When was the last time you opened up a customer record to handle an inquiry only to find the comment field populated with abbreviations and codes that made the documentation unintelligible? Or, as you are quality checking the data side of a call, you find entries into fields that “are not allowed” according to procedures but certainly are allowed by the database? If you have, then you probably agree with Howard (2007) “Data quality isn’t just a data management problem, it’s a company problem.” And, certainly it is a customer contact problem we have to address sooner rather than later.

What happens when we aren’t diligent about ethical behavior? I don’t mean only the great lapses in judgment. I’m also talking about the “little nods” that happen on a daily basis because we are too busy to address them. Did you know that studies show employees have four ways of dealing with these confusing expedient nods? When employees watch us act contrary to our defined ethical standards (e.g., code of conduct), they often begin to demonstrate:

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

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

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

How many times have we heard it? One day a contact center manager is asked to make a decision that seems counter to the request asked yesterday. “We need to cut personnel costs…but, let’s not forget to keep our service level performance high.” I’m not saying that cutting costs and keeping service level are always competing actions but there are times when some decisions run counter to others.

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

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

As little as a few years ago I heard executives tout the great numbers being presented after data mining. The result of the mining was the end. However, now, managers are looking to the analytical result as the beginning. Business users use the analytics to answer two critical questions. They want to know how they turn the information into action and what effect each action will have. It is not enough to simply know the results of the analytical process. Data mining used to discover an interesting group of customers. Now we need to move to action and measurement by saying, “Here are a group of people that should be presented with product X when they call inquiring about product Y. By following this course of action we project a 20% lift in call center revenues over the next 3 months.”

Information technology is critical to the success of customer contact. However, according to The Standish Group “only 29 percent of IT projects conducted in 2004 were completed successfully.” Add to that a warning from Phillips (2007) in his article “ABC: An Introduction to IT Project Management" (Retrieved June 16, 2008, from http://www.cio.com/article/print/40342):

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

Defining the Digital Firm
Laudon and Laudon (2007, p. 7) define the digital firm as:

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

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

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

Customer Contact and Knowledge Management
The customer contact organization is highly dependent on knowledge. And yet much of the knowledge walks out of the call center on a regular basis because the employee turnover in a call center can range from 20 to 100 percent annually.

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

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

I was reading "The Global State of Information Security 2005" (retrieved from www.cio.com/article on June 1, 2008) when I came across the following quote:

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

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

I received an email from a friend the other day describing her recent customer experience. The last line stopped me dead in my tracks because of my recent work on defining quality agent behaviors. My friend said:

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

Now that we know product quality is higher with better interdepartmental interactions what can we do to enhance those interdepartmental relationships? As you read the research results below think through your customer contact organization and how you might encourage the innovation, decentralize the decision-making and structure rewards to accomplish the desired result. Sometimes we get so caught up on the immediacy of our customer contact that we forget to reward the individuals who do take the time to sense and respond to product or service improvement opportunities. So many great opportunities stay locked up in our people because either there is no mechanism to capture the idea or else our people are frustrated. They've communicated before but no action was ever taken (at least none that they know of).

A great research study shows that there is a relationship between the interdepartmental interactions and product quality. We've known this for quite some time in the customer contact arena. The call center agents talk to more customers in one day than do any other employees the rest of the year. Yet, how many of us have the sytems in place that allow these agents to communicate what the customer is telling them? Here's what the study says:

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

In the early days of the Internet, companies typically formed a separate “skunk works” organization to build, test, and manage the Internet channel. This was a costly decision. As the Internet channel grew, there was little to no coordination between this channel and other customer-facing channels. The customer experience suffered greatly. Most of us recognize this mistake when we order something from the Internet and then call a company to ask a question about our order. Most companies “forgot” that these channels should be seamless to the customer. A customer should be able to purchase something through any channel, return it through any channel, and ask for service through any channel. The company should view the customer holistically, not as separate pieces depending on what channel they choose to interact through.

As you may have noticed we are holding a free monthly discussion (see www.contactcenter.ning.com for details). This month (June 5) the topic is attendance management. I asked a question on one of my business networks (LinkedIn) to get some insights on what people are grappling with when it comes to this topic.

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

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

I have just started down the long road of Internet business networking. Yes, it takes diligence but I have seen good results. Jobs are posted and people are matched. I've asked questions and gotten great answers. I've made good contacts with people that I would have otherwise never met.

What experiences have you had? Are you part of any networks you would recommend? Do you have any hints to make the experience more useful?

I am part of:
LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/)
Fastpitch (http://www.fastpitchnetworking.com/),
Plaxo Pulse (http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/).

If you haven't tried it and want to have access to good people, this is definitely one way to go.

Customer value is a very important factor for a customer contact operation. Companies have to constantly attract and retain loyal customers thus increasing the lifetime value of their customers. In their 1995 article, Why Satisfied Customers Defect, Jones and Sasser describe how companies can increase customer loyalty by focusing on “completely satisfied customers” and targeting “right” versus “wrong” customers (Jones & Sasser, 1995). In the following quote, Jones and Sasser discuss how the “top box” satisfaction score (on a customer satisfaction survey) drives exponential loyalty. Their discussion of the “commodity” products and services is a critical one. For example, think of the consumer products in groceries. Can these customers be loyal to a higher priced brand and lured away from buying discounted “off” brands based on period coupon campaigns? According to Jones and Sasser, under certain circumstances instances, yes.