Showing posts with label Call Centers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Call Centers. Show all posts

July 15, 2015

Your Bowling Help Desk At Your Service

This was the sign in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building Bowling Ally that I mentioned in a post yesterday.

[Note: I've removed the phone number so don't try calling.] 

Yeah, I've heard about a help desk for a lot of things, especially for Information Technology, but for bowling???

Thinking about calling a help desk for trouble with bowling [equipment], I couldn't help imaging how this may go and chuckling a little:

"Hello, this is the bowling help desk at your service--what is the nature of your bowling emergency?"

Or

"Press 1 if your bowling shoes are too tight.

Press 2 if you've dropped the bowling ball on your foot.

Press 3 if you've bowled 2 or more gutter balls in a row.

Press 4 if the bowling machine is in a frustratingly stuck position.

Press 5 if you've lost your bowling ball or need a replacement.

Press 6 if you need additional scoring sheets.

Press 7 if you're a lousey bowler and need bumpers to help your game. 

Press 8 if your fingers are caught in the ball and you can't get them out. 

Press 9 if you'd just rather be ice skating or going to the movies. 

Press the # key, if you need to speak to a bowling representative."

Lastly, I wonder if they open a help desk ticket for the bowling challenged and what their response time is. 

Yep, help is only a call away when you've got a bowling problem in the works. 

Now, if only they could fix the highly troubled DC Metro system--there should definitely be a robust help desk for that!  ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
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October 14, 2013

Listening Beyond The Superficial

"I know you hear me, but are you listening to me?"

That's something one of my teachers used to say to the class back in yeshiva day school. 

The New York Times reports on a company that is pioneering the study of "Emotional Analytics."

Beyond Verbal is helping to "reach beyond the verbal" and listen for mood, attitude, and personality of the speaker. 

The point is that if you listen carefully, you can decode a person's mood--almost like a "human emotional genome."

Beyond Verbal can already identify "400 variations" of emotions not based on the words chosen, but rather based on the tone and frequency of use. 

For example, is the person telling you over and over again about a products problems--and are they getting annoyed that you aren't getting it!

Through a speech analytics engine that examines patterns of verbal use, we can classify whether a person is dissatisfied, escalating, and so on.

This can be extremely useful, for example, in call centers that service (perhaps some irate) customers.

Also, speech analytics could help us with uncovering deception from terrorists or moles in the government by detecting threatening or nervous emotions that the subjects are trying to hide. 

Potentially, this software could be helpful in our personal lives as well in terms of identifying the context and providing the E.I. (emotional intelligence) to understand what a person is r-e-a-l-l-y saying to us, rather than just perhaps the superficial words themselves. 

If we can not only hear someone else, but listen better and perceive more precisely what they are trying to tell us and what they are feeling, then we can problem-solve and resolve situations better and more quickly.

Software like this could definitely help keep me out of the doghouse at home. ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
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March 11, 2011

Power To The People




From potholes to garbage, broken street lights to vandalism...we want to get our community problems resolved.
There is a good-looking application called "SeeClickFix" for connecting people and government to point out problems and get them fixed, fast.
It works with iPhone, Droids, and Blackberries; integrates with Facebook and Twitter; and has dashboard reporting and alerts, as well as emails notifications to provide acknowledgements and status updates on issues.
Built on the Open311 model, which provides APIs to existing internal systems and processes, so citizens report non-emergency issues to government based on standardized, open-access, and interoperable systems.
Open 311 describes how it works:
"Using a mobile device or a computer, someone can enter information (ideally with a photo) about a problem...This report is then routed to the relevant authority to address...this information is available for anyone to see and...contribute more information...By making the information public, it provides transparency and accountability for those responsible for the problem."
According to an article, iCitizen, in Fast Company (December 2010-January 2011), reported problems from citizen's smartphones or computers can even be routed straight to dashboard computers on public works trucks, "meaning a click in the morning can lead to a repair in the afternoon."
Ok, this may still be more vision than reality at this time, but it is a noble vision, indeed!
This is an evolution from 311 phones systems in many cities which are one way communications from individuals calling into government call centers and then waiting, waiting, waiting to see if the problem gets resolved to instead applications like SeeClickFix as a highly visible cloud solution where many people can openly exchange information over the Internet on public issues--providing more information, even potentially rating and ranking them (i.e. helping set public priorities for allocating limited public resources to community problems).
This can even be coupled with suggestion platforms such as IdeaScale for crowd-sourced citizen input into urban planning and community health, safety, and livability issues.
As part of its Apps for Democracy contest, DC awarded a prize and grant for the development of FIxMyCityDC, a web-based application for submitting service requests, checking status by interactive maps, along with the option of the user getting a call when the problem is resolved.
This is huge progress from the prior endlessly annoying call centers and their Interactive Voice Response Units that previously took callers through a maze of pre-recorded numeric options that more-often than not ended in the users abandoning the call and service requests going unfilled.
This is a far better model of information sharing, collaboration and transparency to solve real everyday problems in our communities, and a great example of the power of e-Government.

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November 7, 2010

Match Me With You

eHarmony and Match.com and other matchmaking sites are all the rage on the single scene with recommended partners for people being done by computer algorithm.

Now this concept of matching of people is going beyond people’s love lives and into the world of business.

CIO Magazine (1 Nov. 2010) reports in an article called “Call Center Matchmaking: Analytics pair customers with the right agents for better service” that companies are using similar technology to match customers and call centers reps in order to get higher satisfaction ratings and increased retention rates—and it’s working!

Since implementing the IBM system called Real-Time Analytics Matching Platform (RAMP), for example, Assurant has increased customer retention rates by 190 percent.

Other companies have been doing customer matching on a more elementary level for some time—for example, financial service firms route calls from high-net worth or high-balance customers to “premier agents.” Similarly, calls made at certain time are “routed to Boise instead of Bangalore.”

With computer systems like RAMP, there is a recognition that customers can do better by being matched with specific customer service representatives and that we can use business analytics to examine a host of data variables from sex and age to persistence in calling to match a customer to “the right” representative to handle their issues.

Based on success rates, computers have been shown to perform sophisticated business and data analysis, and to successfully match people for more successful business (and life) transactions.

If we can successfully pair people for love and for customer service, it makes me wonder what’s next (maybe happening already)? For example, will we pair people to “the right”:

  • Potential adoptee parents?
  • Neighborhoods?
  • Schools?
  • Jobs?
  • Bosses?
  • Coworkers?

In essence, as the “bar is raised” in a highly global and competitive environment, will we be pushed to seek to maximize our potential for success interaction with others—for developing high-performance and highly profitable interactions—by pairing exclusively with those that “screen” positive for us?

With genetic testing already being used to screen for babies that people want—like an order at Burger King—“hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us…”—we are already well on our way to “special ordering” the people in our lives.

Companies have also started to use intelligence and personality tests to weed out applicants, and the use of personality tests like Myers Briggs is already being employed for better understanding each other and working together.

However crude all this may be, it is essentially a high-tech way of trying to optimize our performance. The question is can we use technology to enhance personal interactions and elevate performance without subjecting people to undue bias, criticism, and violation of their privacy? This is a very slippery slope indeed.

Another potential problem with computer matching is that when we rely on computers to “tell us” when we have a good match, we are potentially missing potential opportunities for matches with others that cannot be easily quantified or summed up by a computer algorithm? As they say, for some “two birds of a feather flock together” and for others “opposite attract”—we shouldn’t limit ourselves to any creative, positive possibilities in relationships.


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March 27, 2009

Save A Penny, Lose a Customer

It’s amazing to me that organizations and people still miss the basic premise that underlies any successful business and that is good customer service.

Indeed all the innovation and technology in the world will not make up for the common business sense in putting the customer first.

Whatever happened to the customer is always right?

One of the most frustrating customer experiences is often associated with how companies routinely mishandle customer calls. We all know the shtick all too well by now:

  • The phone rings off the hook in the customer call center—why isn’t anyone answering?
  • If the phone is answered, very likely, the call is handled by automated call telephony—and you end up in a maze of instructions and options from which quite frankly, you may never return.
  • If you are so fortunate as to actually get to a real-live customer service representative, they won’t identify themselves—except with a first name--or provide a direct contact number to reach them should you get disconnected or need to follow up with them.
  • If you can identify who you are actually dealing with, you may quickly realize that you are talking to someone who is likely resident in another hemisphere and you may be unable to understand or effectively communicate with the company representative on the other end of the line (whose primary language is not your own).
  • If you are able to actually communicate with each other—what did you say?—you are likely to hear all sorts of gobbley-gook policies and excuses for why they can’t resolve your service request, need or complaint.
  • If you argue, raise your voice in frustration or ask to speak to a supervisor, you are likely to get “accidently” disconnected and you go back to go and cannot collect $200.
  • If you manage to get to a supervisor, the supervisor may throw you a bone and give you a partial win or more likely will stand firm and tell you to “talk to the hand, cause the face ain’t home.”
  • If you threaten to take your business elsewhere, you will have to place a call to another customer call center and start from step one all over again.

This is NOT a customer-centric enterprise architecture for an organization—it is almost the furthest thing from it aside from going out and actually paying customers to go use a competitor’s products or services instead of their own. This customer service-NOT approach is the death of our national competitiveness and represents the end of life for an organization and any individual employing it.

The Wall Street Journal, 24 March 2009, has a review on a book titled “Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us” by Emily Yellin who hits this right on the head.

“It is one of the most maddening ordeals of modern life. You are having problems with a product or service, and so (fool that you are) you call a customer help number, only to be greeted by a cheerfully inept or robotically indifferent voice at the end of the line.”

So why do organizations behave in this self-defeating, anti-customer fashion?

It’s called pinching pennies. Or penny wise and dollar foolish.

“Companies naturally try to keep costs down, sometimes rating the performance of their harried call-center workers by the number of calls they log, not by how well they resolve callers’ complaints…or companies move their help desks to countries where costs are low but accents are impenetrable. Or they switch to computer systems that leave already unhappy customer shouting their responses at an unresponsive machine.”

This is emblematic of the short-term focus on quarterly profits and share price at the expense of the customer satisfaction, service, and long term retention goals. The result: piss-poor customer service!

That’s why as enterprise architects, we need to ALWAYS start, end and follow every point in between with the customer needs. So in terms of EA what can we do to improve service delivery?

  • Focus on organizational performance goals and put customer satisfaction and retention at the top of those goals.
  • Align technology solutions and investments to deliver on the customer experience.
  • Don’t automate the customer out of the equation by removing genuine listening, empathy, and problem resolution.
  • Add a human-capital perspective to enterprise architecture frameworks to focus on best practices, targets, and transition plans to manage both the humans that work in the organization and to satisfy the human beings who are our customers. Human-to-Human interface!

Generally speaking, technology is known as an enabler for efficiency and effectiveness. Let it be first and foremost a means to better customer experiences. That is what is going to keep them coming back for more or heading to the exits.


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