and investments accordingly.

For contact centers that means more automation, and home agents (let the creepy-crawlies take over millstone bricks-and-mortar centers), on finding ways with analytics to reduce headcount, and less on customer loyalty, retention, and satisfaction programs. When it comes to hiring and training worry less about smarts and filling them with knowledge--you won't keep let alone attract them into all but the high-paying tech support centers anyway--but who can smile, sell, and do more than speak a.k.a. multitask.

Also focus your CRM initiatives on tracking customer interactions by channel to avoid pouring away money on asking customers to repeat themselves, and on cutting sales and service costs. Customers don't want except for the most sensitive products relatiobnships with your company. You are only as good as your last pricepoint.

Forget total customer lifetime value. With the way many businesses are going--the slow upturn is going to unlock mergers and consolidations to grow by acquisition rather than the more expensive and financially shakier approach of growing organically--the customers are going to outlive them.

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. And finally, he said, Infosys itself had found ways to streamline its processes so that it needed fewer people to complete the work."

What makes Indian contact centers offshoring especially vulnerable are two factors. One, India is moving up the IT food chain, with better paying and higher skilled jobs such as in programming. Two, offshoring-serving contact centers' hours are deeply and understandably unpopular with employees because they must work unsociable (and unsafe) graveyard shifts to match the corresponding daytime hours in North America. That is on top of the typical contact center stresses from demanding and sometimes obnoxious customers while meeting stringent performance targets in very confining spaces at low pay.
 

Does this mean that offshoring will end? Well...no. As India's companies and employees become more expert and proficient with technology, expect them to develop and refine automated solutions...at less cost than their North American counterparts.

Ask 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.

Staff can't afford to waste these outlays to go in for an eight-hour shift only to be told to go home after four or even two hours. They have little leeway, being at the bottom of society's pecking order, to get doctor's appointments changed or find alternative child care when their boss suddenly calls them in. Yet because they are poorly paid they have little choice except to pull their hairs out and pray.

So why should contact centers and other employers care? After all it is a difficult economy, business is scarce, and costs have to be tightly managed, which means only having workers on the clock when they need them.

Here's why: turnover and quality. It costs money to hire and train staff and productivity is lost--and customer retention and revenues can drop--until the newcomers are brought up to speed, when they can deliver the same if not better performance compared with those who have left.

More seriously, employers could be risking long and annoying queues and rushed service that really drives scarce customers--and their spending--elsewhere.

Why because what is happening on the employees' side is that the workers are taking on multiple jobs to make ends meet. If their 'principal' boss calls them in because a colleague is 'out sick' (like applying for another job) and they're not home, and no one else can come in, the roster falls short. The employees' reactions when they see the voicemails or texts is "tough tomatoes, pal."

Here's another consequence: any actual or perceived violation of laws and regulations--be fudging on payroll, blocked exits or loose wires, mouse droppings in the cafeteria, racial and/or sexual harassment--and your outfit will have a series of unwelcome visitors. When someone feels their back is against the wall and they may be going down, what is to stop them from taking they believe is responsible with them?

Employees aren't worried anymore about references. HR departments don't require them because they know their absence or presence on applications means nothing because people b.s. and of what goes on good and bad in workplaces. More seriously someone/some outfit can get sued for negative comments, and who needs to justify spending for lawyers for such HR matters? All employers are allowed to say therefore are the equivalents of 'name, rank, and serial number'.

And when the economy truly bounces back with new jobs well, it doesn't take a seasoned observer to predict what is going to happen next. Especially in contact centers where staff churn is rampant even slowdowns because of the job stress and the confining lab-rat-like/monitored-up-the tailfeathers environment.

Is there a solution? Yes. And that is for employers to pay for the hours promised. Suck it up. No on-call. No cutbacks. No 'we've decided to make this job temporary'. No games with benefits.

You hire someone for 20 hours a week at $10/hour you allocate for that. Period. Can't afford to do that? Then you don't know how to forecast and budget and therefore you shouldn't be in business.

Employees are like any other expense. If you don't pay the bills you won't get the service. No money? No voice/data, power, roof, or the people under them.

Having said that, and on the positive said there are a good many companies, including contact centers that do treat their people well. They get the message that in the service business your employees are your principal investment because it is they that interfaces with the end-customers i.e. the one who give you money. And, not surprisingly, these outfits have strong balance sheets, enabled by productivity-and-revenue enhancing loyalty.

The choice is clear: emulate these outfits and succeed. Toy with the people who work for you and fail.

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.

When you're on your way out, in more ways than one, and you want to wreak revenge on those you truly despise you leave them a poisoned chalice, one fortified with nutrients but laced with a cocktail of deadly agents, one that they have little choice to drink.

For a disgruntled employee that can be the computer virus from Hades. For a head of household that can include a business or property that the heirs can ill-afford to manage. For a political kingpin that can be scandals that will be unearthed, forever embroiling and tainting the new chiefs and their rivals when the old boss is put to earth.

This may well be the case, intentional or more likely unintentional but with the same effect with the sale of Nortel's enterprise division to Avaya

If the Ottawa (Ontario Canada) Citizen newspaper story and competitors' reaction to the sale as reported by TMC are to be believed, Nortel's archrival and half-cousin Avaya--both firms are derived from the same Bell heritage--and which Nortel had tried to buy, should soon feel the toxins coursing its system.

The seemingly rosy $2.4 billion Nortel's enterprise division earned in 2008 has quickly been eroded to only $860 million in business in the first six months of 2009, down 34 per cent from a year earlier. It lost $209 million compared to an operating profit of $168 million a year earlier.

The arsenics and strychnines are not just the severe downturn but a lack of faith by many resellers and customers in the enterprise division's offerings caused by Nortel's lousy finances and poor top management. As soon as this comm/tech giant announced that it was in financial trouble last year it was doomed like the whiff of almonds that are the telltales of cyanide--from a firm that had reportedly been detoxified from past mismanagement and scandal. 'Here we go again?' came the fear. Understandably channel, prospects, and existing customers seeking replacements or upgrades started going elsewhere. Who can trust Nortel again? Who wants to risk being stuck with end of life goods?

Here's the nub. If resellers and customers picked Nortel over Avaya why should they buy/stay with Nortel now that it will become Avaya? Will Avaya really continue to support Nortel's product lines? The one scenario there is Avaya may act like a spider; after paralyzing and cocooning its prey it sucks out the juices created by special enzymes that liquify the organs--until there is nothing left.

Nortel has been the walking dead, its heroic and dedicated engineers like the still-vital organs struggling with weakening condition to produce and support IP-oriented quality products as they were drained with layoffs. Little wonder that in the contact center field at least, reported Interactive Intelligence's Joe Staples--whose firm has seen competitors like the 'old' Aspect, Davox, Rockwell et al disappear and many others fade into insignificance--Nortel's product line was aging with little new to get these buyers excited.

Then again IP-from-the-ground-up companies like Aastra, Cisco, Fonality, Interactive Intelligence, and ShoreTel, to name but a few, didn't have the legacy TDM/PSTN baggage to lug with them. For these companies there is no need to 'migrate' customers to IP; they are already there.

The substance that stops the heart may be the technology shift from PSTN/TDM to IP. What is happening is another lesson that firms that were based in the new technologies are typically but not always more successful than those that been formed from and made their mark in the old ones. When the core technologies change the old outfits are left behind.

A great example to illustrate this is railroads. Which is why if you've seen or ridden on a commuter or Amtrak or in Canada VIA Rail train they are pulled or pushed by diesel or electric locomotives built by outfits that had started out making them, not by firms that had made their mark constructing steam engines.

Those companies: Alco, Baldwin, Lima and their Canadian licensees CLC and MLW, failed to make the transition when the railroads switched from steam to diesel in the 1940s and 1950s. They had tried build diesels, in an attempt to capitalize on the loyalty of the customers that had relied on them for their 'legacy' steam engines, but their diesel products failed to match the quality and features of the steam builders' 'non-legacy' competition. The steam firms had allied with electrical gear makers GE (Alco-GE) and Westinghouse with Baldwin--most railroad locomotives are diesel-electric with motors driving the axles--but they fell apart. In GE's case it emerged as a competitor to Alco and supplanted it.

In a lesson for technology as well sometimes new entrants don't fare as well if their solutions are not suited for particular markets though these tools may be proven elsewhere. Fairbanks Morse, which made marine diesel engines, entered the steam-to-diesel fray in the late '40s but exited 10 years later. While its technology, opposed-piston engines, offered an appealing much higher horsepower in the same space than its competitors, could not hack the very different environment of railroads. It is one thing to have the engine blocks being battered and rattled by depth charges and hurricanes. It is another for them to be violently jerked front and back and side to side in a moving train.

Nortel has also left for its enemies a set of legal and political nightmares, like its powerful customer Verizon who wants its pound of flesh. Then there are the workers who may in likelihood will need to find new jobs sooner than later despite the $15 million employee-retention plan and promises to retain 60 percent of Nortel's North American staff by Avaya.

Job-keeping programs are merely ways to enable staff to find other careers or pare down their expenses so they can live on much less when they are ultimately let go. Canada is teetering on an election which may take place this fall but the latest will be next spring. The Official Opposition Liberals have made it known that its attack will include on how the Conservative government has handled the Nortel debacle, including the treatment of its pensioners and long-term disabled former employees.

Besides who is kidding whom here? Does anyone truly believe that Avaya will actually retain Nortel's North American staff, in particular those in now 'foreign' Canada, whose offices are but a 90 minute flight or 9 hour scenic in the spring/summer/fall but dangerous-in-the-winter drive from its New Jersey HQ? American firms have more often than not when they buy Canadian outfits shift their operations to home base to save money and gain greater control. Why should Avaya, which isn't exactly flush with cash, behave any differently? Especially with the high Canadian dollar?

The question is can Avaya or more accurately its owner Silver Lake Partners can afford to sustain the Nortel 'legacy' in what appears to be a slow recovery amidst a marketplace that is fast-moving to pure IP, where voice is another set of data to be managed? And where the savvy outfits are having the routing hosted rather than using scarce capital resources to buy hardware and licenses for boxes and servers stuck in some closet, money that will be spent more effectively not on infrastructure but on R&D, production, and marketing? Is it willing to be a political punching bag in Canada and the target of legal attacks and having its government customer base eroded in the U.S?

Then again did Avaya have any choice but to drink from the cup? If it had declined to sip it may have met a crueler and more likely fate at the hands of Cisco et al. Avaya may well have a strong constitution and corporate antidotes to cope with the poisons laced with the strength from the beverage but could it continue to take the battering from such powerful, flexible, and younger opponents?

Nortel's toxic chalice has with Avaya drinking from it also wounded its other rivals, e.g. Iwatsu, Mitel, Siemens Enterprise, and Toshiba. The deal has made Avaya number one at Siemens' expense that gives it a powerful position, but is Avaya strong enough to capitalize on this new position?

The only cure for this poison is for Avaya backer Silver Lake Partners to suck it up and lay out the cash now to devise and launch a strategy to weaken and destroy, and buy at dimes to dollars the other legacy TDM-based vendors to create one outfit that has one foot in the TDM past that will swing then those customers into IP with an integrated mix of flexible open and hosted as well as premises solutions. If Silver Lake does not do this or hesitates it may be too late for Avaya, Silver Lake, its investors, and Avaya (and Nortel) employees.

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.