Immediately I understand this company doesn't "know" me. If they did, they would realize I don't manage a call center and boosting an imaginary call center's performance is not top on my list.

But, I am a research junkie. Therefore, I notify the company that I would like a complimentary copy. I comply with their instructions: "To receive your complimentary guide, simply reply to my email." (There is no link to click.)

I inform the compnay in my email that after reviewing the guide I would like to promote their company and research on the Customer Contact Performance Forum (CCPF) (www.contactcenter.ning.com). I explain we have members who might be interested in requesting the guide (I had no intention of including the entire guide on the CCPF site).

My next step was to check the company's web site to see if it is legit (and it is). Not only is it legit but the company's products target customer contact / call centers.

I don't get this. Why wouldn't the company want free advertising? Are they concerned compeititors might get a copy of their complimentary guide? Didn't they offer this valuable guide to promote their brand, company, products, and services?

I start wondering what investments companies make (mine included) to promote our products and services that become sunk costs because we put some silly restrictions around them. How many times do we miss out on great opportunities becasue we are trying to protect ourselves from that 1-2% risk that may happen?

I would love to hear what you think. I'm still amazed. Help me - I'm concerned that I'm the crazy one for reacting this way.

Interestingly, the researchers also found that employee commitment was more of a driver of customer satisfaction than was employee satisfaction.

While the study only involves the hotel industry, I think we can ask ourselves some important questions.

Are we, as contact center professionals, unaware of misalignments between our own words and deeds? How many of us examine whether or not we do what we say or ask how our employees perceive us? How many of us have considered how our integrity affects employee commitment and ultimately the success of our organization?

Do we teach any of these concepts to our managers or directors? Do we train our management team about integrity? Is it part of our performance appraisals?

What do you think about this link? Have you ever worked for someone with great integrity and found your commitment was better than when working for someone you perceived as lacking integrity? Or how about your commitment level when your witnessed a lack of behavioral integrity in your manager or management team? Did one infraction cause your commitment to wane or did it take multiple instances? We'd love to hear about this topic from your perspective / experience.

Simons, Walsh, Sturman (2002). Service from the heart: The relative influence of job satisfaction and affective commitment on service quality and employee turnover. Organization Science, 13(1). 18-35.

To try to figure out his dilemma, Howard first looks to the data modeler who could have defined a domain table of state and commonwealth codes that would force anyone using the database to enter a common code set. He then considered the application development team whose “application edit checks failed to recognize the 50 valid state codes or provide any text standardization conversions.” He states that whether or not a company has a quality assurance team is largely dependent on the size of the company but goes on to say that data quality with these teams may not be better. In his example, the fact that the state code should be only two bytes in length and conform to the USPS standard was overlooked. Because there was no specific requirement to test, these data sources passed QA with flying colors. Howard says, “More than likely, someone assumed everyone knew the 50 state codes and that writing validation code was a waste of time. After all, everyone knows the state abbreviations for Michigan, Minnesota and Missouri. (Don't feel bad if you have to check - I did.)” Finally, he turns to the business users. An executive at one of Mr. Howard’s clients told him that data quality at their company was an afterthought. “Bad information was captured and passed on to the next application that assumed the first application had done its job. Bad data is persistently stored in multiple data stores.”

Mr. Howard’s article presents a valid question: Because data integrity is critical to the success in today’s corporations, who is responsible? Enterprise systems contain critical product, customer, and employee data. This data is integrated into management reports including dashboards and scorecards. Managers and executives use this data to make both tactical and strategic decisions. If someone does not take the responsibility to manage the quality of data quality, critical data elements / metrics may be incorrect or unusable thus jeopardizing the success of an organization. We all know what happens when a customer contact agent inputs undefined abbreviations and nonsense data into customer interaction fields. What can we do as customer contact professionals to ensure the quality of this precious data?

Reference
Howard, W. (2007). Data Quality Isn't Just a Data Management Problem. DM Review, 17(10), 16. Retrieved July 19, 2008, from ProQuest Computing database. (Document ID: 1413058121).

1. lowered productivity,
2. reduced quality of output,
3. increased absenteeism, and
4. voluntary resignation

I’ve posted a whole chapter of our customer contact book “The Ten Most (un)Wanted Villains” to what I like to call “Expedient Nods” at www.contactcenter.ning.com under the discussion group "Villains that steal customer contact success."

So how can customer contact leaders encourage their companies to act ethically? In addition to the advice we give in our The Ten Most (un)Wanted Villains chapter, consider what Miller and Jentz (2008, pp. 48-49) have to say. They indicate that there are four factors that define a leader committed to ethical leadership.

Don’t look the other way: “Managers must show that they will not tolerate unethical business behaviour.”. As soon as a leader sees an ethical infraction it is critical that the leader address it immediately and effectively. The rest of the employees will understand from these honest and swift actions that a leader means what he says.

Set realistic goals: Leaders must understand what an enterprise is capable of attaining without succumbing to unethical behaviour. Should goals be set too high, employees may be tempted to achieve the goals by unethical means. It is the work of the leader to know the capabilities and the limitations of his team and to set expectations that are reasonable.

Provide periodic evaluation: Leaders can encourage ethical behaviour by periodically reviewing an employee’s behaviour. This can be accomplished through face-to-face interviews with the supervisor. Or, a company may prefer to have a standard ethical checklist that can be filled out by the supervisor or self-reported.

Are you experiencing any of the four factors in your organization? Could it be because of expedient nods? How do you keep your organization aligned to your code of conduct? How do you assess if there are any expedient nods happening in your organization?

Miller, R., & Jentz, G. (2008). Business law today: The essentials (8th ed.). Mason, OH: West Legal Studies in Business, an imprint of Thomson/South-Western, a part of the Thompson Corporation.

Most of the time I run across this is when there is a poor understanding of the organization’s strategy and how that affects contact center strategy and decisions. In particular, how organization competitive strategy drives the strategy of the contact center that then defines the competencies of the agents the contact center team hires, trains, and manages. Contact center management can spend needless time and money if the organization strategy is not defined or poorly communicated.

To illustrate, consider the different competencies of agents supporting an operational excellent versus a customer intimate competitive strategy.

Customer Contact Agents in an Operationally Excellent Contact Center
The organization in an operationally excellent company is more regimented and agents are counted on to maximize efficiency for standardized service. While the work is relatively routine, the agents must contribute to continual improvement of process efficiencies. Agent training is oriented mainly to ensuring job proficiency. An agent’s career opportunities are typically limited, and there is considerable emphasis on schedule flexibility (i.e., adjusting agent numbers and working hours to changes in demand).

Teams are not extensively used and if a team is formed, management controls it. Agents are expected to spend much more of their time interacting with customers than with colleagues.

Agent rewards are typically aimed at individual performance.

The agents in an operationally efficient organization use technology tools to manage customer satisfaction in a cost efficient manner. While interacting with customers, agents depend on technology to provide the company’s standardize solution for each customer issue. In an operationally excellent company, the goal of this agent-technology interface is to ensure consistent and hassle-free service for the customer.

Customer Intimacy
When a company decides that its differentiation is to pursue customer intimacy, the contact center holds a strategic position on the competitive front line. In a customer intimate company, the mission is to provide customers with service that is exemplary when compared to other companies. The goal of technology in this scenario goes beyond simple customer satisfaction to true customer intimacy.

Customer-facing People
This customer contact environment most resembles the highly advertised “empowered work organization.” Workers are given discretion to negotiate sales and service. These agents maintain control of their work solving complex problems within agreed-upon timelines and on budget while maintaining stringent professional standards.

When interacting with customers, these agents have considerable discretion within policies and procedures, maintaining a type of fluidity that ensures customer intimacy.

These empowered agents typically relate to both external and internal customers and, in each case, the relationships are complex, endure over relatively long periods, and involve the continuous exchange of information and knowledge.

The complexity of this type of work encourages greater reliance on other team members in executing work, for learning and support. This means more teamwork. Therefore, there are more rewards that are team-based.

These highly empowered agents use technology tools to continually learn about individual customers such that a tailored sales or service solution can be delivered. An agent developing customer intimacy must initiate an ongoing, meaningful dialogue with each customer. Technology enables the agent to develop and maintain that kind of dialogue.

Implications
Do you know the competitive strategy of your organization? Do you continually align your strategy to that of the organization? Do your personnel decisions support the goals of the organization or do you feel like you are continually asked to implement competing objectives? If so, what can you do about it? If not, what advice do you have for others who are struggling with this?

For example, Kohavi, Rothleder, and Simoudis (2002) highlight the following challenges most organizations face as they try to create relevant, accurate, and timely analytics.

1. The time to crunch the numbers and analyze the data is never fast enough. But then, will it ever be? Will we just keep demanding faster and faster answers? When should we redefine “real-time” to “right time?”

2. Business users want to be a little more self sufficient. They want user-friendly interfaces that will allow them to rely less on other people to get the answers when they want them.

3. Data collection and analysis isn’t targeted. We want it all whenever we want it. We don’t take the time to define clear business goals and metrics. In the past, unrealistic expectations about data mining “magic” led to misguided efforts without clear goals and metrics.

4. We want analyze data that must be integrated from multiple sources. Most of the time we don’t have an efficient and cost effective manner to do this. The extract-transform-load (ETL) process is usually complex and when it is considered, the cost and difficulty are usually underestimated.

Most every company I work with is creating on some type of dashboard and/or scorecard. Both of these are delivered through some type of business analytics. It is a grueling process and I run up against each of the challenges mentioned above. I find that the biggest hurdle is to get the business user to define the business goals and metrics. When most people go down this path they believe, “If I can measure it, it must be important.” Many people become fascinated with “quantity” rather than quality. The “fun” side of seeing all these correlations and neat analysis paralyzes them. Rather than thinking of what action they will take and what effect that action will have, they enter into the common analytic stupor of “paralysis by analysis.”

Kohavi, R., Rothleder, N.J., Simoudis, E. (2002). Emerging trends in business analytics. Communications of the ACM, 45(8), 45-48. Retrieved June 22, 2008, from http://ai.stanford.edu/~ronnyk/cacmEmergingTrendsInBI.pdf

“Managing an IT project is like juggling chunks of Jell-O: It's neither easy nor pretty. Information technology is especially slippery because it's always moving, changing, adapting and challenging business as we know it.”

• What IT justification methodology exists in your organization? What kind of input does the call center have when acquiring and designing IT solutions?
• How do you help make IT project decisions? How does the contact center help make IT project decisions?
• How are IT projects managed in your organization to improve success? What role does the contact center user play in project management?
• Does your organization include a post project implementation audit to determine how you fared against projected results? Does the call center take part in this?
• What other lessons have you learned from successful (or not so successful) IT projects?

"A digital firm is one in which nearly all of the organization’s significant business relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees are digitally enabled and mediated. Core business processes are accomplished through digital networks spanning the entire organization or linking multiple organizations.

Digital firms sense and respond to their environment far more rapidly than traditional firms, giving them more flexibility to survive in turbulent times."

Why Pursue Digital Status?
Webber (2007) describes six customer-focused reasons why firms pursue a digital strategy. Because most customer contact organizations have not achieved digital status, companies can use these characteristics to evaluate how this strategy can benefit them. Once a company is on the path to becoming a digital firm it can use these benchmarks to assess how far they’ve come.

2. Focusing on the most profitable, digitally enabled customer segment. More and more customers are becoming digitally enabled. Customers who are willing to communicate digitally and self-serve are increasingly more profitable to companies. If organizations can’t accommodate the digitally enabled customers then that organization will end up with a customer base that typically spends the least and costs the most to serve.

3. Using “digitally enabled” connections to drive speed. Customers will expect speedy interactions and delivery because speed is infectious. Remember the quality revolution phenomenon? First customers realized they could have a quality car. Next they wanted a quality everything. Once customers know that they can get an answer today or have something delivered tomorrow, they will ask, "Why can't I have everything tomorrow?" For the digitally enabled company the answer is "You can." Or consider the email response requirement of customers five years ago versus today. The standard used to be that companies would respond to customer emails in 24 to 48 hours. Today, if the customer does not get a response within the hour or two, he is likely to re-contact the company (increasing the cost to the company. Organizations that become digitally enabled and promise speedy interactions and delivery are going to win.

4. Decreasing complexity and giving customers back their time. Customers’ lives are increasingly complex and their time is precious. Digital interaction gives them the opportunity to navigate through that complexity on their own terms. By interacting with digitally enabled companies, customers move from simply completing a transaction to finding value in each transaction they do. The result for the organization? Higher revenues. Webber says that people spend more when they sell products to themselves.

5. Utilizing “digitally enabled” analytics to revise customer segmentation schema. Soon old customer segmentation schema will not work. Digitally enabled customers are creating niches that companies never knew about. As consumers buy things faster and assume more control over the entire experience, they start displaying new and different behaviors. Their past behavior stops predicting future behavior. The challenge of the digital firm is to use its analytics to detect emerging customer segments that require new and different ways to serve them.

6. Creating valuable, real-time intelligence. Webber says, “A company that manages its business through averages is a company waiting to be hammered.” The real-time intelligence that is available through every digital connection is a competitive advantage. The challenge is to create valuable intelligence and not just information. A digitally enabled company can understand its “over” and “under” performing areas in real time. Companies that continue to manage using historical averages will fail. Webber (2007) says, “A company that can harness the output of digital information to speed up its operations is going to outperform competitors, create new standards, and make a lot of money.”

As most contact center professionals know, transitioning to a digital organization requires a tremendous investment of resources. While most organizations can gain substantial benefits from becoming totally digital other organizations may benefit most by investing in a partial transformation. Management must have a good business case before investing. To be a successful digital customer contact organization, the digital strategy must be clearly defined and eloquently implemented.

Have you decided what digital investments you are (and are not) going to make? Why or why not?

References:
Laudon, K. C., & Laudon, J. P. (2007). Management Information systems: Managing the digital firm (10th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. ISBN: 9780132337748.

Webber, A.M. (2007). Are You on Digital Time? Fast Company. Retrieved June 8, 2008, from http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/22/digitime.html

This industry has been struggling with how to implement viable knowledge management (KM) solutions for years. In the early years we designated teams of people as “experts” who would handle the customer inquiries that were too complex for the first line agent. We asked people to memorize vast amounts of data so they could have any answer at a moment’s notice. We then tried to embed static FAQs and Help into the agent technology but the answers were too rigid for the ever increasing complexity of customer requests. An agent trying to find an answer took too long for a customer to wait. Knowledge management systems were built that were a little more intuitive but companies failed to assign knowledge managers and so agents found incorrect answers more often than right answers. The answer had changed (and was not updated) since its last use. Agents stopped using the systems and went back to depending on their own memorization schemes.

So how do we implement a successful knowledge management solution in the contact center today?

“A broader view looks at KM requirements from three perspectives: a) Information-based; b) technology-based; and c) culture-based. The last of these perspectives highlights the importance of organizational culture in the KM process. Not all KM processes require high investment in technology. More importantly, successful use of the technology is often dependent on the incorporation of KM behavior into the organizational culture.”

Karlsen & Gottschalk (2004) view culture as important because it shapes assumptions about what knowledge is worth exchanging; it defines relationships between individual and organizational knowledge; it creates the context for social interaction that determines how knowledge will be shared in particular situations; and it shapes the processes by which new knowledge is created, legitimated, and distributed in organizations.

Hurley and Green (2005) believe that “Traditionally, KM has been perceived as a theory that is derived from and relies on high levels of technology. However, in most instances, the necessary cultural shift is more difficult to accomplish and often overlooked.”

Investing in Knowledge Management Culture
Agent Jobs
To create a KM culture in the customer contact organization we must take a look at the agent’s job and redefine it in terms of characteristics that encourage and simplify the creation and transfer of knowledge. We must recognize that agents gain tacit knowledge when interacting with customers (i.e. learning-by-doing) and as they gain experience they internalize that knowledge so that it becomes explicit (i.e., so they can share it with others). Once this knowledge is ready, the stage is set for the agent to share this knowledge through structured systems.

Organization Structure
We have to rethink how we structure our contact center organization to encourage and simplify the creation and transfer of knowledge. While we have been slow to adopt a decentralized approach, it is this very organizational structure that facilitates the sharing of explicit knowledge. The fact that a decentralized organization structure emphasizes empowerment and information sharing allows agents to more readily give their knowledge to other employees.

Reward
Agents must also be rewarded. The reward must be structured such that it effectively influences the agents’ decision about investing in knowledge creation and transfer (versus knowledge hoarding). Hall (2001) identifies intrinsic rewards as important in motivating knowledge management activity. These include rewards like access to information and knowledge, reputation enhancement, and personal satisfaction. Therefore, rewards should focus on intrinsic rewards and individual motivation. Through the individual's motivation to create and transfer knowledge, a KM culture can be established.

Technology
Technology can enhance a KM culture in the call center by facilitating the creation and transfer of knowledge. Alavi and Leidner (2001) identify three common applications of IT to organizational knowledge management initiatives the:
1. coding and sharing of best practices,
2. creation of corporate knowledge directories, and
3. creation of knowledge networks.

Examples of IT tools that can facilitate these functions are e-mail, corporate intranets, databases, document management, electronic bulletin boards, and discussion groups (Alavi & Leidner, 2001).

Summary
The customer contact organization is perfectly positioned to prove that the successful implementation of a knowledge management system requires an investment in creating a KM culture.

References
Alavi, M., & Leidner, D. E. (2001). Review: Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management Systems: Conceptual Foundations and Research Issues. MIS Quarterly, 25(1), 107-136.

Hall, H. (2001). Input-friendliness: Motivating Knowledge Sharing Across Intranets. Journal of Information Science, 27(2), 139-146.

Hurley, T.A., Green, C.W. (2005). Creating a knowledge management culture: the role of task, structure, technology and people in encouraging knowledge creation and transfer [Electronic Version]. Retrieve June 8, 2008, from Mid West Academy Web site: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:3bHjmNR6-rwJ:www.midwestacademy.org/Proceedings/2005/papers/HurleyGreen%2520revision

Karlsen, J. T. & Gottschalk, P. (2004). Factors Affecting Knowledge Transfer in IT Projects. Engineering Management Journal, 16(1), 3-10.

"When you spend all that time fighting fires, you don't even have time to come up with the new ways to build things so they don't burn down. Right now, there's hardly a fire code."

It struck me how similar this is to what we go through in contact center management.

In order to become customer experience managers and provide real value to the rest of the corporation we have to figure out how to balance the tactical with the strategic. It is not one or the other. Both are important.

What do you do to ensure your customer contact strategy aligns with and enhances your organization's strategy? Do you have a leader (or leaders) that focuses solely on strategy? What percentage of your planning time is spent on coming up with fireproof strategies? Are you predominantly reactive or proactive in your approach to contact center management? What can you do today to become more balanced?

Agents really make a difference. Without her, my bloodpressure would still be 180 over 140.

According to my friend, the agent handled the situation very well. My friend really wanted the agent to say the Company was the deadbeat for acting this way. Through it all, the agent remained calm and pleasant and never turned on her company. The agent ended the call with a heartfelt expression of sympathy for my friend's loss. In the end, my friend had only one small complaint... the agent could have spent a little more time emphasizing the family's value to the company.

So, how often do emotionally charged situations happen in your call center? How prepared are your agents to behave in a way that helps the customer on all levels? Do your agents have the motivation to treat each customer as an individual and the energy to follow through to satisfaction?

Do your agents make a difference? How many stories could you tell about the heros in your call center?

What success have you had in enhancing your interdepartmental interactions?

Reference
Ajay Menon, Bernard J Jaworski, Ajay K Kohli. (1997). Product quality: Impact of interdepartmental interactions. Academy of Marketing Science. Journal, 25(3), 187-200. Retrieved May 28, 2008, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 12606198).

"...the results of this study suggest that the relationship between interdepartmental interactions and product quality is strong. Thus, managers should implement interventions that increase interdepartmental connectedness-particularly in turbulent environments.

In the competitive market we face today, can any of us afford to have our silos dictate poor product quality?

What are others doing to help facilitate this cross-functional interaction? What programs or incentives are you using to foster cooperation? Are you allowing greater decision-making authority? We'd love to hear what you are doing.

Reference
Ajay Menon, Bernard J Jaworski, Ajay K Kohli. (1997). Product quality: Impact of interdepartmental interactions. Academy of Marketing Science. Journal, 25(3), 187-200. Retrieved May 28, 2008, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Document ID: 12606198).

What challenges have you faced as your company has started to integrate the internet into the customer's experience?

I have been impressed with how giving busy people are with their time. I have gotten great responses, great questions, great feedback, and one gentleman went out of his way to introduce me to another gentleman he felt had some innovative practices in this area.

This reminds me to be continually aware of how I can help people. For example,

Isn't that the essence of good business? Isn't that the reason for networking? We give, we receive, we pay it forward so others can succeed just as we do. I only hope I can remember this the next time I think I am to busy to invest a couple of minutes to help another business contact.

Thanks everyone for the wonderful lesson.