innovation with technology, but this is now shifting to the Consumer side. Enterprises do not seem to know how to respond to the Consumerization of IT.  The initial reaction was a “lockdown” that prevented any personal devices from infiltrating the work place.  Now we are seeing CIO’s build strategies around BYOD, social media and tablets/smartphones that embrace Unified Communications and mobility.  While the workforce wants access to a variety of consumer products, the Enterprise is very slow to adopt and innovate.  This, of course, is changing rapidly and will eventually mirror the consumer side.

As with most Enterprise companies, we at Republic Services have struggled with how to embrace the demand to use mobile technology along with leveraging our customers’ access to these devices.  In my opinion, our company has a huge opportunity to increase collaboration and innovation by embracing mobility.  The ability to communicate and collaborate should extend beyond the traditional Enterprise methods such as voice, email and file shares and allow employees to use any device to securely access data at any time.
Embracing the cultural change and encouraging these types of behavior is a major challenge.  Within our organization, we have major projects both internally and externally to increase collaboration. Most of these projects have a strong mobile component.  The strategy allows customer and end user choices.  Can you imagine a bank demanding you go to a branch to complete transactions or an airline requiring a customer to visit a ticket counter to purchase their ticket?  In our sector of solid waste collection and recycling, it’s a little more complicated to deliver mobile transaction ability to the consumer.  Yet we must embrace that strategy because our customers are demanding it.

From a consumer perspective, I would choose companies that allow options for how I conduct my transactions.  In fact, I would pay more if I feel that company is creating value with ease of use and excellent customer service.  This willingness to pay (W2P) is a result of a company’s effort to create value in their customer service offerings.  Otherwise that
transaction is just a commodity, something I can get anywhere from anyone.  I do believe companies that have embraced a mobile strategy and multi-channel interactions are creating value with their customers, producing consumer loyalty and higher customer satisfaction.  Within the contact center walls, our employees are consumers as well.  Why should we not offer them the same mobile strategy that we offer our customers?  Employee retention in the contact center can be challenging.  Allowing the employees to view schedules, performance metrics, training and other essential job functions via a mobile device can only help employee satisfaction.  Shouldn’t great companies treat their employees just as they treat their most important customers?

Providing a choice to consumers and employees is critical for higher customer/employee satisfaction.  The challenge in the Enterprise is creating innovative choices for both while yet maintaining durability.  There needs to be a plan that aligns with business objectives
and produces measurable results to the bottom line.  A well planned and executed, innovative mobile strategy can drive not only revenue but also satisfaction amongst consumers and employees.  As an employee, it can be frustrating following a process that takes more time to execute than it should. Enterprises should be examining ways to use collaboration tools to break down employee silos and allow more innovative thought and communication.  For some organizations, it’s a massive shift in culture, but one I believe
employees are ready to embrace.  The freedom to create, to communicate and to be mobile is a growing demand.  Successful companies will figure out how to embrace this challenge.

Republic Services

Doug Saunders is Director of IT at Republic Services, Inc., a leading provider of services in the domestic, non-hazardous solid waste industry. Republic provides non-hazardous solid waste collection services for commercial, industrial, municipal, and residential customers in 40 states and Puerto Rico with more than 2,800 municipalities for waste collection and recycling services.

Since incorporation, Republic Services has been committed to the essential components of integrated solid waste management services: collection, recycling, composting, transfer and disposal. Each division of Republic Services is dedicated to preserving the environment while providing the most cost-effective programs for solid waste collection and disposal.

Nobody can deny the burgeoning importance of mobility in the contact center. Mobility is far from being a new concept in business as evidenced by the success of mobile field service applications that have become all but commonplace in the insurance and similar service industries. In the contact center, however, the concept of mobility has yet to be truly tested.

Most of the contact center discussions I’ve heard or read seem to focus on bringing mobility to customer applications. For example, providing a customer with the ability to pay a bill from a mobile device is a common idea. Gathering customer information and passing that onto a customer service representative on a mobile device, kind of like mobile CRM, has been talked about. What hasn’t received much attention, however, is the idea of adding mobility to the tasks that are undertaken on the other side of a customer contact; i.e., on the contact center side.

With the advent of the Web 2.0 framework and the ability to create widgets, or applets, that are browser-based and can run on any browser-enabled mobile device, the possibilities of mobilizing many contact center tasks moves from concept to reality. The challenge now becomes creating practical applications that address contact center performance as well as customer convenience.

Although it is possible to provide agents with access to contact center technologies on mobile devices while they’re outside the contact center, I don’t see the point. Realistically speaking, it is unlikely that many hourly wage agents will be driven to take work home after their shift is over. But, what if those agents could access their schedules and request changes at any time and from any smartphone or other mobile device? There’s an agent mobility application that makes sense.

For the contact center supervisor, mobility could become an essential tool.  Providing supervisors the ability to move about the contact center while monitoring performance metrics could be an industry game changer. Making it possible for supervisors to be mobile without having to leave critical performance applications at the desktop could boost productivity exponentially. Likewise, efficiency could be significantly impacted if supervisors were given anywhere access to things like the master schedule in order to quickly address the need to address tasks such as shifting breaks around and other schedule adjustments.

While creating mobile customer applications is a fairly straight forward process, coming up with mobile applications on the operational side of the contact center will take a little more imagination. I believe, however, that mobility will have its greatest impact on the customer care industry if applications grow from the inside out. It’s time to start thinking about the other side of contact center mobility.

Saddletree Research was founded in 1999 by veteran telecommunications industry analyst Paul Stockford with the objective of providing leading-edge industry information on contact center market segments that are new, emerging and/or have high growth potential. Based in Scottsdale, Arizona, Saddletree Research provides communications industry research including analysis of market trends, issues, technologies, and companies in the contact center, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and emerging communications markets such as social media.

So what opportunities does that open up for the Contact Center?

I recently read a great article in Information Week entitled “An App Isn’t a Mobile Strategy”. It was interesting to see how closely it mirrors our own perspective on mobility as it relates to contact center management, which you can reference in another recent
article “Contact Centers Break the Chains”.

To summarize, mobility doesn’t generally replicate an entire application. Rather, truly effective mobile apps enable specific tasks or activities that can be done anywhere at any time. An example in my life is my salesforce.com app. With this application I can get
information wherever/whenever on items important to our business – things like
sales data or customer support history.

For the contact center, we visualize those task components that can make the time contact center employees spend in the office that much more productive. We envision the ability for managers to stay connected even when they can’t be present. And we predict a more collaborative, interactive environment within the contact center walls, where technology enables the exchange of information even when employees are not sitting at their desks.

In my view, there are many opportunities for mobility to increase the pace of contact center operations by leveraging the power of mobility to manage people, process and
performance.

To demonstrate, Calabrio will showcase a hands-on mobile experience in our booth at Enterprise Connect in Orlando next week (booth 433). We’ll feature a variety of mobile devices and applications designed specifically for the contact center agent, supervisor and
manager roles. When it comes to mobility, role-based access becomes all the more critical, as applications must be tuned for the user to easily, accurately and conveniently accomplish a specific task.

Leading up to and throughout the event, we’ll be talking to industry analysts, vendors and
customers who will share their perspectives on the role for mobility in contact centers.

Stay tuned here for additional blog posts, follow us on Twitter, and look for us next week on Facebook as we bring the mobile contact center experience to you…anywhere…anytime…on the device of your choosing.

Tom

We recently sponsored a white paper with Frost & Sullivan titled “Can your center keep up with the changes?” which discusses these changing business dynamics and how contact centers can capitalize on the resulting opportunities. Over my next couple of posts, I will explore the most salient points. Today, I’ll focus on changing business dynamics. Next, how your contact center currently behaves in response to change and, finally, discuss some forward-moving tools and strategies.

To kick things off, let’s first look at the four ways the contact center environment is evolving.

- Influences from the Enterprise – Historically, the enterprise evaluated contact centers by looking at “cost-containment” and measuring outcomes such as number of calls. That view is changing. Enterprises are more aware of the strategic importance of delivering strong customer service and measuring customer satisfaction, which can translate to increased revenue.

- Generational Shifts – Today’s contact centers are managing to two very different generational workforces. Those from the Millennial generation, aka Gen Y, are accustomed to smart phones and other connected options, whereas older employees may struggle with the latest technology advancements and communication channels. Managers must revamp processes around quality evaluations and incentives, for example, to align with the shift in staff competencies.

- Customer Complexity – What channel should I use today? Contact centers face the challenge of addressing customer concerns and delivering high quality service in a multichannel environment. At our Calabrio User Group last fall, that was a common theme voiced by attendees. They’re operating in a world where customers not only call, but initiate chat, send e-mails, and voice their concerns in forums and other social media. Payoffs to engaging in these channels include stronger customer relationships and new opportunities to resolve problems.

- The Center Isn’t Always a Center – Geography has become irrelevant. Operations are no longer confined within a large brick and mortar establishment. AAA Western & Central New York, for example, is connecting customers with the best available subject matter expert, regardless of location. Today’s technology unifies multiple locations, storefronts, at home agents and subject matter experts into a single operation to help customers anywhere, any way, any time.

With all that is changing, it’s obvious to me that contact centers cannot be complacent. Progressive business leaders seek value as much as cost containment. If contact center leaders can’t demonstrate that value, they risk making the department irrelevant.

Stay tuned…

Tom

At Calabrio, we’ve heard the concerns from an industry that’s starved for more powerful applications that don’t feel like a science project when using them. In 2011, we made significant strides to overcome this problem by releasing a contact center software suite that is powerful yet simple Calabrio ONE takes the intuitive, easy-to-use characteristics of our favorite personal “apps” to deliver a better user experience for contact center workers by personalizing their views, simplifying how they access data, and streamlining their interaction with each other and the customer.  Industry reaction to Calabrio ONE and our own business momentum this past year truly validate that we’re on the right track.

Let me share some specifics. When we introduced the redesigned Calabrio ONE to the
marketplace in 2011, the response from our partners, customers, media and analysts was overwhelming.  We consistently heard that our hard work resulted in a software product that was a refreshing change in an industry desperate for innovation.

The positive response translated into tangible sales, industry awards and solid media coverage.  We added more than 80 new customers, exceeded the million mark in total seats deployed, and continued to attract customers from our biggest competitors at an
ever increasing rate. All of these results illustrate that the industry, and most importantly, our customers, recognize how Calabrio ONE can improve their business.

It was an honor for us to be recognized so prestigiously with awards such as the Tekne Award in the Software/Small and Growing Company category. We also received the top score in customer satisfaction and were named one of the top four vendors in workforce optimization in the 2011 CRM Services Awards by CRM Magazine. The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal also named Calabrio as one of the fastest growing companies in Minnesota for a second consecutive year.

Further product validation and recognition came from some of our industry’s most prominent media outlets. We landed on the cover of July’s Customer Inter@action Solutions, and InformationWeek stopped by our Enterprise Connect 2011 booth to talk to our own Kristen Jacobsen in a video interview, just to name a few.

Even though we’re confident we’re delivering a simple solution for contact centers, we must continue to engage with our customers to stay up to date on their future challenges. With that in mind, we topped off the year with our inaugural Calabrio User Group event in Nashville, Tenn. It was a productive and engaging three day event for us as we were able to talk with our customers on how we can continue improving the user experience with Calabrio ONE.

For 2012, we’re further developing our user interface to better tackle the challenges facing the contact center industry. We’re already off to a great start too with the release of Calabrio ONE version 8.8, which improves the contact center supervisor experience with more capabilities and tools in a simple-to-use dashboard.

I want to sincerely thank everyone who has supported us throughout the years. We have a lot cooking for 2012 so remember to sign-up for our newsletter, subscribe to this blog, send me your feedback and follow us on Twitter to keep up with Calabrio’s latest news and insights.

Tom

My son and I both love MLB.com, but we have a very different level of interest in baseball, so the manner in which we use MLB.com varies. My son is a fantasy baseball guru. Every season he spends countless hours managing his team, picking his players and researching waiver moves. He’s a stats junkie, tracking and researching individual players’ performances throughout the season. So when he visits MLB.com, he prefers the site to launch into Player Statistics immediately.

I’m not as much of a fantasy baseball savant as my son. I would rather see how teams are performing and how overall standings are playing out in the league. I’m less concerned about the on-base percentage of Albert Pujols as I am in the Twins’ standing in the American League Central. When I visit MLB.com, I prefer it to immediately launch into the standings for an overview of the rankings throughout the league.

In a way, the differences are similar to how an agent consumes information about contact center statistics as compared to a supervisor or manager. That’s why, with our Calabrio ONE suite, there are different views to suit different needs.

My son’s interest in player stats is similar to a contact center agent who personalizes their dashboard to view their daily performance, for example. That same dashboard can be further customized to allow them to monitor their performance evaluation scores with a desktop widget. With just a click, agents can also access work schedules and view their assigned shifts and request vacations or swap shifts with other agents.

My interest in overall league standings is similar to a contact center manager or supervisor who needs to monitor the contact center’s overall performance. A supervisor needs a dashboard view that shows performance scores on an individual agent, team and organization level. The supervisor can set their desktop to display scores to easily assess whether or not they are meeting business metrics, and they can compare scores between agent teams to determine any problems. With scheduling, supervisors are a click or two away from knowing in real-time if contact center activity is matching up with the forecast and whether they need to adjust staffing levels.

Like the sport of baseball, contact centers are driven by the numbers. The amount of data surrounding customer contact activities is dizzying, and the way in which different types of centers consume that data is as varied as the individuals who staff and manage them. So truly effective software must provide a focused view of the stats and tasks that each individual cares about – nothing more and nothing less.

My son and I both use MLB.com, but we’re able to cater to our individual interests by customizing our own immediate webpage views.  Calabrio ONE is designed with this same principle at its core, having the right view for the right person according to their specific role and responsibilities. Everything should be immediately accessible according to the person’s need. As our clients get to this level of personalization, we’re helping them hit the ball out of the park.

Tom

One of the most important experiences we took away from the CUG Summit was the chance to share ideas and really get to know each one of our valued users who took their valuable time to help make us better. We were so pleased with our users’ openness and willingness to provide essential input.  As I stated in Oct. 27^th’s post Coming Together Makes for Good Company and Good Design, we can’t depend on what we THINK our customers need – we must work with our customers to tailor our solutions to really meet their dynamic technology and business requests.  The summit provided us with this valuable opportunity to collaborate with our users and continue to work towards meeting those contact center challenges they face every day.

Customers can join CUG anytime; just visit our Calabrio User Group webpage.  We are already preparing for next year’s annual summit – and looking forward to it! 

Tom

We can hardly wait! In preparation for the event, I spent a few minutes with Greg talking about his perspectives on the industry in general. Here’s what Greg had to say: 

Q: How have you seen contact centers change in the past 5 years?

Greg: For one, the contact center now receives much more respect from the rest of the company and the business world in general. What used to be viewed as a mere back-office operation is now highly valued for the critical customer data and insight it gathers daily (and shares with key departments) to greatly enhance customer loyalty and revenue. No longer do contact center managers and staff get beaten up and have their lunch money stolen by big mean bullies in Marketing, Sales or other departments. If you work in a contact center and still do endure such bullying, let me know and I’ll take care of it. I’m tough like that.

Another big and very positive change in our industry is the increased use of home agents. After years and years of contact centers just tinkering around and testing the home agent waters, many are finally fully embracing this powerful staffing model, which studies have shown to improve agent recruiting, retention and performance, as well as decrease facility costs and enhance staffing flexibility. Add in the obvious “green” benefits the home agent model affords, and it’s easy to see why more and more companies are kicking their agents out of the contact center. 

And of course, no conversation about big changes would be complete without mentioning the emergence of social media and its impact – both real and imagined – on customer care. Just when contact centers were starting to get a handle on the phones, email, chat and web self-service, social media comes barreling in and forces managers to return to therapy.  

Q: What are a couple of the biggest challenges facing contact centers now?

Greg: One of the biggest challenges contact centers face now is one that they have always faced: Keeping agents in place and inspired. While with ICMI from 1994-2010, I was involved in several research studies and reader surveys in which we asked managers to list their biggest concerns and challenges. Agent turnover and burnout always topped the list. Fostering agent engagement and retention is especially critical in today’s crazy competitive business climate, where top-notch service and support is often the differentiating factor – the thing that determines what company a customer sides with.

I’ve already alluded to what I see as the other major challenge in today’s contact center: Managing the multichannel madness. Have you ever tried accurately forecasting and scheduling for phone, email, chat and social media contacts – and ensuring that customers receive consistent, efficient and effective service regardless of which of those channels they choose? Scary. It’s why I merely analyze and write about contact centers rather than actually RUN one!

Q: You’re a humorist in a unique industry. Can we use a little more comic relief in the world of customer service?

Greg: Absolutely. Just look at what we’ve got: An industry full of managers being pressed by execs to constantly do more with less; agents being measured on a multitude of performance metrics while sitting in a cubicle that’s the same square footage as their body; and the entire center having to handle a seemingly endless stream of calls and other contact types from highly demanding customers who are often abusive even though they know that you know where they live. If that’s not an industry begging for comic relief, I don’t know what is.

Managing a contact center is no laughing matter. But if you want to survive in this business, laughing matters. Humor defuses. Humor relieves. Humor inspires. And if we can’t laugh at ourselves, who can we laugh at – besides the guys over in IT.

Q: What can Calabrio User Group Summit attendees look forward to hearing about during your keynote? What are the takeaways you want to leave with them?

Greg: Anybody who dares attend my keynote will hear me manically go on about a whole bunch of key practices and tactics for keeping agents motivated and engaged, including real-world examples of contact centers that have embraced those practices and tactics with great results.

Attendees won’t be permitted to leave the room until I feel confident they will return to their contact center to do what I talk about in my presentation, namely: 

- Implement fair and feasible performance objectives that enable agents to focus on the customer rather than the queue;

- Empower agents to use their collective skills and experience to continuously improve the contact center and the customer experience;

- Reward and recognize agents in meaningful ways;

- Invest in agents’ physical and emotional wellbeing; and, last but not least…

- Let agents work naked (from home).

Kristen

Our company’s commitment to good design also inspired us to retool Calabrio.com with the same creative principals we used when creating Calabrio ONE. Inspired by the flexible, intuitive Web 2.0-based design of our own software, we re-launched Calabrio.com so that customers and other visitors could access information and resources quickly in only a few clicks. The new Web site still features a library filled with demos, case studies, product brochures and whitepapers, but now visitors can obtain this information in multiple ways within the site. The goal is that visitors using our Web site will have a consistent experience when working with our Calabrio ONE workforce optimization suite.

As proud as I may feel about the design quality at Calabrio, I know our creativity can’t stop after our latest product launch or Web site makeover. We also can’t depend solely on what we THINK the customer needs when developing our strategy. We must work in conjunction with our customers to evolve our solutions to meet real needs, offer fresh ideas and drive success in their business.

With collaboration in mind, there is a designated Web community page on the new website that will provide a portal for Calabrio users to share industry’s best practices, educational materials, and business and technology needs.

It is no coincidence that we launched the new Web site in anticipation of our first formal Calabrio User Group.  This organization will serve as a community where Calabrio customers can come together to share their experiences, best practices and valuable input on our product strategy.  We are hosting our inaugural Calabrio Users Group summit this November 7^th-9^th in Nashville, Tenn. to spark robust discussions and learn from our customers about what is working well and where we can make improvements. Customers attending the event will get an exclusive peek at our plans for Calabrio ONE and meet many of the thought leaders and experts behind the scenes at Calabrio.

Collaboration takes many forms and inspires the best of ideas. By coming together with our customers, we can strive towards our mutual goal of tackling future contact center business challenges through an ever-evolving and distinctively effective suite of software.

Tom

I apply a similar strategy to my finance team at Calabrio. I ask them to close our financial books from the previous month within the first week of the new month. I want my finance team to spend the rest of the month analyzing financials, identifying trends and making predictions on what the company should expect. I want 20 percent of their efforts spent on looking at what happened the month before and 80 percent spent on analyzing and predicting what will happen in the future.

Speech analytics functions within a contact center much like the Pareto principle. It’s a tool that flags calls for supervisors to identify trends or potential issues affecting a larger share of contact center callers. Before speech analytic tools existed, contact center managers conducted quality control and searched for trends by sampling as many calls as possible during a specific time of day.  Supervisors typically spent the majority of their time listening to calls, missing the opportunities to react to trends and efficiently manage their staff.

Phonetics-based speech analytics flags a modest sample of calls-of-interest for contact center supervisors. From this sample, the manager may focus in on one or two common issues. Recalling the Pareto principle, finding the identified problems from a group of calls that has been intelligently flagged will most likely reflect the issues affecting the majority of your contact center agents, as well as other operational challenges or opportunities. This analytics sample provides far better insight into the business than a random manual sampling.

Speech analytics frees supervisors from the restrictions of finding calls manually. Utilization of this tool allows supervisors so focus their efforts on addressing identified issues and guiding operations. Following the Pareto principle, the supervisor will ideally spend only 20 percent of their time analyzing calls and 80 percent of their time managing the contact center.

It’s far more important to quickly understand the potential business impact of the ever changing conditions of a call center operation. Integrating speech analytics into your call center will free your supervisors to focus on customer concerns that may impact business and improve customer satisfaction where it is most effective. 

Tom