As you may notice, I have an offer for a free report at the top of my blog. Why?
A little background. As I approach retirement in a few years if not sooner, I decided I would like to continue to work but on my own terms so that I could set my own hours and to travel or do things where I’m on my own schedule. I feel an internet business will provide me that opportunity. I was educated as an engineer, but have spent 40 years as a salesman. As a result I have a decent understanding of technology and setting up an internet business shouldn’t be all that intimidating. Although one of my son’s is employed as a web developer, I certainly don’t know HTML nor the “ins and outs” of developing a profitable web site. What I do know is that to be successful, I must develop as big a list of subscribers as possible and to do that, I must provide value and give more than I take.
Consequently, I began to look for and absorb as much as I could about setting up an internet business. I still haven’t determined what that business will be, although my passion as an amateur baseball historian and long time collector of baseball memorabilia, will weave its way into my business some way. The more I looked on line for an efficient way to learn how to set up an internet business, the more I came across folks selling quick “get rich” plans. I had no interest in such schemes One name emerged several times, John Thornhill . Googling John, I found only positive comments. He appeared to be the mentor to many successful people selling on the internet. In researching John, I found he was an ex factory worker from the UK, struggling to make ends meet, who began by selling information booklets on the internet. His business has evolved into many web sites with many offerings, all providing good value and offering a ton of free information. As a result, John has become wealthy.
I subsequently found out that starting 2 years ago, he began offering a detailed, comprehensive training program for folks aspiring to start their own internet business. The training program lasts 36 weeks and consists of weekly assignments with detailed videos that allow you to proceed at their own pace. John’s support is great. It starts with setting up your own domain through developing a subscriber list and developing your own niche and product offering. To illustrate how comprehensive the program is, what you see on my blog today, April 21st,2010, I developed from scratch and this is through only 7 weeks of the program. I’m running a little behind since I work full time and don’t have as much time to spend on the assignments as I would were I not working.
I should also mention, I have never spoken with John personally, although I would like to someday,so I have no vested interest in his business. So why am I promoting his class. I believe it may be the best practical training class on how to develop a profitable internet business. You should also know that I do get a referral fee should you subsequently sign up for John’s Masterclass program, but as you will see in the free report, he allows you to take the first few weeks of the course for $4.95.
Should you have any questions about my experience so far with the training, please contact me.
Organizations are starting to accept the burgeoning social media environment as an opportunity to enhance customer service. These days it is imperative for organizations with a large public following to track, understand, and respond “real time” to the conversations occurring about their brand on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Bloggr, etc. This undertaking resembles that which already takes place in their customer service centers for routing, managing, responding, and reporting on every form of customer interaction such as phone, IVR, voice mail, email, and chat. As an example, how quickly was Toyota able to gauge and respond to those making comments on the various social media sites when announced a recall for sticking accelerator pedals? Many of these sites may have thousands of followers.
Statistics indicate that on average, customers who have had a bad experience will tell at least 9 people. Two thirds of customers who quit doing business with an organization do so because of company indifference. Organizations can become front page news without realizing the business impacts. A dramatic example is a You Tube video by Dave Carroll, a musician, whose guitar was broken by United Airlines baggage handlers. He followed up with United for a year before he was compensated. As of Feb. 1, 2010 this video has had over 7.5 million hits. As result, how much business did this cost United? Had United monitored, analyzed, and responded “real time” to comments like this from various social media sites, they could have mitigated the damage.
This will conclude my series of blogs, at least for now, on the history of the customer service center. My next series of blogs will be devoted to my passion of baseball history. I’ll begin by discussing my choice for the best players, by position and era, in baseball history for the American, National, and Negro leagues. I encourage your comments; agreement, disagreement, or your choice.
The greatest single cost in a contact center is the cost of personnel. As a result it has become important to maximize agent productivity and accountability. This is done through programs commonly referred to as Workforce Management and Quality Monitoring.
Workforce Management allows contact center managers to schedule and monitor agent’s real time to ensure that specific levels of customer service are met, such as the minimum time to answer a call and the time an agent engages with a caller. An adjunct to Workforce management is presence which allows a manager to know the status of each agent throughout the agent’s shift.
Quality Monitoring provides a manager the ability to monitor an agent’s call and provide real time training and feedback to improve agent effectiveness.
Finally, Multimedia Queuing allows an organization to treat all forms of customer contact to be queued and treated equally regardless of the interface. This includes voice calls, IVR transfers, fax, email, chat, and social media, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Two of the companies for whom I have worked that have strong reputations in implementing contact center technology are Product Support Solutions (PSS) and ethisIQ.
These complementary technologies afford callers the ability to get their information quicker and can preclude the frustrations of having to reenter information or repeat their request more than once during a call. As an example, when you call your bank and request information either by speaking to an agent or using a touch tone phone or speech to enter your information, your input can accompany the call if your call is transferred one or more times. In addition your call can be routed to an agent who is best suited to assist, i.e. knowledgeable of the information you need or perhaps is fluent in your language if not English, etc.
Another technology that has contributed to skilled base routing is the recent evolution of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP). This technology which is the same as utilized by some of the newer phone companies like Vonage or Comcast Cable, allows the lower cost use of data lines to digitize voice and transmit it over data lines versus the use of analog lines used by phone companies for over 100 years.
As a result, many companies have agents working from home and in some cases this lower cost telephony has led to the moving of customer service or support to offshore countries.
In my next blog on contact center technology, I’ll discuss some of the other technologies used to improve customer service and agent productivity.
Speech recognition, the ability of a computer to understand human speech, started about 3 0 years ago and initially only had the ability to recognize the digits 0 through 9 and “yes” or “no”. Since this preceded the wide spread use of touch tone phones, this early speech recognition technology allowed callers with rotary dial phones to access database information via IVRs by speaking rather than using touch tone input.
AS computer processors and memory became faster and cheaper along with the advancement in speech technology, computers gained the ability to recognize larger and larger vocabularies with increased accuracy. Three companies emerged, with each using a technology originally developed by Stanford, MIT, or universities. The technology today can understand complete thoughts such as ordering airline tickets by saying “I want to fly from Boston to San Francisco on November 22nd in the afternoon”
Another enabling technology is text to speech (TTS), which allows computers to read text and respond spoken speech. In early implementations of TTS, the spoken speech was very computer sounding, known as speech synthesis. Again, with the increases in computer processing, the spoken speech today is called concatenated speech, which consists of combining human recorded phonemes and combining them to form words. Phonemes are the smallest elements of human speech. English has 40 phonemes.
In my next blog I’ll discuss Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) and skill based routing, which allows a caller’s information to transfer with the call and be routed to the best available agent
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is the technology callers love to hate. This “talking” computer technology had its beginnings at Brookhaven Labs on Long Island, N.Y. in the mid sixties under government grants. It took input from telephone touch tones (Dual Tone Multi Frequency – DTMF)), emulating an operator’s terminal keystrokes as input, to access computer data bases and provideback spoken information by combining prerecorded words and phrases.
In 1969 several of the developers left Brookhaven and started Periphonics, later bought by Nortel. One of the initial applications was used internally by financial institutions to provide customers in branch account information by allowing tellers to access account information using a touch tone telephone. With the proliferation of automated teller machines (ATMs) by Diebold, IBM, and NCR in the late seventies, customer self service was born. This paved the way for acceptance of IVR systems.
Initially the technology was very proprietary and all the applications had to be written by the vendors. In the mid eighties, the technology vendors developed programming interfaces allowing the employing institutions to develop their own applications. The technology spread rapidly in the nineties to the financial, healthcare, transportation, utility, and government sectors as a way to provide callers information 24 hours a day while saving the cost of live agents.
Yet the technology was limited to information that could be accessed using only telephone touch tones. This worked fine for simple inquiries, but not for more complex transactions such as ordering airline tickets, i.e. travelling from Boston to San Francisco would require the caller to be presented unmanageably long selection lists or similarly long lists for ordering items from a catalog. As a result, speech recognition was born to offer the caller a more natural telephone interface. This allowed the caller to essentially have a spoken dialog with a computer.
When you contact your bank, mortgage company, or the customer service organization of that product you bought but are having difficulty with, is it a pleasant experience? Being a salesman the past 40 years, the last 20 selling technology in the contact center space, I thought I would summarize some of the evolution of this business segment that most people love to hate.
It used to be when you called an organization, a person would answer the phone and you would explain your issue or the information you desired and the person with whom you spoke would either provide you an answer or would call you back. That’s assuming, the organization had a customer service department. Many didn’t. As an example, If you wanted information regarding your bank account, you went into the branch.
Much of this began to change after the deregulation in the telephone industry almost 30 years ago. That led to the evolution of the telecommunication industry. Up until then, businesses like individuals received all their telephone services directly from the phone company. If an organization added a phone, they obtained it and another line from the phone company. The telecommunications manager was simply the person that ordered the phones.
One of the first technologies to emerge in the customer service space was Interactive Voice Response (IVR). In my next posting I’ll discuss the evolution of IVR, which, although disliked by many, is an extremely useful solution to obtain information and can actually be user friendly if properly designed.
