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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.

When I saw the press release from the American Teleservices Association and DialAmerica reporting that most major teleservices clients would leave their outsourcer vendors because they were dissatisfied with them i.e. the service they were getting, I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or curse or all three at the same time. Naturally I turned this into an article that I put on our site.

After all, what are teleservices firms in the business for, except to deliver services? If they can't deliver them to their clients' satisfaction then why should they exist?

The underlying issue is quality. Teleservices companies have historically been the 'teleprofessionals': the experts with the expertise to deliver high quality customer care and acquisition at low costs.

Yet too many teleservices outfits have dropped the ball for reasons both preventable i.e. greed, incompetence, lack of attention to detail, underpricing, and understandable: limited resources, overly demanding clients, costly new technologies with long-burn ROIs, and offshore and onshore competition.

In fairness, and to the last set of points, clients too must share part of the blame, including for the low service quality their customers get. Stressing cost over price, which too many outfits still do results in poor results for cheap: you get what you pay for. Lousy metrics and lists generate lousy returns: garbage in/garbage out.

This leads to another key question: is the teleservices industry sustainable? The hard reality is that outsourcing is a more expensive solution than in-house centers because the outsourcers' profits have to calculated into the total costs. The only savings--and rationale--for outsourcing, is avoiding staffing and facilities costs for short-term programs. That is why organizations typically have a core in-house group to handle the steady calls and outsource the rest.

Yet advancements in speech rec, and increasing comfort levels with employee home agents are making these options viable to handle outsourced calls. Outsourcers like Working Solutions are wisely also marketing their platforms to serve in-house operations.

The only choices available for teleservices firms seem to be:

* Get back to the quality roots. Make the people and processes outperform the best in-house centers. Clear out the management and supervisory deadwood. Lead, follow or get the (H) out of the way. Do whatever it takes. Teleservices can be better than 'DIY'

* Go innovative techwise. There are a wide range of hosted solutions on the marketplace for everything from CRM to routing to WFO. Go SIP ASAP

* Board up traditional contact centers--they are a waste of money and those jobs tend too often attract low-performing 'gumsmacker' young slackers--and instead go home where one can recruit higher quality, mature, and responsible adults

* Focus on the clients. Treat them like gold, because they are.

The firms that do the above will survive this economy and prosper, and may find themselves at the top of our Top 50 Teleservices Agencies, where they belong.

And we have a winner!!! A blog posting last month referred to an Internet contest wherein the winner would be the person who was fired from his or her job for the most outrageous or ridiculous reason, judged by a panel from Silicon Valley. Employment-related Internet start-up Simply Hired, through its affiliated Web site SimplyFired.com, solicited the stories of absurd firings; the reward would be a Caribbean cruise.

Well, the grand-prize winner, chosen from more than 1,000 entries, is a computer engineer who lost his job for eating pizza (pepperoni, two slices).

Jim Garrison, who lives in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, ate two of the six pieces of pepperoni pizza left over from a meeting involving a different group within the company.

He didn’t realize that some of the other employees of this potluck had already decided to take the leftover pizza home with them.

When they discovered one-third of the leftover pizza pie had been eaten, the employees reported Garrison to management, ultimately leading to his firing last November.

He found out a month after the sinister snacking incident.

In Garrison’s words: 

... I had been working for a mortgage company as a developer for 18 months and things were going well. Then, one day I saw that a different group in my company had just finished up a pot-luck and had some pizza left over. I thought they would probably end up throwing it away and I was kind of hungry so I went for it ... I took a slice of pizza.

Apparently the employees who threw this pot luck were planning to take it home and were offended by my action. Now I thought we were all basically on the same team and if someone didn't like what I did they would tell me so and I would apologize and maybe offer to pay for the pizza. These employees ended up telling their manager, who told her vice president about what I did.

The worst part about this is that I wasn't told about any of this until a month after the incident. No warning, no second chance.

I know that I left an impression because to this day my former coworkers refer to unattended pizza as "programmer bait".

Runners-up included a furniture mover who got fired after he and a co-worker were caught fencing with some adult sex toys found in a customer’s bedroom; a software developer who incorporated the word “STUPID” (yes, all CAPS) into an error-code message; and a warehouse worker found doing naughty things with the prosthetics made by his employer.

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DRB

IEX Corporation, a provider of contact center workforce management and optimization tools, today announces the general availability of version 3.9 of the company’s TotalView Workforce Management system. Version 3.9 offers skill block scheduling features that are designed to make easier management of multichannel contact types and other back-office work. The new version of TotalView Workforce Management also offers new time-off management and schedule preference capabilities. To sum up the enhancements and additions:

Skill Block Scheduling automatically designates optimal time slots for agents to devote to a particular skill (e.g., outbound calling, e-mail, Web chat, etc.). As well, centers can manage offline tasks. During these designated periods, the agent is only considered open to handle a defined subset of contact types, resulting in the center being able to more effectively manage multimedia and offline contact types.

Time-Off Manager allows agents to manage sick time, vacation, personal days and other schedule entitlements via any standard Web browser within the WebStation Plus module. This automates the process of managing, tracking, notifying and approving paid time off. This feature also provides a “wait list” capability for their desired days off.

WebStation Plus Agent Preferences allows agents to input the desired characteristics of their work schedule. This gives agents more influence over their start times and stop times, days off, lunch time, break times, etc. Preferences can be input based on scheduling intervals defined by managers.

TotalView Workforce Management v3.9 offers enhancements in addition to those above. For more in-depth coverage of IEX’s TotalView Workforce Management system, be sure to read the upcoming September issue of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine.

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DRB

InVision Software, a Germany-based provider of workforce management (WFM) software, announces today its launch of a U.S. subsidiary in Chicago, IL.

The new headquarters of InVision Software, Inc. will service both the U.S. and Canadian territories, with further bases "planned for the West and South to be nearer to those specific markets."

InVision currently has 12 international subsidiaries. The customer base currently includes global brands such as ABN AMRO, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom and IKEA.

“We are confident that the North American market, across all industries, holds great potential for our company,” Peter Bollenbeck, CEO of the InVision Software Group, said in a statement. “Obviously, it is a very large territory, and it is still the place where global technology trends are set. With the strong foothold we have in Europe, demonstrated by currently 480 installations, InVision has what it takes to meet the North American challenge.”

The InVision Enterprise WFM is a Web-based solution for enabling businesses to forecast, schedule and control their workforce in real time to match requirements with capacity; a point, therefore, to reliably prevent over- and understaffing. According to the company, its software has been proven to reduce staff-related costs by up to 25 percent.

At the same time, the InVision Enterprise WFM is designed to increase workforce productivity and reduce staff fluctuation, all the while significantly reducing time spent on workforce management processes. Another key advantage of the InVision system is its degree of localization: While logging on, users can choose between six different languages, including English, Spanish and German, with more to come.

“In our tenth year, the opening of the U.S. office demonstrates how far we have come,” Bollenbeck continued to say. “All in all, our tools are perfectly geared towards the North American market thanks to their technological power and functional versatility. This is a real milestone in our company’s development and with an impressive client list, a strong base in Europe and 110 employees, InVision continues to go from strength to strength.”

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DRB

IEX Corporation, a provider of workforce management and optimization technology for contact centers, today announced news that the Netherlands division of SITEL Corporation has chosen IEX’s TotalView Workforce Management system. SITEL is a global provider of outsourced customer support services.

This Netherlands contact center further expands SITEL’s global relationship with IEX, as its but another added to the growing list of SITEL centers using TotalView. Most recently, IEX announced a workforce management contract with SITEL Germany in late February, and TotalView is installed in a number of SITEL’s other contact centers worldwide.

SITEL Netherlands has a diverse client environment: the company provides multilingual technical support for one on the world's largest manufactures of printer and computer products; multichannel support for clients in the publishing, utilities and automotive sectors; and outbound acquisition for one of the world's largest credit card companies.

How the TotalView Workforce Management system helps:

The system is designed to improve scheduling and agent management processes in both single and multiple-site environments. Its features include skills-based and multimedia scheduling, real-time and  historical adherence, intraday and performance management, enterprise reporting and data exchange, vacation/holiday planning, and short-/long-term resource planning. It is aimed at enabling contact centers to deliver consistent service with lower operating costs and higher employee morale. Version 3.8 of the IEX solution won the company a 2004 Product of the Year award from CIS magazine.

“This latest contract demonstrates SITEL’s continued faith in TotalView and our ability to effectively support markets around the world,” said IEX President Debbie May in a company statement.

If I put 1,000 business people into a room together, and asked them all what the most significant cost of doing business is, my guess is 999 of them would answer "labor." (Perhaps the one lone dissenter works in the Underworld, where "firing employees" literally involves the use of a flamethrower.)

Why is labor so expensive? It's not just the salaries, of course, though those are a large part...it's the turnover. From the moment an employee departs, the process of hiring a replacement involves a cash and resource outlay every step of the way. First, you've lost company human capital in that trained employee who has just departed. You've lost his or her memories, experiences, personal and business relationships and contacts, methodologies, knowledge and educational anecdotes. Considering the rise of software designed to turn employees' casual knowledge into company capital, these factors are not inconsiderable.

Next, you need to tap into your human resource department's time and budget: advertising the position, preparing paperwork for both the departing employee and the new hire, time to select resumes and interview, time to write rejection letters for the non-hires, and time to put together a job offer.

Finally, when the new employee starts, you need to embark on the expensive process of training.

Many companies, though resigned to the fact that labor, including hiring new employees, will always be their biggest expense, have discovered that streamlining the process of employee searching, hiring and training is an opportunity to save significant amounts of cash. We accept the adage that it costs more to find a new customer than keep an existing customer happy...it's time to apply the same concept to employees.

Connecticut-based Dictaphone, a company that has been around since workforce management involved chiselling marks onto stone walls with rudimentary hand tools, has announced the debut of some new features for the company's really spot-on ContactPoint Workforce Management solution.

"Workforce management" used to involve only keeping track of existing workers. But why stop there...why not apply the same principles to potential employees, and use a better process from the pre-hire process?

The full release is below.

Customer-Driven Features Enhance Dictaphone’s Workforce Relationship Management Solution
For Optimizing Contact Center Performance

DALLAS, TX, and STRATFORD, Conn., Feb. 1, 2005 – Dictaphone Corporation's Communications Recording Systems (CRS) group today announced significant feature enhancements to its ContactPoint Workforce Relationship Management solution for contact centers. The announcement was made at the Call Center Demo & Conference Dallas 2005.

Dictaphone's ContactPoint Workforce Relationship Management solution provides a fully-integrated solution for optimizing agent performance, focusing on three major functions: recruiting, training and assessments. The ContactPoint software suite is comprised of three modules – Recruiter, Trainer, and Assessor – that are linked together through a common competency model detailing the skills, knowledge and abilities agents need to be successful. Once identified and captured in ContactPoint, this competency model can be applied to the contact center's hiring, training, and assessment programs to increase agent effectiveness and improve customer service.

"As the first solution to address agent performance from a total life-cycle standpoint, ContactPoint is already revolutionizing the way that contact centers hire, train, assess and motivate their agent workforce," commented John Kaiser, vice president of global marketing for Dictaphone CRS. "Now, ContactPoint's new features give contact center managers even better tools for optimizing performance, such as enhanced tracking of coaching and training activities, and more flexible, automated reporting capabilities."

Included among the new ContactPoint features are:

An Assessment Workflow Tracking Engine
ContactPoint's new assessment workflow tracking engine helps contact center managers more effectively identify and track specific problem areas for agents, all the way through to their resolution, to ensure proper steps are being taken to improve agent performance. Specifically, it allows managers to:

- Flag items on agent assessment forms to indicate specific performance issues

- Determine the appropriate action steps for improving agent performance
(e.g., coaching, training, or some other user-definable follow up category)

- Track and report on these follow up activities from start to finish

A Report Scheduler For Flexible, Automated Reporting
While conducting agent assessments is important, having the ability to derive meaningful information from the assessments is equally important. ContactPoint's automated report scheduler provides contact center managers with timely, meaningful information while improving productivity and saving valuable time. Specifically, it enables managers to:

- Create report "templates" by specifying various report criteria:

-- Time frames, data elements, and roll-up categories (e.g., based on specific assessment questions, agents, campaigns, centers, etc.)

- Generate customized reports to fit individual contact centers needs

-- More than 1,700 customized reports can be created

- Run reports automatically based on pre-specified schedules (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly, etc.)

- Automate the distribution of selected reports to specified recipients (by e-mail)

- Generate reports using data available through each of the three ContactPoint modules

ContactPoint Trainer Enhancements
Using ContactPoint Trainer, contact centers can import SCORM-compliant training material and deliver that material directly to agents' desktops. New enhancements to Dictaphone's ContactPoint Trainer module save contact center managers time, by automatically tracking the training status of every agent, relative to individual learning modules. The system keeps track of which learning modules agents have been assigned, which ones have been started or completed, the agent's progress (percent of modules completed), and the agent's actual results or test scores.

Other new Trainer features include a "randomized question capability" which randomizes the order of questions in a specific learning module to prevent duplication of tests administered between agents, and the ability to create timed tests, which require an agent to complete a test within a specific time period.

The new version of ContactPoint also includes other new features, such as an enhancement to the incentive management system, which allows contact centers to link agent assessments with merits and incentives so agents can be rewarded for exceptional call handling. Additionally, it gives managers the ability to create multi-dimensional assessment forms by specifying conditional questions. For example, as a supervisor is completing an assessment, if the score on one assessment question indicates a particular problem area for the agent, the system will automatically lead the supervisor to a different set of assessment criteria/questions that enable the manager to have a clearer understanding of the nature and cause of the problem and implement appropriate action.

"Since its launch in August 2003, ContactPoint has been installed in contact centers employing more than 18,000 agent positions," added Kaiser. “With the addition of these new customer-driven features, we’re looking forward to another banner year."

The new ContactPoint software release is available immediately.

About Dictaphone Corporation's Communications Recording Systems (CRS) Group
With thousands of installed customers worldwide, Dictaphone Corporation's Communications Recording Systems (CRS) Group is a leading provider of recording and monitoring systems for contact centers and Workforce Relationship Managementä solutions designed to optimize agent performance. Dictaphone CRS is a division of the Stratford, Connecticut-based Dictaphone Corporation.

Dictaphone's ContactPoint Workforce Relationship Management solution helps optimize agent performance by helping contact centers hire and retain the best agents, assess them fairly and consistently, and empower them with the right training and rewards. The centerpiece of ContactPoint is a competency model that enables the creation of job profiles that outline the skills, knowledge and abilities that agents need to be successful. Once identified, these skills, knowledge and abilities can then be systematically applied to the contact center's hiring, training, and assessment programs using ContactPoint, to help increase agent effectiveness and improve customer service.

The ContactPoint solution was designed to work in combination with Dictaphone's Freedom Enterprise system. Freedom Enterprise records customer/agent interactions, using standard voice recording or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) recording. The agent's desktop screen activity can also be captured. Other features supported by ContactPoint and Freedom Enterprise include: remote playback via Web access; Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) for data capture, service observe, and advanced analytics; and integration to legacy HR systems to capture recruitment, assessment and training data. For more information, call (800-886-4908), or visit www.dictaphone.com.