Something else jumped out from that piece too: apparently the open-source movement now includes PBXs. There's a phreaker group that's built an open-source PBX called Asterisk, and free VoIP service that runs on top of it. It's got all sorts of cool features, and I would have a lot more to say about it, but for the unfortunate Internet outage that continues even now (see above). But it's a mind-blowing project, and I/we at Call Center will surely have more to report on possible implications for business telephony.

Info on Asterisk.

The article in Wired won't be online until December 2. Entitled When Cell Phone Hackers Attack.
Posted by Keith Dawson at November 24, 2004 Up-Sell/Cross-Sell Survey

We at Call Center have lately been working with the folks at Convergys to design and implement a that I'd like to encourage everyone to participate in. It's goal is to help us understand what experiences businesses have had with Up-Sell/Cross-Sell programs. In particular, we are interested in how many companies have already deployed a US/CS strategy and what the experience has been in migrating from a service center to a service and sales operation.

There's not a lot of useful data out there on this topic, so we're excited about the prospect of having some good numbers to report to our readership when this survey is done. So I'd like to personally encourage anyone in the call center industry who has some experience in this area - and I know there are a lot of you! - to take just a few minutes and participate in our survey.

And if doing it for the good of the industry isn't enough for you, I understand that .
Posted by Keith Dawson at November 23, 2004 Black Friday is Coming

Thanksgiving is more than just a day of festivity in the US. It's the prelude to what is generally acknowleded as the highest traffic day in the call center year. The Friday after Thanksgiving is traditionally known as Black Friday in call center circles as Americans, sitting at home on a day off, begin their holiday shopping with calls to catalog retailers.

I wonder, in these days of high-performance workforce optimization and forecasting, if BF is really all it used to be. If, when all is said and done, it's become as blase as the retail/mall experience. Have we succeeded in anticipating, and then smoothing out, the peaks that come on these known holidays? Posted by Keith Dawson at November 22, 2004 30,000 Squandered Opportunities

I'm in the middle of writing an article this week for an upcoming issue on the subject of Agent Development. This is a complex and highly interesting topic, covering essentially every technology and management technique that impacts the call center rep. In other words, this is very hard work.

In the course of my research I came across an opinion piece I'd written a couple of years ago that totally delighted me. (There's nothing like taking a certain amount of pride in one's own work.) Here's an excerpt from that 2003 piece - it's as true now as it was then, and just as scary:

Let's pretend you hire a rep and based on known statistics, you can predict that that person will stay for an average of three years. Then, taking what we know from ACD reports, we can do a little fun - and scary - math.

Say for argument's sake that you expect a rep to handle five calls per hour, or 40 calls in an eight hour shift. That's 200 per week, times 50 weeks is 10,000 in a year, or 30,000 in the typical life of a job. You can plug in your own variables - but no matter how you slice it, that's an enormous number of agent-customer interactions.

So think about that for a minute. How scared are you that the person you barely know is going to talk to 30,000 of your customers? At precisely the moment when the customer is most a) ticked off, b) primed to buy, c) confused?

Put dollars to those 30,000 interactions. Depending on what you sell, that's either a lot of money saved, or a lot of opportunity squandered. Can the rep on the phone make the most of that opportunity by soothing someone who might bolt to a competitor? Or sell them something that they might not have thought of? Do you even know what they are capable of? If not, then you're looking at the question of value through the wrong end of the telescope.

What we need it a way to measure the value of a call center hire over the lifetime of that job - taking into account the cost of training, and the cost of those 30,000 interaction opportunities (possibly squandered). I like to think of it as the analogue to the lifetime value of a customer. If you're going to go to the trouble to measure that metric, why not measure the lifetime value of an agent? The answers might surprise you - or rattle you.
Posted by Keith Dawson at November 19, 2004 Things That Are Broken

Everyone delights in stories of really bad customer service, don't we? If for no other reason than schadenfreude, the delicious feeling of relief that it's happening to someone else, not me.

I stumbled across this site yesterday: it's called , and it's a place where people - regular people, you know, like, customers - write in with their despairing experiences of customer service gone awry. Need a call center gut check? Breathe deeply, then read.

It's also worth making sure your own operations aren't anything like these dysfunctional stories. Posted by Keith Dawson at November 18, 2004 You Don't Know What You Think You Know

No one is better at expressing the "confusion" and dismay that comes from observing today's telecom landscape than my colleague Rick Luhmann. He comes face to face with the reality that people buy boring old stuff like key systems, eschew fancy new stuff (like unified messaging and IP), and best of all, Rick knows why this is happening.

An outrageous example:

True story... This guy comes in for a briefing and we're just sitting around afterwards shooting the, um, breeze; at one point I ask about the competitive aspects of his world.

The dude sells very sophisticated systems, featuring all the advanced bells and whistles of a modern "communications" platform -- unified messaging, desktop call handling, softphones, IP Telephony, a hint of presence, etc.; I asked if they ever ran up against traditional keys and switches anymore; again, his answer rang a bell.

"Nah, our systems really only make sense these days for companies who need all the extra functionality -- the ones with serious knowledge workers or multiple offices or with expert agent needs or all of the above... Yah gotta remember a lot of people don't really want all this crap; for those guys, and there are a lot of 'em, they still buy boring old key systems."

Oh man, that must make the hair on the back of every telecom product developer stand on end. That's a SALESPERSON making that assertion. Read - it's an eye-opener, and a primer on why you should never hold fast to your cherished assumptions.

Posted by Keith Dawson at November 15, 2004 Analytics In The Middle

I just met with Wes Hayden, ceo of Genesys. His company is coming out with an analytics tool called InfoMart soon (1Q05). It's very interesting to see a company that sits squarely in the call routing/infrastructure area taking a shot at organizing the mountain of data that call centers generate.

He says that the middleware provider is the natural vendor to consolidate all the information needed to perform analytics, because they have control over the interactions from all sources. He says that they are not reinventing reporting or necessarily doing the analysis of all that data - they are merely formatting it, making it available for people outside the call center to make use of it as they see fit.

One of the interesting questions that came up in our conversation was this - how exactly do we define "success" in a call center, and what metrics do we use to measure it? He seems to think - and I don't mean to put words in his mouth - that the call center industry is moving incrementally toward a different set of measures than those we traditionally use, more tuned into things like revenue and customer satisfaction. He identified the cadre of executives that call centers report into, the VP level execs who control the center's direction as well as other aspects of the enterprose, as those who are pushing this trend.

More info forthcoming as we get a hold of it. But it will be interesting, come rollout, to compare the feature set and ease of use of the InfoMart with some of the offerings from more traditional analytics and knowledge management vendors. Posted by Keith Dawson at November 12, 2004 What's On Managers' Minds

One of the most persistent themes that keeps coming up in our research about modern call center trends is this: technology is starting to take a back seat to a profound managerial transformation. What's important to call centers is not the tools that are used, or even whether those tools show ROI. What's bubbling up to the top of call center manager's minds are ideas: how to connect the call center to the rest of the enterprise. Not by wires - by culture, appreciation, measurements, contributions. The idea that the call center contributes to the health of a company - that it's a first responder in case of emergency, that, to mix metaphors, the call center is like a sense organ bringing outside feedback into the company's brain..... These are not just idle thoughts - they are critical strategic positions and definitions; once they are articulated within a company, the whole notion of what tools you need to buy can change, depending on how the combined center/company defines its priorities and its criteria for success.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but shouldn't you buy your technology after you've decided what you want it to accomplish, not before? Posted by Keith Dawson at November 10, 2004 Dell in India

Seems that Dell is opening a new call center in India. Not much news there, as they are thought to have as many as 6,000 seats, built up since they first hit Indian shores in 2001.

What's key about this news is that there are two hidden trends bubbling to the surface in the offshoring debate, exemplified by the Dell example.

One is that offshore is coming to mean more than just call center services; Infoworld says that Dell's set up a product development and testing group team in Bangalore, and a software development center. Message: India is for everything, not just customer-facing services.

Second point is that labor pressures seem to be creeping into the equation, despite India's huge educated population: "Faced with a shortage of good quality staff in large cities such as Bangalore, Mumbai, and Hyderabad, a number of multinational and local companies are exploring the option of setting up their call centers and business process outsourcing (BPO) operations in smaller towns."

After all, how many American cities could support the kind of unbelievable growth curve experienced by India in the last half-decade? 6,000 agents just for Dell? The InfoWorld piece is . Posted by Keith Dawson at 07:22 AM November 09, 2004 Culture and Quality

We had an interesting dialogue with Mercom's Kristyn Emenecker, talking about agent management best practices.

Here's the money quote:

"The QA form should not drive the behavior - culture should drive the behavior, and this will involve all programs and efforts. Quality assurance should be viewed by the agents as just a logical flow from the rest of the culture and a way to have their efforts consistently noticed and acknowledged. The culture drives, QA follows. When that takes place, they will always be in sync."

Read the rest: Posted by Keith Dawson at November 08, 2004 Offshoring Costs

Today's news has around the world. The basic conclusions I read from this and other reports seem to be:

* The closer to the US you get, the higher your costs, but the more stable the region. That's the key trade-off - "stability" (which is an amorphous concept) versus cost.

* For every linguistically oriented locale you may need, there's another one ready to roll at lower cost. German? Think Poland or Eastern Europe if you want closeness, Turkey for cost. French? How does Morocco sound? Tunisia?

* The arbitrage between labor costs in different locations are going to create a wide playing field for any country or region that wants to get in the game. And yes, it is a game at this point.

I think we'll see two diverging trends in the next year or so. First, small locales will start differentiating themselves on the basis of language, cultural affinity with bigger markets and niche services. And second, the large offshore markets like India will see costs rise and try to diversify into more all-purpose providers of business services. Like what Ireland did ten or fifteen years ago, until it reached the point where the labor arbitrage wasn't what was attracting business, it was the quality and diversity of the country's service offerings.
Posted by Keith Dawson at 08:40 AM Call Center Today

Welcome to Call Center Today. As the editor of Call Center Magazine, I (Keith Dawson) will be your blogger and your host.

What you'll find here are opinions, remarks, thoughts, and perhaps not-fully-baked notions of where the call center industry is going. It's interactive, so maybe we'll be able to have some back and forth conversation about issues. Posted by Keith Dawson at 08:39 AM