Congratulations, or Condolences

Congratulations, you are the new contact center manager…now what?

Recently we were asked, what are the first things a new manager has to do to be effective in their new role as the Contact Center Manager (CCM)? In particular what can a new CCM do in the first thirty days to be successful?

Contact Center Manger may well be one of the more challenging positions in any organization. The CCM must deliver the company’s service promise to hundreds or even millions of customers. The CCM must understand and deal with technology that supports customer interaction. The CCM must deal effectively with unexpected events or circumstances that impact on the center and its performance. Perhaps most challenging the CCM must take individuals, perhaps hundreds or even thousands in some centers, and make them into an effective team that serves their customers to the best of their ability. Just to complicate matters, all of this must be developed, delivered and managed in a ‘live’ environment, with no ‘do-overs’ or second chances.

So where to begin? As with any new manager the first thirty days are critical. It is during this period of your tenure you will be under a microscope. Both the staff and your superiors will watch and assess every move to see how it aligns with their expectations of you. Each act taken or omitted builds your reputation. Regardless of the role the first thirty days sets the tone for the way you interact with your superiors and the way your staff interact with you. Being successful in your first month can be a daunting task to be sure. So where do you begin?

Here we set out tasks, activities and processes that characterize the activities completed by successful CCM’s. Of course there is no single way to succeed, just as there is no one type or style of manager that will always succeed. The following is a compilation of our experience in working with, training and developing effective CCM’s. These observations are augmented by our experience operating centers, both our own and our clients. The following outlines themes that align well with building effective centers and succeeding as a CCM.

So back to the title of this article, “Congratulations, you are the new contact center manager…now what?” The first activity is to meet and understand your direct reports and staff. Your first task must be to take your direct reports, this group of individuals and bring them together as a cohesive team.

There are a number of dynamics underlying your interactions with your team in first few months when you move into this new role. Just because management has awarded you the position of CCM, doesn’t mean that your direct reports and their staff will automatically believe that you are the most qualified or even best person for the job. You should expect that one or more of your direct reports was also considered for this role and did not secure it. Additionally each member of the team understands how your predecessor completed the task. Many will expect you to maintain the status quo. Human nature is such that status quo is comfortable and is safe for most staff. Change on the other hand is uncertain and involves risk. So the backdrop as you walk into your first team meeting will have undercurrents of jealousy, suspicion and an expectation of more of the same.

As you look to your team, you will likely realize that they are not a team at all but a collection of individuals each being governed by their own individual concerns and perceptions about you and your ability to lead them. Your challenge as their leader is to take these individuals and bring them together as a team. One of the most effective ways to do this is employ the framework developed by Patrick Lencioni in his book “The Five Dysfunctions of the Team”. In his book Lencioni sets out a hierarchy of activities required to build effective team. I will paraphrase these steps below:

1. Trust is the pre-requisite for any effective team. You cannot have trust without vulnerability, or more accurately the ability to be vulnerable to each other member of the team.
2. You cannot have open and honest communications within a team with out Trust.
3. You cannot gain buy-in from team members unless there has been open and honest communication,
4. You cannot hold team members accountable unless you gain their buy-in to a course of action.
5. You cannot secure the desired results without holding team members accountable.

I would recommend reading Lencioni’s book for more insight into this hierarchy, but for the sake of this article we will take the truth of this hierarchy as a given and focus on how to achieve it.

Set up a meeting with your direct reports early on in your tenure. The focus of this meeting is a team building exercise. At this meeting set out the expectation that this meeting will be to get to know each other better and to build a more effective team. Of course, you will need to establish some ground rules for all discussion and team interactions.

These rules should include: honesty (all team members must commit to be honest and frank in all of their dealings); Engagement (all team member commit to be active participants in any discussions); Cohesiveness (all decisions made, must be supported by all members of the team, regardless of their support or opposition in prior discussions); lastly it is important that each team member understands that while it is the desire of the team to foster open communications and that each team member is expected to be an active participant in all discussions. The team is in no ways a democracy. You the team leader will make the final decision. While you welcome the teams input, you reserve the right to make any decision you feel is appropriate…after all that is your job and your responsibility.

For the initial meeting with your direct staff identify a vision for the section and group. Don’t make this a huge exercise. You can refine it later as more facts become evident and your understanding of the organizational requirements improves.

Provide an overview to the above hierarchy at the first meeting. Secure their buy and support for the hierarchy. Tell the team that your objective is to build a high performance team and to do that you need everyone to participate in the process. Ask each member to provide a 5 minute synopsis of their lives. Have them start from graduation from high school. Have them punctuate the highs and lows in their life by drawing a stock chart on a whiteboard or easel. This process will produce an number of results: first, each team member will know more about their co-workers, Second, each will share some low points in their lives that make them vulnerable to other members of the team. Finally the whole team will now have a shared experience the builds the cohesion of the group.

Once you have established the ground rules, and presented the hierarchy of team communications and have shared a little about their lives before they joined this team we can now move onto the second key step.

This step sets the stage for success of the contact center and for you as the Manager…building the contact center Strategic Plan.

In preparation for this meeting it is important to prepare the facts and current understandings for sharing with everyone.

What is the center’s capacity? Complete an inventory of what the center has: staff, equipment, processes, budgets etc. Most important, get a forecast of the demands for the center for the next 3 to 6 months; how many phone calls and/or other transactions are expected? Map the demand by week. The people doing the schedule are a good place to start. Make sure they check with marketing, sales and other stakeholders who generate traffic into the center.

Estimate any variance between the capacity and the demand. Does the center have the staff and equipment required to meet the demand projection? What is the state of the budget and how does that affect the ability to meet the demands you foresee?

Decide what changes need making and how that will be accomplished? Here it is presumed that you have the authority to make these changes. If not, you may need to get buy-in from others, including your staff. Get your staff involved in the data gathering and the analysis. If they help assemble and prepare the data and information for the meeting they are each more likely to draw the same conclusion as you when it is presented in the meeting.

No doubt as a part of the interview and selection process, you became familiar with the role of the center; and the expectations of senior management for the contact center within the organization. So with this big picture in mind, you can move forward to the second stage in your thirty day plan.

There are already goals and objectives in place for the center established by the senior management. In the vast majority of organizations these goals and objective fit into one of two categories: Extremely High Level or Minutia. In fact a number of centers will have both in place.

The Extremely high level goals or objectives are often taken from the company’s Mission Statement and employ phrases such as “to provide world class customer service” or “to deliver an unrivalled level of service”. These are in fact not goals, per say, but are rather philosophies. They are unconnected to a means of attaining the goals. They lack measurements to confirm the attainment of this level of performance.

I can hear the naysayers now chiming in. ”But we have metrics and KPI’s. So these are in fact goals.” In a few rare cases this may be the case. But out of thousands of centers that we have worked with, we almost never found this to be the case. What the measures and KPI’s really are is Minutia. These are an incredibly granular look at the individual transaction sets and agent performance against a backdrop of arbitrary numbers and figures, some with merit but many without.

The purpose of the Strategic Contact Center Plan is to create the connectedness between the Extremely High Level goals and the day to day metrics and KPI’s. This ensures that all measures support the attainment of the stated goals and objectives for the center and that the center goals support those of the organization.

Start the discussion by examining what are the corporate goals? Which of these can be achieved or supported by the contact center? Once this list has been identified the next question becomes what metrics, KPI’s or measures can be established that support or improve performance?

While this may seem quite straight forward and logical, in actual practise this is very rare. Most centers establish metrics, measures and KPI’s based upon what they have seen employed elsewhere or what they read is a Best Practise. The result is that centers’ often put in place measures that they think are best practices and are consistent with well run centers. The result is metrics and measures that are disconnected to the attainment of the stated goals and not aligned with the centers’ experience and history.

So which metrics and KPI’s should you employ? This is a point for discussion with your team. As a primer you will want to review the two primary types of KPI and/or contact center metrics: Quantitative and Qualitative. Quantitative measures are based upon numbers and efficiency. For instance how many calls per agent, Service Level, ASA, Grade of Service, Average Handle Time (AHT), Average Talk Time (ATT), Availability, Occupancy, etc. These are the most common metrics employed in contact centers today. Metrics of these types are useful in assessing individual or center efficiency with certain limitations. Example: ASA cannot be controlled by an agent. This is more a reflection of calls offered and agents scheduled. These metrics are numbers and counts related to the transactions but are silent regarding the quality of effectiveness of the transaction.

Qualitative measures assess the quality of service or effectiveness being delivered in the transaction. Qualitative measures include: Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), First Contact Resolution (FCR) and internal Quality Assessments derived through monitoring and assessing the contact against a set of pre-determined criteria.

Qualitative measures are less common as they can be much more challenging to implement than quantitative metrics. In the majority of centers qualitative metrics are frequently limited to internal quality assessments.

Qualitative assessments often require the joining and mingling of data from different sources unlike quantitative measures which are produced by the ACD or other systems,. Internal quality monitoring can be an effective tool. It requires the development of meaningful criteria that accurately reflects the quality of the transaction. If the assessed elements are flawed then the value of the process is reduced or rendered invalid. We have all seen centers with frivolous internal quality elements including: annoying neighbours, chewing gum and being in on time. It is clear that none of these factors actually impact on any individual transaction. Each of these reflects agent performance and adherence to policy rather than to contact quality.

Internal quality assessments can be characterized as what we believe is or should be important to our customers. Customer satisfaction can be best described as what is actually important to our customers. While logic would suggest that these two sets of metrics should be quite close this is often not the case. There is a fairly consistent gap of 20-30% between internal (QA) and external (CSAT) measures of satisfaction. Additionally the customer’s perceived value on common attributes is often quite different from the weightings employed in the Internal Quality Assurance process.

For example Average Speed of Answer is consistently ranked as one of the most important elements in call/contact center operations yet customers do not place nearly the same value upon it. The customer is much less concerned with getting their contact answered in speedy fashion than they are in getting the question or inquiry resolved.

To accurately measure CSAT focus specifically on the contact center interaction. A general satisfaction survey that focuses on the brand or the products does not provide meaningful data regarding the performance of the center. The contents of the survey must focus solely on the center and must be specific to an individual contact. Common questions posed in this process include:

1. Was your call/contact answered in a timely fashion?
2. Was the agent professional?
3. Was the agent helpful?
4. Did the agent help you to resolve your inquiry?
5. Is the center and company easy to do business with?
6. In the past have you ever recommend that a friend or acquaintance contact center?
7. Following your most recent contact would you now recommend a friend or acquaintance to contact the center?
8. Based upon your most recent interaction with the center has that contact: Improved your opinion of the center, reduced your opinion of the center or left you opinion of the center unchanged?
9. On a scale from 1 -5 where 5 is exceeding your expectations and 1 is a complete disappointment, how would you rate your most recent interaction with the center?

Of course there are a number of additional questions that could be asked and numerous ways of phrasing each question. The above survey assesses the agent (professional, helpfulness and resolution); the center (timeliness of answer, ease of use, top box (1 -5 scale); and impact versus previous opinions (recommendation and impact of most recent contact). Each of these components are essential in assessing how satisfied a customer is.

Tracking and measuring FCR is also challenging for a number of reasons including: unidentified expectations; absence of systems; and dissatisfaction with company policy or procedures. For example when is a contact really resolved? Is it resolved only when the customer gets the outcome they desire? Or is it resolved when the agent informs a customer that they cannot get the resolution they seek? Must you ask the customer if their reason for the inquiry has been resolved or is this a judgment call the agent should make? What happens if resolving one inquiry logically leads to a second question or inquiry? Are these two distinct inquiries or is it one inquiry with two elements? Can we track FCR based upon frequency of contact? Is a contact deemed resolved if the customer doesn’t re-contact the center for three days; but unresolved if they re-contact in two days?

As you can see there are a number of aspects that must be kept in mind when designing how to measure FCR in a contact center and the method you select can easily skew the results attained. For example if agents are being asked to decide if an inquiry was resolved, they will often say that it is. If the customers for these same contacts were surveyed the results are often quite different. This is a similar phenomenon to the gap between internal and external measures of satisfaction and the result greatly depends on the point of view and perspective of those involved. An agent who has responded to the questions and answered with the appropriate replies will often feel that they have properly resolved the inquiry, based upon their adherence to policy and process. The customer, however, unencumbered by knowledge of the policy or process will only want what they want and will feel the inquiry is unresolved unless they get what they wanted.

So how can you improve the accuracy of the process? It is unlikely that you can ever get to the point where all of the ambiguity is removed; you can however create an environment where the points of view, of both the agent and the customer become as transparent as possible. Then ensure that at the end of each interaction these points of view are reconciled. This is often harder than it looks to be with many challenges in a ‘live’ environment.

Most agents jump to conclusions regarding what they believe the problem to be without letting the customer explaining their point of view. This is both human nature (we love to interrupt), a reflection of the training the agent has received (active listening isn’t featured in most training programs) and a result of the guidance the agent has received (“your talk time is too high, you have to get off the calls faster”), which encourages guessing the question rather than listening to it.

By asking the customer how we can help them and listening to their request/query in full, we are halfway home. The agent then must restate what the customer wants to ensure that there is no confusion or ambiguity, then and only then, should the agent begin to answer the customer’s question or resolve the query. Once the agent has responded fully to the customer query and before wrapping up the contact the agent should then restate the question or query and the response and ask the customer if this resolves their inquiry. In some cases the customer will not be able to get what they want and in these cases they agent should explain why they cannot get the desired outcome and then ask if this resolves their inquiry. For example a customer may not be able to get a refund because they waited too long to request one. In this case the agent may reply by explaining the company’s policy on refunds and offer a point of escalation for the customer to pursue and then ask if the query has been resolved. It can be helpful to ask the agent if there was anything else they could have done to assist the customer and if the answer is yes, then the inquiry was likely not full resolved.

In your meeting you and the team need to join the dots between the high level goals and the daily and weekly metrics and explain how each metric supports the attainment or progress towards attainment and of each and every goal. If you cannot specifically demonstrate the value of a metric in realising or progressing towards a goal, drop the metric. The plan needs to include specific targets and goals for the center, each team and ultimately each agent. The tracking and reporting has to be defined it must also be objective data and not subjective or based upon opinion. This plan must be documented and once completed should be reviewed by the team for accuracy and reasonableness. The final step is to present this Strategic Plan to senior management and gain sign off from the senior executive that the plan reflects the goals and objectives of the center, that support the attainment of defined goals and objectives of the company and that the defined measures and metrics will be the sole basis for assessing success in achieving the stated goals.

If in your first 30 days, you can build a team, set the contact center strategic plan, secure management support and implement the associated metrics you will be well on your way to success in your new role.

Reinventing Call Centre Management

Just a quick post regarding an upcoming conference I am speaking at, Reinventing Call Centre Management on March 18 & 19 in Toronto. Now you have fair warning to either attend or book something else to save you from attending.

I will be speaking on Leadership Strategies for High performance call and contact centers. This is a meaty topic and I looking forward to it. For more information on the conference you can visit http://www.federatedpress.com/pdf/RCCT0803-E.pdf

The Challenges in Employing Research Reports to Make Purchase Decisions

The Challenges in Employing Research Reports to Make Purchase Decisions

There are a number of sources where call and contact center operators can gain insight into the offerings of contact center telephony vendors. The majority of these are provided or sponsored by the vendors and as such are suspect to greater or lesser degrees. There are a few research organizations that research and provide assessments of the vendors though even these are not perfect as many are based upon vendor submissions and interviews and can only be as good as the research analysts’ questions and depth of research completed.

In reality each call or contact center is unique and has unique requirements, while whitepapers and research studies can be helpful in assessing which vendors may be able to deliver the solution for your center there is no substitute for conducting a detailed assessment and analysis of your own requirements.

Selecting a purchasing a call/contact center telephony is a significant purchase and for organizations that rely upon their center as a primary customer interface, and who doesn’t today. A bad purchase decision can have significant financial, not to mention career limiting impact. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise to see organizations relying on ‘research’ from big name firms to validate their own findings and in some cases as the primary basis of a purchase decision.

Before committing to a business decision based upon a research study, it is important to understand the methodology and objectives of the study. For example Gartner in describing their methodology for their ‘Magic Quadrant’ research studies states that their study provides “snapshots of markets and their participants[1]”. Further Gartner also states in explaining their methodology, “is not intended to be an exhaustive analysis of every vendor in a market”.

A look at the methodology employed by Gartner may be cause to examine more closely the suitability of their study as a basis for a business decision. The Magic Quadrant scoring is broken down into two components “Completeness of vision” and “Ability to execute”. On the surface few would argue about the value of these two assessment criteria in an assessment, but a deeper dive surfaces more than a few questions. The research is heavily weighted to information provided by the vendors through briefings, product documentation, and client provided references. This approach increases the likelihood that the vendors are able to secure a superior review due to the effort they devote to disclosing and managing information provided to Gartner. This is likely more often the case in “completeness of Vision” which deals to a large degree with the product roadmap and future development. The “Ability to Execute” by nature is focused on the information and references provided by the vendor. Every vendor has clients who love them and will provide a positive and flattering point of view.

While the results reflect the results generated by the process, it is not without challenges and all potential purchasers would be wise to keep a few relevant points in mind:
1. The vendors assessed are not all inclusive. Some organizations do not participate in the process. The vendor may be too small or simply not focused on the contact center market space.
2. Magic Quadrant results may not be representative of the real world. For example, Cisco ranks very high in the Gartner assessment, below.
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure, North America, 2007
Source: Gartner (August 2007)

Yet Cisco implemented in spring 2007 their new ‘A2Q’ (Assessment to Quality) process which requires all resellers and integrators (this includes their top tier ‘Gold Certified Partners’) to allow Cisco two weeks to review all code before it is deployed. This is certainly a positive step given the inherent complexity in the Cisco solution, to provide a superior end result, it can also be seen as a response to significant stability issues that Cisco has had with their contact center product. In one case that TRG is familiar with a client was unable to complete call routing and reporting for almost six months following a change to their auto attendant messaging. Yet in the 2007 Magic Quadrant Cisco received the highest marks for ‘Ability to execute’. Cisco is not the only example: Oracle touts their Oracle Seibel hosted CRM as being recognized as a leading platform, yet it has been plagued by stability issues, unresolved help desk tickets and an ineffective offshore help desk. In this case Gartner identified Oracle as a ‘visionary’. A less flattering label may well be that of vaporware, because the solution doesn’t deliver what it promises.

The Magic Quadrant assessment does not include all vendors in the market. Some are too new, some are too small and some simply elect not to participate in the process. One example of an omitted vendor is ShoreTel. ShoreTel is a publicly traded IP telephony vendor (SHOR) which was a late entrant into the call and contact center market space. The company deployed their first IP PBX solution in 1998 and did not have a fully featured call/contact center offering until 2004. ShoreTel however has an advantage over many of their competitors in both the IP PBX and Contact Center markets in that they developed their solution from a blank page. ShoreTel is not encumbered by legacy equipment and a desire to ensure compatibility and future migrations from a legacy base, nor have they assembled their code based upon acquisition and the inherent integration of thousand of lines of code to complete specific or discrete tasks and activities. Freedom from these restrictions has allowed ShoreTel to develop and deploy a good call/contact center platform. While the ShoreTel solution may be in somewhat less robust than other solutions on the market today, depending upon the user requirements it may well be the best alternative for a significant percentage of contact center operators.

The following chart outlines the results of TRG call/contact center vendor selection engagement that was completed for a Fortune 500 company with more than 650 agents in numerous centers across the country.

Figure2- TRG- Commissioned Assessment

Specific user requirements were developed (41 mandatory and 14 future requirements were identified) and bids were solicited from 14 firms including all of the major players in this sector including: Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, NEC, and Interactive Intelligence, as well as Mitel, ShoreTel and others. TRG short listed Cisco, NEC and ShoreTel. At the end of the process it was ShoreTel was number 1 in the TRG rankings ahead of Cisco who was ranked as #2.

The results above are not to suggest that ShoreTel is the best solution for every company, nor that ShoreTel has the best functionality for every application, it doesn’t, but it does suggest that when companies examine their needs and look for the vendor that best meets those needs they may be surprised, with the result. ShoreTel for example offers a competent call center solution, with many of the enhancements organizations are seeking today.

Clearly while the Gartner Magic Quadrant is very informative and does provide an insight into the vendors selected it is, at the end of the day a “snapshot” that is skewed based upon Gartner’s vendor selection and assessment model. This research is a good point of reference for understanding the vendors, but by its very design is skewed to those vendors who invest the greatest amount of time and resources to managing this process. This should be a point of caution for any organization that bases their purchase decision on Gartner of any other similar reports, thinking that “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” (or basing their purchasing decision on a well regarded research report).

So what is the preferred method for making a purchase decision? As we have stated previously, each call or contact center is unique and so should be the best solution to meet its needs. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution. The best solution will be the solution that best meets to company’s’ needs today and expected future requirements. Employing an independent consultant can assist an organization is clarifying and weighting the functional requirements for today, the ‘nice to have’ and functionality expected to required in the future, though this may also be completed internally if the resources and competencies exist. Developing a Request for Proposal (RFP) that sets out these requirements is a logical next step in the process. Scoring the responses against the predetermined criteria will ensure that the best vendor to meet your current and future needs is identified. Lastly, complete due diligence to prove the ability of the vendor to deliver the desired functionality, and to do so in the manner desired, completes the assessment process. Follow the above steps will ensure that you end up with the solution you need and not just one that has received research accolades. You will own this decision for a long time; make sure it is the right one for you.

For more information about The Taylor Reach Group, Inc. please visit our website at http://www.thetaylorreachgroup.com/ .

[1] Gartner -Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes: How Gartner Evaluates Vendors Within a Market

Gratuitous self promotion

This has been an exciting fall for us at TRG; we have secured a number of new clients and launched some new services. In particular we are excited about two specific service offerings: Managed Service and Pay for Performance consulting.

TRG Managed Services may not fit with your view of contact center consulting, and frankly, it didn’t fit with mine until I realized the number of calls and emails I would get from clients as they prepared to go into planning, quarterly, and performance or budget meetings. Before they shared their performance, strategies or goals they wanted a litmus test. They wanted to ask our opinion about how they were doing…. Were the results good? Were their goals reasonable? How did these stack up against others in their vertical? What would we add?

These may seem like small questions and in fact they generally didn’t require a great deal of time to answer, we simply needed to understand the organization, it’s goals and aspirations for the contact center and had to have a historical view of the center to put the information in context. What did surprise us was the frequency of the questions. We began to see a market opportunity here.

So we asked our clients what they felt they got from the process and received answers such as “we wanted an independent view of how we were doing” and “We wanted to see if our goals were reasonable” or “ We wanted a dry run to review the numbers and ensure we could answer senior managements questions” and lastly “did we include everything we should have in the budget, are our assumptions reasonable?”

Based on this feedback we were sure we did have a service opportunity, not traditional or large projects, but rather small micro projects in 1 to 2 hour blocks of time. For less than a $1,000 per month our clients could have 10 hours of our time and use TRG as a sounding board, an advisor or a reality check.

The second service offering: Pay for Performance Consulting came about after discussing with some current and former clients the barriers they had encountered in retaining a firm like TRG. The single biggest challenge they had to overcome internally was the risk…”We pay a lot of money and we don’t really know what we get for it”. Having spent many years on the client side we understood this issue and while we do guarantee a 300% ROI on implementing our Recommendations, that doesn’t really help us get in the door in the first place. So we decided that the only way we could make it easier for companies and organizations to engage us was to eliminate their risk, by taking the risk ourselves.

The result was launching our Pay for Performance consulting services where we provide an estimate for a project based on a detailed scope of work and then execute the project with the client’s agreement. But it is the client who determines what value they received from this exercise and they decide what to pay.

For more information on TRG’s Managed Services or Pay for Performance consulting please call us at 416-979-8692 or email us at info@thetaylorreachgroup.com

Dumb Outsourcing Mistakes Bright Contact Center Executives Make

Dumb Outsourcing Mistakes Bright Contact Center Executives Make


We recently wrote an article outlining ‘Ten dumb things, bright contact enter mangers do’ and we were surprised by the response from readers and by the number of downloads and forwards we received. So we decided to follow up the general contact center management, with some more specific guidance for center manager as they look at outsourcing.

It is amazing that otherwise bright contact center executive that often make planned and considered decisions in other areas of their business, somehow seem to have their grey matter neutralized as they charge headlong into outsourcing.

The following is a list of regular challenges and mistakes we have seen bright contact center executives do while assessing and evaluating outsourcing and offshoring.

Don’t establish why outsourcing is being done or considered in the first place. After all outsourcing must be a good idea if our competitors are doing it.

Don’t investigate alternative solutions. If you have already decided that you need to outsource your contact center then looking at alternatives can be downright inconvenient. What would happen if you found a better solution?

Outsource for the sake of following the trend. It was in Fortune, Forbes or Business Week, so it must be right. The magazine said everyone else is going to India, so we don’t want to wait too long and miss out.

Travel to the offshore location and check out the hotels and amenities, after all if the bigwigs want to visit they will need somewhere nice to stay.

Don’t get competitive bids, why do we need them, they just delay the process. Besides a contact center is a contact center and we know we will save 80% so why quibble and delay over a few percentage point of savings.

Don’t establish objective criteria for evaluating outsourcers and the proposals. Criteria, such who have we heard of, who do our competitors use? Why make it any harder than it has to be

Don’t underestimate the power of psychic training. I just think a thought here in my office and my offshore outsourcer knows…scary.

Don’t bother to customize your staff training materials, they’re fine, besides the outsourcers has an extensive training program built around accent neutralization.

Don’t be concerned that your offshore partner doesn’t understand your customers. Really what aspect of your customer relationship can’t be addressed by watching 26 hours of Friends?

Don’t worry about what your customers will think, they may like the challenge of understanding new accents, words and phrases. Heck, they probably won’t notice the change.

Just send everything to the outsourcer; they will sort it out at their end…after all they are the experts.

Don’t involve the outsourcer with marketing/sales meetings that will just confuse and distract them from serving our customers.

Just get on a plane, you can find an outsource partner when you land. You can use the time in the air better to figure out how to spend your bonus for saving the company so much money.

Don’t visit their contact center, why take the trouble, after all they have nice pictures on their website.

Don’t plan to have to manage the relationship, they are the experts anyway, right and if there is a problem they will call me…at 3 in the morning.

Don’t budget additional expense to manage the relationship. How much can it really cost anyway to manage a few hundred folks dealing with your most important assets halfway around the world?

What mistakes would you add to the list? Let us know by email at feedback@thetaylorreachgroup.com

Of course there are many excellent outsource firms domestically, near shore and offshore. Many of these top flight companies have saved some of our otherwise bright executives from making these very mistakes. But like with everything else where there a good partners there can also be bad ones and it is the executive that makes the decision that must be vary.

Pay for Performance Contact Center Consulting

I have always been a firm believer in the old adage that "you get what you pay for", but it is also true that just because you paid a lot for something doesn't always mean you get a good result.

I think that generally products and services are priced based on their value and based on how the markets have valued them in comparison to alternatives available. But there always are charlatans out there who will charged big bucks and deliver little value. The technology and technology services realm has been rife with these occurrences...think vaporware. How many times have we heard how good something is going to be. How often have these future capabilities been presented or implied as being available today. All to often the truth only comes out after the purchase has been made. This experience is widespread enough to have lead to the creation of another adage specific to the technology space, "nobody gets fired for buying IBM". The upshot of this message is clear, the only safe choice is to buy what you know you can trust.

This whole purchasing premise is based on agreeing up front to price based upon a set of expectations and then seeing what you get. Well known and well regarded firms generally deliver what is expected, though this is not always the case. The less well known companies represent risk for the buyer, "what if they can't deliver?", 'what if it doesn't work?". We all avoid risk and clients are no different. Less well known firm and start ups have to overcome the perception that they are asking the customer to 'buy a pig in a poke', the clients' skepticism and natural risk avoidance can lead all to often to 'buying IBM', which is great if you are IBM and not so great if you are the unknown company with a great product or service, but can't demonstrate that without the client agreeing to buy your offering.

So what is a company with a good product or service to do? Well this is a situation that is common in the consulting space where I operate. The Taylor Reach Group, Inc. (TRG) a call and contact center consultancy, may possess a leadership team with hundreds of years of Strategic and Operational Management experience, serve clients organizations that read like a who's who of the corporate world. We may have won awards for the work we do and have offices in three major cities (Toronto Atlanta and Sydney, Australia) and operate globally, but we are certainly not a household name.

I have seen prospective clients elect to go with IBM (or in this case IBM Global), or PwC and other big 5 consulting firms based upon their skepticism and/or to avoid both personal and professional risk. Yet instead of getting a senior consultant with 20+ years of experience they may get a twenty-something year old MBA grad who has completed a six week training program. Now I ask you which approach do you think is more risky?

So the challenge we face is still the same...How do we overcome the skepticism of buying 'a pig a poke' and eliminate the associated risk?

Our approach is to let the client decide. It sounds simple, let the client decide what a project is worth at the end of the task. Rather than agreeing up front to a cost with a set of expectations but no guarantee of the quality of the result we let our clients determine the quality and how much value they believe they received from an engagement of project. Our Pay for Performance Contact Center Consulting model gives the client control over what we get paid. Of course this doesn't eliminate risk it simply transfers the risk from the client to TRG and we have the confidence to know that we can add value and are comfortable giving control over our remuneration to our clients.

So how will this venture work out for us, I can't see the future, but I am confident. I will keep you posted.

The Trouble with Consultants...and Clients

There is an old adage that a consultant is someone who borrows your watch and tells you what time it is. Some times this is truer than we would like it to be.

The reasons for an organization to employ a consultant are many and include:
1-Need for specialized knowledge not available within the organization,
2-Desire to have a 'fresh set of eyes' look at and examine the business or the contact center,
3-The need for additional 'bandwidth' to complete a task or project,

In the first instance above the organization will learn from the process and if the consultant provides effective knowledge transfer then the company will have developed a new capability and competency.

In the second scenario the expectation is that the company "can't see the forest for the trees" and that they are too close and too biased, based on history, experience and how thing have always been done, to see alternatives. The consultant can facilitate a new view of the issues and present new alternatives not previously identifed by the organization. This process can remove the 'blinders' from the organization and create a new method for viewing issues, challenges and opportunities.

It is in the third scenario that we can see the 'borrowed watch' come into play. This is a situation where the organization has the knowledge and skills to complete a task, but not the 'bandwidth' in people or resources to get the job done. In this situation the consultant has the highest degree of risk as the client will often have an expectation of the outcome, based upon their ability to have completed the project if they had the time. The client will often project this outcome to the consultant. The less ethical consultants out there might just set about to develop evidence to prove the clients desired outcome rather than complete the work required to meet the original mandate. While it is obvious to me that the only option is to complete the project without bias, this can pose numerous problems. Clients who beleive they could complete the project, may in fact lack some of the knowledge, skills or experience to actually do so. And when they have a stated expectation of the result it may be very difficult to convince that another result is possible or desireable, let alone superior. The meeting where the consultant finds a different result can be very difficult, yet can prove to be very rewarding when we suceed in demonstrating the superiority of an unexpected result and sucuring the clients buy in and support for this new vision.