Edmonton Call Center Frustration

Last December I watched with interest as Edmonton launched a new call center, 311, with ambitions to improve service response. The target at the time was to respond to 80% of the calls within 25 seconds. But in the first six months, the average time waiting for an operator was two minutes. ($10-million phone service source of frustration By Frank Landry, City Hall Bureau, Edmonton Sun)

The idea was a good one. What went wrong?

I am most concerned that the "fix" quoted in the article is to hire more operators and add Interactive Voice Response. Beware of techie fixes, especially if the problem is not fully understood. Those of you who know me will agree; I like gadgets. Especially if they make my job easier and faster. But gadgets aren't always the solution. For instance, I have resisted the urge to buy a food dehydrator, a showtime rotisserie, and an electric meat slicer. A girl has only so much counter space.

So if buying a new gadget is not the solution, what could the call center do to improve it's service? First of all, the agency needs to find out why it takes so long for an operator to conclude the call. I suspect they have many of the problems experienced by Alberta Treasury Branches (ATB) when they decided to improve their call center operations. ATB is now a "best practice" model on how to improve the customer experience.

Here is a quote from the Customer relationship management systems handbook
By Duane E. Sharp (2003) (P 152, 153)

"ATB’s cumbersome contact center system lacked the functionality to service customers quickly. Often, customers who thought they were phoning a local branch office had their calls redirected to the centralized contact center, where the customer’s transaction history was unknown. To find the answers the customer needed, the contact center representative would have to bring up any one of several different screens, a laborious, time-consuming process….[now] when a call comes into the contact center, a profile of the customer will pop up, giving the representative information about who the customer is, the customer’s address, a full listing of the customer’s holdings, and a description of the customer’s last contact with the bank."

I would respectfully suggest that the city would do better to hold off on the purchase of the interactive software, learn more about the business of responding to city calls and the number of screens their operators must flip through, learn more from the best practice models like ATB, and then come up with solutions.

I'll throw in one more plug for the Fish! philosophy. Here is an article by John Christensen on the implementation of Fish! at Sprint's call center, "A Call for Change".

Call centers are important. Call centers are where front-line interaction with the customer happens. The customer's opinion of your offerings are made here. Set aside the statistics for a moment, as summaries and statistics may mask the cause. Executive should take a day off and sit in and listen in at the call center. How does the public really feel about your agency?

If this is where customer relations are made or broken, why would you put any barriers, such as automated response, between the caller and you? As I learned from webpagesthatsuck.com, the smart guys such as Wal-Mart, E-Bay and Amazon give the customer a smooth experience. Doors of entry are wide open and there are no barriers between customer and product.

Streaming Fish

Again, no topic today. A work assignment has completely absorbed me for the past few days. Hubby gets monosyllable grunts instead of complete thoughts. But I do want to keep up on the writing. My theory that body and mind responds to habit does seem to bear out. I wake up in the morning anticipating my blog.

Now, if this poor old brain had something to say..... mister fishy grins at me from his perch at my desk. He makes me smile. Hubby and I saw another at a Webkins display, the first time I've seen him in Edmonton.

Mister fishy of course, reminds me of Pike Place, the success of my unit to introduce joy in the workplace, and the accolades that came from that. That initiative is getting old, but the principles haven't. They've borne the test of time.

Public Voyeurism - Swarming Celebrities

Colin Farell yesterday confronted a paparazzi for yelling at his sister for getting in the way. Media frantically gathers information on celebrities to feed an apparently insatiable thirst for that information. The way we do that in the western world has a wrongness about it that I haven't quite fingered. Today I have more questions than answers.

When does the public's apparently insatiable desire to know become wrong? In a nation steeped in the principles of "freedom of the press", is restraint possible?

Here's a definition of mediated voyeurism from the book, Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. by Clay Calvert.

"Mediated voyeurism refers to the consumption of revealing images of and information about others' apparently real and unguarded lives, often yet not always for purposes of entertainment but frequently at the expense of privacy and discourse, through the means of the mass media and Internet. "

The book concentrates on "reality television" and the unreality so created. Privacy is a right. Obviously people who participate in such shows must sign away their rights to privacy, including night vision cameras. Regular people who have not cavalierly given them away, are more sensitized to their rights in this regard, especially now that we have the tools to break down all apparent barriers. On the other hand, it can be argued that celebrities, unlike "reality show" participants, never sign their rights away. Privacy is gradually (or suddenly) taken from them. Can a celebrity ever have a "private dinner" in a public place? Is there such a thing as a "private beach"? What lengths must a celebrity go to for privacy? How much privacy can a celebrity create for themselves without help?

A veteran of celebrity status, Gareth Edwards says,

"But the fact of life is that the mouth of the media is a very hungry one to feed. People may say there's no such thing as bad publicity, but I wouldn't necessarily agree...Publicity and all the attention is not something you get used to, it's something you grow with. If I were to say, 'Is it a nice thing?' then yes, it certainly is, and it has more attractions than drawbacks."

So far there are few restraints on the insatiable collection of minutae by the media, all under the cloak of "freedom of the press". Will there come a day where self-monitoring will be inadequate? Will the public demand some restraint on what is offered free on people's lives?

Here's a popular vendor who does not cater to the public, Shopskins . The link provides an audio interview, about twenty minutes long, with the owner of this popular restaurant. His answer to the public frenzy was to find a smaller location off the beaten track. He routinely ejects about 3-4 people a week if he senses they are simply there for the show. Check out the mixed reviews from visitors.

How different from Pike Place Fish, who have cheerfully embraced their yogurt dudes. The difference, perhaps, is that Pike Place has been committed to becoming "world famous" and has grown the company and it's offerings as it's popularity has grown.

Paparazzi: http://www.viiphoto.com/showstory.php?nID=870

Things Left Unsaid

Well, I'm wrapping up Pres. Obama's book on the Audacity of Hope. I won't provide a summary on these pages. Wiki it or google it or something. But I warn you in advance that no summary can do the book justice. If you really want to know what is driving Pres. Obama's reforms in the United States, read the whole book. All of it.

A chief joy of the book is that none of the raging controversies are ignored or glossed over. Pres. Obama covers race, poverty, abortion, and religion among others. He speaks plainly where our society has failed - sometimes miserably. Don't think that Canada is immune. Very often where Americans go, we blithely follow. For instance, we may take comfort that we hadn't the slavery problem. But don't tell me we don't have an unstated class structure that leaves our Native population neglected and at times disdained. It sure is painful to see those failings in print. Thankfully we are not left there. The next critical step is to talk about where we can all agree to address these issues.

Agreement doesn't make good press, but if these critical issues are to be addressed, all sides of the ideological debate must start talking about our common ground.

This bold statement of the problem is something I am missing from my management style. I inherited it honorably. I am likely the third generation to be raised on the strict Methodist code of rule by silence. After all, the offender should know what they have done wrong. As a corrolory, why waste breath on praise? They should know that, too.

I've learned to praise publicly and often. Not only for others but for myself too. Hang the upbringing, I am motivated by praise. Everyone else is too. But it is still so very hard for me to tell an employee their obvious failing. There are people who have so obvious a defect it prevents them from moving on. My inner voice claims that they must know, or else they are so self-deceived they would deny it to my face anyways. But by not saying anything, am I condemning them without any opportunity for reform?

This is not the coaching way.

I am reminded all over again while re-reading Pike Place Fish's "Catch!" with my staff. These are fishmongers; rough and ready dudes. They respect each other enough to coach to greatness; every one of the guys. Why would I respect my own staff any less?

So in conclusion, silence is not an option. Say the tough things, in kindness. Say it with the intent to change. Say it knowing that by bringing problems in to the open might mean I must change too.

This is the way to change my office and help all my staff to greatness. This is also the way to turn a country and a world around.