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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.

To get a full view of your customers to utilize your CRM systems so you can retain and obtain more value for them, especially in this challenging and highly competitive economy you need realtime access to complete quality data on your customers.

Yet for too many organizations this may not be happening. And the reasons lie in both too-complex processing and in the sometimes inaccurate customer information that these systems have to work with i.e. "garbage in..."

One of the biggest barriers to getting value from CRM initiatives is this need for improved customer data management, according to William Band, Vice President and Principal Analyst with Forrester Research.

One set of solutions, data warehousing, he says fails to deliver the real-time access, and end users compensate by deploying myriad purpose-built data marts. Mega data warehouses often fail in the eyes of business users because they become too complex and take to long to build. They often become 'boil the ocean' type projects.

"These limitations, along with poor data integration between CRM and enterprise resource planning systems, result in fragmented views of customers," Band points out.

Business intelligence (BI) applications offer the promise to be the focal point to customer intelligence across multiple data sources, says Band. But BI efforts often highlight poor customer data quality. When users try to apply powerful analytics tools they find the source data is lacking, and not properly managed, leaving users scrambling to fight a losing battle to keep customer data clean and updated.

Band recommends that companies look at customer data handling up front, before putting in CRM applications, and resolve any matters that have arisen. This can save time and aggravation, and help you get the results you are seeking.

"Don't wait to address customer data issues until the latter stages of your deployment; it might be too late to resolve problems at that point," says Band.

Contact centers seemed to have weathered the downturn better than most sectors thanks to the need for firms to retain and attract scarce customers and their wallets with quality service, the unfortunately growing demand for collections, and in a slowdown in and in some cases a reversal of outsourced nearshoring and offshoring.

These are also excellent times for contact centers to expand. Retail closures and layoffs have created plenty of available customer-service-skilled people and modern, well-situated buildings. The financial services industry meltdown has led to similar opportunities, including vacant, well-wired, move-in ready contact centers. Home based work has finally emerged as a viable cost-effective and arguably more productive and greener alternative to traditional, and expensive employer-subsidized facilities.

Unfortunately if reports are accurate, contact center turnover continues to be higher than one might have expected in these difficult times. Even in communities where larger and better-paid employers have been cutting back, contact centers aggressively recruit for staff. In at least one city where there are several contact centers some of them have resorted to placing portable billboards near the entrances of their competition to lure agents and supervisors.

And where communities are prosperous, contact centers seem to lose out. One firm is closing its contact center in a small Midwestern city because it could not find enough workers to fill open positions even after several months of trying.

At the same time the bar has been raised on contact center employees. Customers who cannot find the products/services they want or solutions for their issues via the self-service demand, and rightly so, truly intelligent agents to help them: individuals who can communicate on their feet both verbally and in writing at the customers' level. It is no longer enough to have a pleasant voice in today's contact centers. Yet when positions require more skills it shrinks the applicant pools.

To fix these issues a contact center makeover may be needed. A good hard look at why those that are experiencing staffing issues cannot attract and retain the quality people they or more accurately their customers need, and take steps to address the problem areas.

The first place to examine is supervision and management. Staffing experts and experienced managers agree that the top reason why employees voluntarily leave their employers is because they work underneath terrible supervisors. Individuals who zero in and blow up out of proportion minor matters rather than focus on the key issues and who coach by berating staff as opposed to employing constructive criticism and showing better ways of accomplishing tasks.

The chief culprit is the age-old mistake of management, which is to promote the best line workers without any examination of whether they have the aptitude and skills to lead and supervise colleagues. Managers who themselves should not be in those roles. Then again stupidity breeds, well...

Yes, other service jobs like in retail and hospitality have the same bad supervision and turnover issues. Yet their environments make the idiocy a little more tolerable. Clerks and waiters can walk away and focus on customers whereas agents are haunted, even terrorized every second by their supervisors, over multiple channels, and with nowhere to run. Bullying managers have to keep their traps shut when they are facing the public.

A second troublespot is lack of staff empowerment and flexibility. Most contact center agents want to help those they are communicating with--doing so gives them tremendous satisfaction--but they get frustrated when they are tied down by bureaucratic red tape and procedures.

In today's world employees want and expect workplaces that work with instead of against their lives. That means enabling them to change and trade shifts, and giving them flexible hours, accommodating child and eldercare, and allowing them to work from home.

A third blotch is no community identity. In-house contact centers almost always rank higher than teleservices firms with potential hires because they have names and corporate images that they can wear as badges. Yet in all too few cases do teleservices companies have similar positive identities that their staff can be proud of. Not enough of them make themselves parts of their host communities such as by participating in charity or school fundraising, supporting local amateur sports teams, and in joining events such as holiday festivities.

Like being a homeowner in a subdivision it isn't enough to pay your taxes and mind your own business. You have to string your lights and take part in whatever else is taking place on your street if you are asked.

Lastly in thankfully fewer and fewer cases, some contact centers, especially the smaller operations still are situated in buildings that look like they have been condemned, or should be, and that is from the outward appearances: Diety knows what's behind the walls or under the floors or above the ceilings. There have been reports of instances that the sites have looked so bad that prospective clients have looked at the sales reps, said 'You gotta be kidding', and walked away.

Little wonder that elected officials have been able to punch through do not call and other industry-restrictive legislation in the past; deaf to the complaints of job loss fears. There have been politicians who fairly recently who have blasted contact centers because they create low-paid high-turnover jobs. If you act and look undesirable and you are not visible, and that you don't give others a reason to truly care about you, you get treated accordingly.

There is no reason why contact centers cannot become employers of choice, whether the workplaces are bricks-and-mortar sites or employees' homes. The solution lies, like in the hiring candidate agents, in facing the mirrors, getting their acts together, become interested in and taking part in what's around them, and in putting their best feet forward.

Research firm Datamonitor recently came out with an intriguing report about Sri Lanka as a potential business process outsourcing (BPO)/offshore contact center hub.

Intriguing in that there may be a strong case for that island nation to become a BPO center despite its small (relative to neighboring India) population of 20 million.  Intriguing is that it has been the media lately on account of an ongoing civil war: which is not exactly the kind of development that assures potential investors and clients.

Datamonitor points out that Sri Lanka shares many of the attributes that has made India such an attractive location for BPO including an affordable and a plentiful pool of educated and English-speaking workers, high literacy levels, and a legal system that is based on a Western model.

The country through its IT trade organization Slasscom is wisely is focusing, however, on a few key strengths, such as accounting and finance (approximately 50,000 Sri Lankans qualify as accountants each year) rather than trying to be 'all things to all firms' that India's huge population can afford that nation to be.

Yet only farther down does the paper touch upon Sri Lanka's 20+ year old civil war, one like many such conflicts based on longstanding and deep-rooted issues between dominant and minority populations...after a discussion about costly telecom, doubts about cities outside its capital to support BPO/IT, and competition from other nations.

This is the wrong focus. Civil conflicts are top of media and top of mind. Because these are issues that must be addressed head on and up front in this post-9-11-01 world.

Here's what the CIA World Factbook says:

"Tensions between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil separatists erupted into war in 1983. Tens of thousands have died in the ethnic conflict that continues to fester. After two decades of fighting, the government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) formalized a cease-fire in February 2002 with Norway brokering peace negotiations. Violence between the LTTE and government forces intensified in 2006 and the government regained control of the Eastern Province in 2007. In January 2008, the government officially withdrew from the ceasefire, and by late January 2009, the LTTE remained in control of a small and shrinking area of Mullaitivu district in the North....

"The 25-year civil conflict between LTTE and the government of Sri Lanka has been a serious impediment to economic activities. By mid February 2009, the LTTE remained in control of small and shrinking area in the North. The conflict continues to cast a shadow over the economy."

Yes, companies set up shop and do business with firms located in many dangerous and conflict-ridden parts of the world. That can include our own back yards. As was remarked to me when I was writing about Northern Ireland as a contact center location 11-12 years ago "you're safer in Belfast than in Boston".

There is, however, a difference between civil wars and criminal activity. Terrorism is a tactic to conduct warfare, including civil warfare. The state is the target, and to destroy or neutralize it or to force it to change policies or redress grievances terror is aimed at the institutions, infrastructure, the economy, and the support of its population through generating fear. The latter can also include tourists, and executives sent there to support operations.

In contrast, criminals don't care about politics. They want what others have and they do what it takes to get it.

I used to live in the UK during Northern Ireland's 'Troubles' including during bombing campaigns. I used to also live in Boston and have visited the city many times before and since, travelling throughout the city on its transit system and on foot. There is no comparison in the on-the-spot fear between being checked out on an MBTA subway train and the shuddering terror of having to evacuate a train station in Manchester, England.

And while firms often take such risks--with civil conflicts and with high criminality--on manufacturing, resource extraction, and trade the rewards are usually there to match. Can the same justifications to put staff and assets in danger be made for comparatively low-value BPO, which the Datamonitor report admitted can be and is done in other parts of the world?

I wish to see an end to the conflict in Sri Lanka. For the Datamonitor report is correct in that the country has strong potential, just like Northern Ireland has. There are firms such as WNS and RR Donnelley there. And yes it will take a long time for Sri Lanka's war to cease even when there is a settlement, as there will be factions that will try to undermine it, as demonstrated by a recent bombing in Northern Ireland.

There are reports of the Sri Lankan government's recent military successes. Yet as this article from the Financial Times points out, "Most analysts argue it needs to do this by following up its military success with measures that would bolster the position of minority Tamils in Sri Lankan society, which is dominated by ethnic Sinhalese, comprising 74 per cent of the population, and ease the ethnic tensions that gave rise to LTTE."

For a country or region to be truly successful in drawing easily transferable BPO/IT business there must be a commitment to stability including creating and maintaining a functional society. BPO/IT investments can firm that up by creating employment--which has been stressed in Northern Ireland to create work for large jobless pools --but the civil foundation must be there for these structures (like contact centers) to hold up over time. And that means taking steps including compromises with the sides involved to resolve the issues that had led to or exacerbated to the point of violence the civil conflicts in the first place.

One of the more sensible new mantras in the contact center field is call avoidance: namely taking steps to prevent calls from customers from occurring. Call avoidance saves money and bolsters revenue by reducing contact handling costs and by improving customer satisfaction and retention by tackling their issues head on before they become problems.

Outbound messaging and notification, which will be covered in the April issue of Customer Interaction Solutions is one technique.

Another, and much more effective, is discovering and preventing the problems and issues that prompted the calls in the first place.

In the spirit of aiding the already beleaguered airline industry and its roster of many fine people still working for it, including in contact centers, here is a great opportunity to practice call avoidance: flush into the 'blue ice' chamber consideration of charging customers to use in-flight toilets that was raised last week by Irish deep-discount carrier Ryanair. Yes, according to Reuters the airline's CEO may be making this stuff up to get PR: but the world is littered with dumb ideas that have taken hold because of someone's musings.

I am taking this pre-emptive move because if this idea takes hold, airlines, desperate for coin and cost savings, would bolt the devices to the washroom doors faster than a 737 taking off from that aircraft-carrier-disguised-as-an-airport known as LaGuardia. The irate calls, e-mails, and faxes that would, well...flow...are the teleservices firms and IVR/speech rec firms such as Microsoft subsidiary Tellme and other outfits likeWest Interactive ready?

After all, look at what happened with food, baggage, and other features once known as amenities--charging for which many people too had thought was stupid--and which take in cash, no doubt like the infamous ' plus sales and handling' on direct marketed items going back to the 'bottom' line. There are probably at this writing engineers working on CAD/CAMs with lightweight, difficult to tamper (or rip off) payment card-accepting devices for the toilets. The profits that can be made on transcon and intercom flights, and to family destinations like Orlando...to make the revenues (ahem) flow to less popular locales maybe the carriers can cut the price of beer...

There are other and customer-friendlier moves the airlines can make to cut costs. Among them:

* Partnering rather than fighting Amtrak (and VIA Rail in Canada) and the bus companies to provide single-ticket short-haul ground spokes instead of connecting flights. There are a few North American airports with rail access or decent proximity to rail lines, like Philly (the only one with a train station inside), Newark, BWI, O'Hare, Providence, San Diego, Sea-Tac, Montreal (Pierre Elliott Trudeau/Dorval) and Toronto (Pearson). The move would cut costs, and ticket prices with the dividends of reducing flight delays and harmful emissions. Short-haul takeoffs and landings chew up runway capacity and spew much more pollutants per passenger-mile than medium to long-haul flights

* Move airline customer service and reservations to a great source of low-cost/high productivity, and extremely knowledgeable potential at-home agents: retired flight attendants, pilots, and customer service personnel

* Devise a lightweight, ergonomically sound non-reclining seat. The recliners on board aircraft create more customer discomfort i.e. breaking the kneecaps and getting too up-close-and-personal with the customers behind than they are worth in supposedly adding comfort. And they are a maintenance headache

On the other hand, installing pay toilets on airplanes maybe just the kickstart the bus companies need to scoop up customers: Amtrak is already popular and the Obama Administration plans to pour more money into it. Such a move by the carriers would also make it a great time to buy shares in firms like Cisco and Logitech. One more reason not to fly and to conference and meet-by-video instead...

There has been a lot of fanfare lately of contact center work being brought back to the U.S. from other countries, most notably India. Yet unless the additional demand is managed effectively, the result could be higher costs, less service, and more automation and fewer jobs.

The key reason for this return is the apparent inability of offshore agents to provide high quality customer-satisfying-and-retaining service that trumps cost arbitrage. The market for qualified affordable offshore English-speaking labor that are willing to work in contact centers appears to be shrinking, leading to rising compensation, turnover, and overall operations costs.

India's workforce are leaving the contact centers and entering higher-level BPO and IT fields that are better paid, have more sociable hours i.e. daytime rather than night shifts, and are more prestigious. Consequently contact centers have had to drill deeper into the labor force, yet many of the individuals hired may not have as solid English language skills and are less able to relate to those of American, British, Canadian and other cultures i.e. cultural affinity as their predecessors.

The Philippines is at risk of risk of contact center saturation because its labor market is much smaller. The nation's appeal is based on low costs coupled with a more customer-service-oriented culture and a greater exposure to and affinity with Americans compared with India thanks to a long and recent history with the U.S. Yet even there at a certain point firms will have to draw from less qualified labor pools that will result in customer service issues.

A few words on cultural affinity are in order. It is not, as others may perceive, about nationality or race. It is instead about understanding and empathizing with others derived from shared experiences. You can't gain this from watching TV or training videos, or linguistic classes, a la Henry Higgins in Pygmalion/My Fair Lady which some Indian outsourcing firms have attempted to resolve this issue. You can only obtain this insight by living amongst others and immersing yourself in that culture. That is why many immigrants to the U.S. face difficulties returning home even for visits: they have become 'Americanized'.

There is another side of the issue and that is American customer service is often not exactly worth having a flag-waving parade about. There are many horror stories about customers' experiences with poorly selected, educated, trained, and motivated U.S. contact center agents. U.S. contact centers suffer from high turnover, much more than one would expect in a difficult economy because they are not often managed and supervised effectively.

The saving grace for the American industry is that lower-cost self-service has not become as popular as projected thanks to poor IVR DTMF implementations and expensive and slow speech recognition technology development and deployment.

Self-service deployments will grow, though thanks to new tools and processes like outbound notifications, standardized language libraries, speech becoming parts of UC solutions, and to value-rich and affordable speech outsourcing. And when the choice is between dumb machines and well...the machines win because they cost less to operate.

Organizations are, in response to these issues, turning in greater numbers to 'homeshoring' i.e. home-based agents to the point where this option to traditional contact centers is reaching a critical mass. So much so that CB Richard Ellis, which has long been a contact center site selection leader now offers homeshoring labor market analysis: if you can't beat'em...

Homeshoring represents the best alternative to managing contact demand because it enables higher quality, more productive service by attracting better-performing agents while lowering costs by slicing facility expenses. The net benefits range from $10,000 to $20,000 per agent/year. Homeshoring also part of the environmental, energy, and traffic solutions by eliminating commuting. All the key issues with homeshoring: voice/data connections, security, monitoring, supervision, training and staff communications have been sufficiently resolved to remove them as barriers.

There will still be offshoring, though at lower levels because many firms are satisfied with its cost/quality equation. There will also be if fewer live agents because self-service cannot replace people where high thought and touch are needed; some of those individuals will be traditional centers mainly because some organizations don't want or see the need to change.

Yet a growing percentage of agents will be at home, because there is no place like it to supply quality, cost-effective customer care and sales.

Now that some $7 billion+ will be spent on rural broadband expansion, thanks to President Obama's just signed $787 billion economic stimulus package, the interesting question becomes which broadband technologies, wired or wireless should be supported i.e. subsidized to deliver it.

To get at the answers let's look at the two key benefits of this program:

1. It opens the door to truly effective e-commerce to residents and businesses, thereby increasing the availability of competitively priced products and services, and enhancing the economy, and to more information and services like distance learning and telemedicine. That means less gas, vehicle wear, and time in the long drives to the nearest urban centers

2. It enables job creation in rural areas such as from telework

Many rural communities have missed out on the recent economic boom. Unemployment and underemployment have been high and is getting worse. A recent story in The Daily Yonder reports double-digit rates in many communities. The recent economic downturn has for example decreased demand for resources such as forestry products. Fewer new homes means less need for local loggers, sawmill workers, and truckers.

Telework--via broadband--enables organizations that have forward-enough management i.e. supervision-by-performance rather than by-pointing-to-heads into this excellent supply of hard working individuals. It can also save them money: $10,000 to $20,000 per agent per year and improve customer satisfaction and retention, and revenues.

Not surprisingly telework through home-based agents is emerging as a viable alternative to offshoring. The cost savings and productivity benefits through home agents have made U.S. and Canada viable competitors to other countries for call handling.

There is a wide range of existing and developing broadband technologies available. TMC Group Publisher Rich Tehrani has in a recent blog pointed to broadband over power line (BPL), along with satellite, 3G, 4G (WiMAX/LTE), and perhaps white space technology. He correctly points out that the 'jury is still out' on these choices, and for good reason.

While with the exception of satellite, whose setup can be problematic (ask a rural resident who has tried to get it going) most of these methods appear to be fine for Internet access and e-mail.

Where the issue lies, however, is with VoIP. VoIP can and has for many firms made teleworking/home-based agents possible by dramatically reducing communications costs. No more LD charges from the switch to remote workers 50+ miles away.

Yet according to conversations with firms such as inContact and MegaPath there are quality of service (QoS) issues with wireless: cellular and satellite transmission. These methods have apparently not delivered consistent high enough QoS that callers, and companies expect. There are also other obstacles to VoIP ranging from old copper and data networks to home networks, depending on who you talk to.

There has been sufficient concern with VoIP to prompt three prominent pure-play telework outsourcers: Alpine Access, Arise, and Working Solutions to prohibit VoIP by their agents. Meanwhile 'blended' teleservices firms like Convergys that permit their home agents to have VoIP can route calls to bricks-and-mortar agents.

Yet in another strike against wireless, for Internet access to work at home applications, Convergys also clearly states that "Wireless or satellite broadband does not work effectively with our desktop configuration, and therefore does not meet our requirements".

Even with the good QoS on the network there can be inconsistency. You can have two VoIP 'lines' at home, one for work and one for personal, being fed from the same source, yet the quality can be different for each.

The alternative to integrated high QoS VoIP+ data: broadband for Internet--assuming that it can support work-at-home hosted solutions--and PSTN for calls would become just as unwieldy for rural residents and businesses as it is becoming for those in more urban areas, many of whom are opting for voice/data through the same pipe.

The future of voice communication according to many experts is VoIP rather than old-fashioned PSTN. If that is the case the VoIP issue, along with the need to support intensive web-based solutions, needs to be explored and resolved before any tax dollars are handed over to companies to install rural broadband.

There has been some good news on the beleaguered U.S. domestic contact center front, courtesy of United Airlines.

The good news is that the air carrier will be opening 165 seats at its Chicago and Honolulu facilities, reports the Associated Press and carried in BusinessWeek, to handle written (e-mailed/letter mailed) customer commendations and complaints (CC&C): work that had been managed offshore in India. Those positions will, however, be filled internally.

United's spokesperson, Robin Urbanski, explained that the rise of Internet booking means it now makes sense to have reservation agents also handle after-flight calls from customers. She said the new arrangement would be "cost-neutral" versus having the calls answered in India.

She told Bloomberg.com "'More sophisticated conversations with our guests are much better suited for us to handle instead of a third-party partner. "We clearly have the deep industry expertise to help our guests navigate through their options.'"

The bad news, from this writer's perspective, is that United is ending handling voice CC&Cs. It would stop publishing its customer relations phone number, which will be turned off altogether at the end of April.

Bloomberg reported that once service that ends, United reservations agents will handle complaints. Here's the kicker: the biznews site says United charges a $25 fee to book travel by phone.

No changes are planned at United's third contact center, in Detroit, which will continue to take phone calls (including after-flight responses) from United's largest customers.

United is not alone in its action. The AP/Business Week story said that American and Delta also direct customers towards e-mail/snailmail for complaints and commendations.

Urbanski explained that United is able to respond better to customers who write, since they often include more detail, making it possible to provide a more specific response.

"'We did a lot of research, we looked into it, and people who e-mail or write us are more satisfied with our responses,'" she said.

A clang of skepticism is in order. When someone is ticked off they are more likely to call and yes maybe to scream than to compose an e-mail or letter. Those are the complaints you want to address ASAP to discover and tackle the root causes, reality or perception of it before the matters worsen.

Bad news always spreads faster than good, and on the Internet the rate is warp speed, penetrating social networking sites and impacting corporate reputations and business. An angry airline customer may just decide to change their bookings on the spot, let everyone in their network know about it and suddenly there are a whole lot of seats that have just come open. Can the airlines, given their precarious financial predicaments, risk to have that happen?

United's action is more one death-knell for offshoring. If these very literate agents--India's and other countries' staff come from the middle classes--cannot provide decent service than the cost savings from shipping high value interactions like CC&Cs are no longer worth the customers' aggravation. That is even in comparison with the notoriously bad high school education that many Americans receive, and the often poor reading and writing skills they possess. The ability to understand and relate to others clearly trumps precise grammar and spelling.

I would wish, though, that United (and the other carriers) would keep or reinstate voice lines for CC&Cs, though. There are less expensive alternatives available, such as speech rec with near-realtime analytics to capture and alert others of critical issues, and home-based agents. A friendly voice, even if it is canned, can only help one's travel through the 'Friendly Skies'.

The ghost of Smoot-Hawley is baaack...and it is a real horror that spread misery worldwide, and could do again unless elected officials have the guts to drive a stake in its latest resurrection.

Smoot-Hawley is shorthand for the infamous tariff brought in the honorable Senator Reed Smoot from Utah and the honorable Representative Willis Hawley from Oregon, both Republicans, signed by GOP President Herbert Hoover in 1930. Infamous because economists then warned the President that that passage would worsen what became the Great Depression, and they were right, for it sparked a zero sum trade war whose net outcome left even those who would benefit with less and in too many cases with nothing.

The spirits of Sen. Smoot and Rep. Hawley appear to have taken over the bodies of North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan from North Dakota and Representative Peter Visclosky of Indiana, this time both Democrats. Sen. Dorgan is sponsoring the "American-made" rule for construction and other equipment that would be used in the economic stimulus program, which funds public works, water, transportation and other construction projects as well as broadband communications deployments and energy research. Rep. Visclosky has strengthened the Buy American portions for steel in the recently-passed House version of the legislation.

Yes, protectionist measures are not new, trade agreements or no trade agreements. That's why non-U.S. firms like Bombardier have built manufacturing plants to comply with Buy America for transit equipment, at costs passed onto American taxpayers.

Yet steel especially, that's another matter. This is the raw nerve of industry--the European Union was originally set up to permit free trade in it--(in a 'past life' I had covered the steel trade), and a fair portion of the truly precious metal comes from Canada and other countries.

Mess with steel and you mess with other valuable commodities that come from other trade partners, like oil. You can bet that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will mention that one to President Obama in person when he visits Canada Feb.19. If not Mr. Harper's rival, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, will make sure the country will know it, based on reading a recent Toronto Star article:

'"We're not small beer here. We're the United States' largest energy supplier, not just oil, but also hydro, and they've got to understand that if they want energy security they shouldn't start putting up barriers to our goods and services,' " he told Global TV's Focus Ontario in an interview.

"'We don't need to talk about threats, but they need to understand, and this will be a message I will pass to the president, that we're a force to be reckoned with.'"

Here's the real nightmare: Smoot/Hawley (or Dorgan/Visclosky) spreading to other industries...like infotech. Does the U.S. really want to go there? After all silicon is to Silicon Valley what steel is to Gary...

There are creeping signs that this sector may be next, with contact centers as the thin edge of the wedge. As reported in the January issue of Customer Interaction Solutions, federal lawmakers may reintroduce a bill similar to H.R. 1776, The Call Center Consumer's Right to Know Act, which would require contact center agents to disclose the physical location of such employee at the beginning of inbound and outbound calls. Firms would also have to annually certify to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) their compliance with such requirement.

H.R.1776 is an attempt to restrict offshoring by making customers aware that their calls may be going to or originating out of country. The bill's supporters hope customers and negative publicity would pressure firms to bring such jobs back to the U.S.

The downsides are that such bills may significantly add to contact center costs in both onshoring and time spent location disclosing and in compliance, which would ultimately be paid for by consumers. In doing so bills like it that hike contact center expenses may also be self-defeating as they may result in fewer domestic jobs.

"The particular type of disclosure contemplated by H.R. 1776 is a burdensome additional disclosure without clear benefit to the consumer," American Teleservices Association (ATA) CEO Tim Searcy told the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee Sept.11, 2008. "Each time additional disclosures or compliance requirements are added to the call, call lengths are increased, and the cost of doing business by phone increases and the quality of the interaction with the consumer declines. The rising costs of compliance and regulation are causing many firms to contemplate automation only, or offshore solutions to stay cost competitive."

President Obama knows his history and the current economic and political realities and has signaled that he is no Herbert Hoover. He understands the pain being felt by the constituents of the likes of the two elected officials pushing for those measures. But he depends on the cooperation of Congress to get his stimulus package approved ASAP.

Are there enough elected Congressmen and Senators who are wise enough to set aside their specific interests to look after the greater good and avoid a near-repeat of history that will hurt even those who short-term benefit from protectionist measures?
 

There has been much and understandable wailing in the current economic climate about 'yes I need to retain and grow customers but my CFO has axed my budget'.

Now Forrester Research has come up with five practical, leading-but-not-bleeding edge recommendations that will make CFOs, CMOs, and ultimately CEOs happy by shrinking costs and increasing business.

This advice, contained in a new report covered on TMCnet, The Economic Necessity Of Customer Service by Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D., Sharyn Leaver, and Andrew Magarie in summary are:

* Deploy proactive chat. It reduces online shopping revenue loss as well as shrinks the need to call the contact centers, thereby slicing operational costs

* Empower sales agents with co-browse tools to help customers through web interactions, and avoid calls and shopping cart abandonments

* Explore unified communications (UC) and with it presence. UC-enabled agents can pull in experts to help resolve issues, thereby saving the customers and the sales

* Invest in online social networking communities. "It's the network" and that's where customers are going to find out advice and recommendations on products and services

* Make self-service work in all channels. Customers want and deserve a consistent experience whether on the web, through automated e-mail or chat or web forms, or through IVR

This last one has been a groaner. Too many firms have thrown up--the multiple meanings intended--web and IVR self-service almost in panic mode to cut costs, and have in turn given this valuable method a bad rap.

Such carelessness got the dot-coms in trouble 10 years ago and almost sank them and the tech sector when customers got fed up of the lousy service. These companies ran to teleservices outsourcers to provide live agents but their business models did not factor in the costs, which caused many centers to expand and new ones built, hiring new agents, only to drop them a year or so later. We can't afford similar bad moves today.

To avoid these and other error Dr. Petouhoff, who is a passionate as well as a savvy and very bright researcher, has included in the report several key step to get enterprises focused so that they can makethe solutions offered above work right. These are, again in summary:

* Reject the old paradigms that a contact center is a cost center
* Demand ownership of the customer experience
* Listen to your customers to create your customer strategy
* Conduct a customer service gap analysis and implement best practices
* Evaluate software with customer experience as the top goal for a business case

The solutions and answers are there. Now it is up to you to make them happen.