Off Center
 
Most contact center professionals will tell you how much they value their employees, and how the center has a lot of programs in place to keep agents – and thus customers – engaged and happy. However, few contact centers include Employee Satisfaction (E-Sat) on their formal list of key performance indicators.

And many of the centers that do consider E-Sat among their KPIs don’t do an adequate job of measuring/tracking the metric. Instead, they implement a plain-vanilla E-Sat survey once every year or two and take little action based on the findings.

The best contact centers give teeth and attention to E-Sat, using a comprehensive survey tool and implementing the survey once every six months or so. These surveys are designed to gauge not only traditional employee satisfaction, but also employee engagement. Engagement is satisfaction on steroids; engagement surveys help to identify which agents are not only happy with their job but also willing to maim others or themselves in the name of the company’s honor.
 
Most leading centers use an outside surveying specialist to design and implement the survey to ensure that the right questions are asked in the right ways, as well as to help foster a sense of privacy/anonymity, thus increasing the chances that agents will respond in a frank and honest matter. Surveying specialists can also help a contact center with evaluating results, pinpointing key trends and warning managers of a frontline mutiny.

Naturally, every contact center would love to achieve a 100% E-Sat rate, but that’s about as likely as a home agent bathing every day. As with C-Sat, anything in the 80%-90% range for E-Sat is impressive – and feasible, particularly if you incorporate into the survey process threats of physical harm for low ratings by staff. 

If E-Sat isn’t already on your contact center’s list of critical metrics, make some room for it. Bump AHT off the roster if you have to. And as for measuring E-Sat, don’t just go through the motions, or you’ll likely find that you have a bunch of agents doing the same. 
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Thanks to some special medication my doctor prescribed, I haven’t felt the peculiar urge to share any of my signature contact center song parodies with the public in a while.

Unfortunately for you, I’ve skipped my last few doses.

Below are the lyrics to a song I wrote – from the perspective of a contact center agent jealous of a co-worker who gets to work from home. You can hear a sample of the actual song – and even download the whole thing for a nominal fee if you feel so inclined – by going here: 

http://www.offcenterinsight.com/cc-tunes.html (be sure to scroll down to the third song sample.)

Enjoy! (Or, at the very least, try not to get nauseous.)


"On the Phone at Home"
(to the tune of “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan)

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Came in to work at 9 right on time, didn’t you?
Now you’re all alone, working in a robe
Chilling on the phone right from home – isn’t you?

We used to… talk a heap
Made fun of all the customers who… talked to me  
But now you don’t even sock your feet
Working out of your house there in your boxer briefs
Please tell me, I need to know now – what’s the deal?

How does it feel?
How does it feel?
To work all alone
Your facial hair all grown
On the phone at home

Yes, among us reps, you were the best
I guess you that you deserve to work undressed – lucky stiff
You always got awards with all your scores
The rest of us were bored, wanted just to roar “enough of it!”

But just because we… secretly
All wanted to beat you up so…   frequently
Doesn’t mean we wanted you to leave the scene
You never come into the center even just to see the team
So, what’s it like going to work without the use of wheels?

How does it feel?
How does it feel?
To work all alone
The whole house to roam
Your facial hair all grown
On the phone at home

You brag and brag, but we ain’t so sad
The center ain’t so bad, the other day we had… a pizza hour
Pepperoni grease and extra cheese
That’s all I really need to keep me pleased and… steeped with power

I know that you must miss our… breakroom chats
And the overtime snacks that are always…  laced with fat
Then again at home you get to take a nap
Whenever on a break from all this agent crap
Ok, I must admit, a home-based shift sounds quite ideal

So tell me, how does it feel?
How does it feel?
To work all alone
The whole house to roam
Your facial hair all grown
On the phone at home

Tell me, ain’t you scared with the fridge right there?
Your television’s staring at your chair – tempting you
How do you adhere with your bed so near
The devil on your shoulder in your ear saying… “Bend the rules”
   
There’s a pool out back – you know you want to… take a dip
Even if it means your stats will… take a hit
Gonna do my best to try to make you slip
Because I want your job and I plan on taking it
Man, I want to work at home – and I’m prepared to kneel

How does it feel?
How does it feel?
To work all alone
The whole house to roam
Your facial hair all grown
On the phone at home


Don’t forget to check out a sample of the song at: http://www.offcenterinsight.com/cc-tunes.html

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Last night you were told by senior management to “do less with more” in your contact center.

You can stop celebrating now – it was just an “opposite” dream.

Back to reality.

Contact center professionals have historically had to devise ways to do more with less. The economy being down for the count hasn’t helped matters much. While some managers have resorted to prayer and medication to get through it all, others have rolled up their sleeves and gotten creative.

Especially in terms of contact center staffing. Try as some organizations might, you can’t simply replace agents with machines. The best contact centers have learned to be innovative and resourceful with existing employees – embracing unconventional and progressive staffing and scheduling approaches to get the most out of agents without breaking their backs.

Here are several ways you, too, can get crafty with staffing in your contact center to drive the sort of success that upper management demands, and that customers expect.
      
4 x 10 workweeks. Many centers have introduced 4 x 10 workweeks (four 10-hour days) to the agent scheduling mix, thus enhancing coverage in the contact center during peak periods while simultaneously making agents happy with an extra day off. Schedules can be arranged so that the center has all hands on deck on the busiest days, like Mondays. And since 4 x 10 stints are popular, centers find that they have plenty of senior agents working through the evening, thus ensuring that service quality and efficiency doesn’t go down once the sun does. 

Agent reserve teams. The contact center loses many of its best agents to internal departments like Marketing and Sales all the time. Crafty managers know how to steal them back – at least temporarily. Creating a crew of former agents who can help out on the phones during unexpected call spikes is a great way to meet service level objectives without having to enter into a complicated outsourcing arrangement. It also brings some welcomed job diversity to those who serve on the agent reserve team, who more than likely miss their headset a little. After all, you can take the boy or girl out of the contact center, but you can’t take the contact center out of the boy or girl.

Home agents. I can’t say enough about the home agent model. When carried out with care, no other staffing approach has as big an impact on agent engagement, retention and performance, or on the center’s ability to staff flexibly and cost-effectively. The center is able to attract and keep top talent who rarely if ever call in sick and who don’t mind being “on-call” on occasion if it means getting to work in just their underwear every day. And kicking agents out of the contact center means the contact center facility needn’t be so big – and rent so expensive. Plus it’s all seamless to the customer, except for the fact that they might note a little extra joy in the voice of the agent with whom they’re interacting.
 

To read more about these and other effective staffing/scheduling tactics – as well as lots of other contact center best practices – be sure to check out my comprehensive ebook Full Contact. http://goo.gl/y73U9

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Nobody could have foreseen the on-the-job meltdown of Tim Thomas, a veteran customer service agent for Alabama Light & Electric (ALE), during a tropical storm last summer. Tim had endured numerous call deluges during regional power outages in the past without so much as a whimper or a whine. His fellow agents had always revered his skill, dedication and resolve – particularly his use of adult diapers during peak periods to cut down on his time offline.

To them, Tim was invincible – until the afternoon of Thursday July 14, 2011. While handling calls during the three-day long storm that left nearly half of ALE’s customers without power, Tim suddenly snapped. In the middle of a call, he punched his computer screen and threw his “Employee of the Year” plaque at the contact center’s readerboard before attempting to eat his headset. His colleagues and supervisors were shocked – never before had they heard Tim forget to use the proper call closing with a customer.

Tim’s manager recently discovered the personal journal Tim had been keeping right up until he freaked out. The journal entries from the days during the storm provide a fascinating and vivid account of the unfortunate unraveling of ALE’s star agent, who has since moved on to work for the U.S. Postal Service as a mail carrier.  

Below are several of the aforementioned journal entries:

Monday, July 11 - 4:30 pm: High winds and heavy rain have left many of our customers in the dark. I’m handling about 50 calls an hour – just wish I could do more. All those nice people trying to get through to us for information and consolation. I love each of them like family. My manager just offered me some pizza, but I told him I couldn’t possibly take time to eat while our customers are suffering so. I think I’ll volunteer to work through the night.

Tuesday, July 12 - 11:15 am: The wind and rain are unrelenting.Things sure are crazy around here – call after call after call from frantic customers. But that’s why I became a rep. I live for helping others. Granted, it would have been easier if these people didn’t yell at me whenever I answer the phone. Don’t they know I didn’t cause this tropical storm? Don’t they understand I’m on their side? Probably not – most of them don’t even know their own zip code. Oops, that was mean and uncalled for. Shouldn’t lash out like that. Must stay focused. I wonder if there’s any leftover pizza from yesterday.

Tuesday, July 12 - 5:20 pm: I’ve handled 120 calls in the past hour and a half. Can’t get my eyelid to stop twitching. I’m starting to regret not going to work on my uncle’s farm. No phones there. No confining workstations. Just fresh air and plenty of nice goats.

Wednesday, July 13 - 9:45 am: My supervisor just hung a banner in the middle of the contact center that reads, “Don’t Give Up.” How encouraging. I should hang him in the middle of the contact center by his stupid tie. Oh, but then who would monitor my every word and action? As I write this, an annoying caller is babbling into my ear – something about a down power line in her backyard. I just thanked her for completely ignoring our IVR, which is designed to handle such types of calls and save me from wanting to cut myself. I told her a technician would be there as soon as possible, and recommended she go out and mow her lawn in the meantime. She hung up. But what’s this? Surprise! Another call is coming in. Probably just Satan.

Thursday, July 14 - I have no freaking idea what time it is: The rain and wind will never stop. The calls will never stop. My eyelid twitch will never stop. All the customers are out to get me.They’re each plotting ways to have their calls routed directly to me. They want to see me crack, but I refuse to let them destroy me. They have no idea whom they are dealing with, the powers I possess, how easy it is for me to press the “release” button. They may have taken away my lunch break, but they’ll never defeat me. Never. Never! Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha!

That was Tim’s final journal entry before his complete meltdown. Three supervisors tried to restrain him when he became violent, but they were no match for his surprising strength. The struggle didn’t stop until the contact center manager shot Tim with one of the tranquilizer darts usually reserved for neutralizing agents on payday. 

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I’ve long been friends with Susan Hash and Linda Harden of Contact Center Pipeline (a most excellent publication), so when they came to me asking if there was anything they could do to help promote my e-book and Off Center in general, I just had to say yes. I’m selfless like that.

The below Q&A set was taken from an interview I did with Susan Hash last year. The article first appeared in Contact Center Pipeline.

Tell us about your e-book, Full Contact: Contact Center Practices and Strategies that Make an Impact. How does it differ from other books on the market by call center consultants and industry experts?

Basically, I set out to create a highly compelling, actionable and entertaining composite of the best practices and strategies I have uncovered during my nearly two decades as a journalist and researcher in the contact center industry. But then I got frustrated with all the verbs and adjectives, so I decided to have my ghostwriter do it. I’m kidding of course; Full Contact is all me, for better or for worse. 

What I feel distinguishes my book from others is that it isn’t filled with mere theory or pie-in-the-sky advice—rather it’s overflowing with proven tactics and useful resources that managers can utilize immediately in their own contact centers. In addition, I tried to inject a healthy dose of humor and levity into every chapter of Full Contact. It’s the only way I could get my wife and mother to read it. My intention wasn’t to have the humor outweigh the key points, but to accentuate them and make them go down more smoothly.


What are the top two or three things that managers can take away from Full Contact as action items they can implement immediately in their centers?

#1: How to attract top frontline talent and keep them fully engaged and committed by implementing such things as a home-agent initiative, special project task forces, and a compelling yet affordable rewards and recognition program. All the details are in Chapter 4.

#2: How to meld your quality monitoring practices and your customer satisfaction measurement practices into a unified process. Too many centers fail to take the customer’s perspective into consideration when rating agent performance and overall quality. Chapter 6 talks all about this, and provides specific steps on how to add the customer to the quality equation. This isn’t a QA trend—it’s QA evolution.

#3: How to cut through all the hype surrounding social media and create a simplified yet effective contact center strategy for managing this emerging monster. For this, go to Chapter 7—then Tweet all about it.   


Your book is peppered with best practices from leading contact center organizations. What is the most unique best practice that you’ve come across?

While there are many noteworthy best practices covered in Full Contact, I’d say the most unique best practice is one that I learned about after publishing the book. I recently learned how, at Zappos, every single new person hired—be they an agent, an accountant or a C-level officer—must complete a four-week customer care and culture training program prior to starting their job. The training is considered paramount to delivering positive and consistent customer experiences across the organization.

I guess, technically, it isn’t a “best practice,” since Zappos is the only company that’s doing it (that I know of); however, it’s one of the best practices I’ve ever seen—one that every customer care organization should be copying.


What inspired you to write your song parody, “Sympathy for the Agent”?

A couple cans of Red Bull and a secret desire to be a rock star in the call center community.

I’ve always enjoyed writing song spoofs, silly poems and even manic raps about call center life. My thinking is that anybody who works in such a frenetic and stressful environment needs comic relief to survive. Even if my lyrics don’t make them laugh, my singing voice will.

“Sympathy for the Agent” came about one day while I was listening to the Rolling Stones’ classic hit “Sympathy for the Devil.” I thought, “Oh yeah, I could definitely do something with that.”

The rest is call center rock ‘n’ roll history. 


You’ve had a long career researching and writing about call centers. What projects are you focusing on now?

I’m starting to do a little more speaking and a little less writing. This is a great thing because my metabolism has slowed down with age, thus I’ve really needed to get off my butt and get out of the office more. In addition to keeping me in better shape, leaving home to speak in public has enabled me to learn how to put on pants and tie a tie.

I am also currently working on a genetic research experiment that, if successful, will enable call center managers to clone their best agents before the Marketing department steals them.
----------------------------------------------------

After you buy my e-book, be sure to visit the Contact Center Pipeline site and subscribe to the best trade pub in the industry: www.contactcenterpipeline.com
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Many progressive contact centers are starting to break free from the confines and rigidity of traditional call routing. Rather than blindly sending callers to the next available agent – regardless of who’s calling or why – these centers are exploring routing methods that are so unconventional they have been banned in certain Midwestern U.S. cities.

Here are a few prime examples of customer care organizations doing call routing on the edge.

HMOno Health Insurance
HMOno uses priority queuing like no other contact center on earth or in New Mexico. The center’s New Policy division gives high priority to healthy callers because they cost less to insure and whine less to agents. 

Every call is front-ended by an IVR system designed to determine if new callers have any serious health risks. A voice prompt asks callers a series of risk assessment questions, such as “Do you smoke?” “Do you drink?” and “Do you work at a public high school?” Callers who answer “no” to all risk assessment questions are quickly routed to a live agent anxious to sell them a policy. Callers who answer “yes” to one or two assessment questions are knocked back a few places in the queue. Those who answer “yes” to three or four questions are placed at the end of the queue. And those who answer “yes” to five or more questions are immediately routed to a company competitor or a hospital.

The IVR system also has been programmed to listen for any sneezing, coughing or wheezing sounds to help determine a caller’s health. If any such sounds are detected, a voice prompt says “Gesundheit!” or “Please cover your mouth” before the caller is bumped back in the queue or routed externally.


MegaMerchandise
MegaMerchandise, which sells everything from saucepans to sporting goods, knows customers appreciate the personal touch. That’s why their contact center – staffed with an eclectic group of employees – uses a truly unique routing process that matches each caller with an agent who has similar interests, personality traits, and SAT scores.

All calls are initially answered by an automated “matchmaker” programmed to quickly assess which agent the caller is most likely to bond with. For instance, if a man from Brooklyn calls interested in purchasing a baseball bat or a thick gold chain, the matchmaker will route that call to an agent like Joey “No-Neck” Gambini. Joey can then have a friendly informal chat with the caller about benchpressing and broken kneecaps to help build rapport before closing the near-certain sale.


Big Spur Bank & Mistrust
Handling irate customers is never fun, but routing them to convicted murderers can be. Big Spur Bank & Mistrust – based in Sweetwater, Texas – has been doing it for about a year, with impressive results.

The bank’s contact center uses cutting-edge technology to identify angry callers, who are then seamlessly routed to death row inmates trained to help the callers realize the pettiness of their complaints.

Here’s how it works: The center’s automated attendant is able to measure the heart rate of each caller. Whenever the rate exceeds 200 beats per minute, the attendant knows that the caller is either furious or has just run a 10K race. To determine which is the case, the caller is told to “Press 1 if you are fighting mad” or to “Press 2 if you need some Gatorade.” Callers who press 1 are routed to the first available killer in one of the many fine high-security prisons in Texas. To help callers put things in perspective, Inmate agents use phrases like, “How dare you complain to me about a $3 ATM fee – I sleep on a metal slab and eat gruel every day,” or “You think being rejected for a loan is bad? Try having your stay of execution request denied 10 times.”

In most cases, callers calm down and apologize for their selfishness, at which point the inmate agent can take advantage of the caller’s guilt and begin cross-selling/up-selling premium bank products.

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Imagine a world in which customer service agents spoke their mind on every call. What if, instead of always trying to soothe angry and abusive customers with forced empathy, agents voiced how they really felt?

How interesting it would be if such scripted statements as “I understand your frustration” were replaced with such authentic ones as “It’s probably just karma.” How exciting things would get if, in place of “I’m going to do everything I can to rectify this problem,” agents instead said, “I make $7.50/hour, sit in a cubicle the size of a gym locker, and have worked the last 17 weekends in a row – go ahead, Mr. Johnson at 105 Elm St., I dare you to scream at me again.”

True, customer satisfaction and loyalty would likely take a vicious dip, but so would agent turnover. Several studies haves indicated that contact center employees who are encouraged to freely express themselves at work are more productive, more engaged and less likely to burn customers in effigy while chanting passages from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Think about it, most of your agents currently do the “right” thing by offering empathy and understanding to irate callers, only to be berated and lambasted by the customer anyway. The end result? High employee burnout/attrition in addition to the already existent low customer satisfaction. By empowering agents to fire back at furious callers, you at least win one of the two battles.   

And just think of the entertainment value for those in your contact center who are tasked with evaluating calls for quality purposes. QA staff would get plenty of healthy, stress-reducing comic relief while listening to customer-agent interactions such as the one featured below:

Agent: Thank you for calling Narcissist Fitness Customer Care. My name doesn’t matter. How can I help you?

Caller: I’ve called you stupid people twice already asking you to cancel my membership. Why are you still charging my credit card!?

Agent: Could you please yell a bit louder, sir? That way the folks in Membership will hear you directly and I won’t have to go through the trouble of processing your request.

Caller: Are you getting smart with me?

Agent: Oh, no sir. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. You were right before  – we’re all quite stupid here.

Caller: I want to speak to your supervisor this instant!

Agent: No you don’t – he’s even dumber than I am.

Caller: Listen, cancel my membership once and for all! And stop sending me your annoying monthly fitness newsletter – it’s paper-wasters like you who are destroying all the forests.

Agent: Oh good, you’re concerned about the environment. In that case, you really shouldn’t cancel your membership. You wouldn’t believe all the paperwork involved.

Caller: I can’t believe this! I’ve never been treated like this in all my life!

Agent: Thanks.We’ve been getting a LOT of attention for our customer service lately.

Caller: If you don’t cancel my membership today, I’ll do everything I can so that you lose your job!

Agent: Good luck, sir. I’ve been doing everything I can to lose my job for months now, to no avail.

Caller: Knock it off! I’m not playing around here. You’d better cancel my…

Agent: Okay, okay. Let me bring up your account. Can I have the last four digits of your Social Security Number please?

Caller: 7322

Agent: Can you please confirm your last name?

Caller: Pierce

Agent: Thank you. Let’s see here – ah, there’s the problem.

Caller: What is it?

Agent: Your cancellation request was denied.

Caller: What are you talking about? How can you deny my cancellation request?

Agent: Well, when you signed up, I see you listed the following as your main goals: “Lose 50 lbs”, “increase muscular strength”, and “improve cardiovascular condition”.

Caller: Yeah, so?

Agent: Have you achieved those goals?

Caller: Um, not exactly.

Agent: Of course you haven’t – you’ve only been a member for two months. That’s why we aren’t letting you cancel your membership yet. We really want to see you succeed!

Caller:[click]

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Some people are simply blessed with the power of prognostication. They have visions and pick up signals the average person cannot, thus enabling them to provide unique insight into how things are likely to go down in the future.

I am not one of those people, but that has never before stopped me from making bold predictions about contact centers and customer care.  

With the aid of my crystal ball and a couple cans of Red Bull, here’s what I see happening in 2012:


A new metric – “Average Speed of Anger” – will take hold.  Customers are more demanding than ever. It’s nearly impossible to respond to their calls, emails, chats, and social media comments/inquiries before they start whining or worse.  Many companies now find measuring traditional accessibility metrics like Average Speed of Answer (ASA) to be a waste of time. After all, even when the contact center hits an ambitious ASA objective, customers still complain and clamor for quicker service.

That's why a growing number of centers have started secretly tracking a new metric: Average Speed of Anger (ASA grrr),  which measures the average time it takes customers to become so enraged they curse your agents/IVR and/or blast your brand on Twitter. By focusing on ASA grrr, the contact center can make training and staffing adjustments that will quite possibly keep customers from killing anybody, and maybe even satisfy a few.


A law will be passed that makes it illegal for a contact center to not have a home agent program in place. Study after study has shown the huge impact home agent programs have on employee engagement, retention and performance, as well as staffing flexibility and operating costs. Nevertheless, three in four centers still don’t have a single home agent in place.

Fortunately, the leaders of these centers will soon be imprisoned and/or fined if they don’t get with the program. A militant but growing group – led by me – has been lobbying Congress about the issue for over a year now. I’ve been told by powerful sources that, thanks to my group’s efforts, Congress now views expanding home agent positions as a top priority, right behind balancing the Federal Budget and bringing down Kim Kardashian.  


A new type of cancer caused by over-exposure to acronyms will plague the customer care industry. This is one prediction I hope doesn’t come true; however, I don’t see how it can be averted. Medical researchers have strong evidence that excessive absorption of acronyms radically alters brain cells and can cause severe vowel deficiency.

A recent landmark study showed that lab mice placed in a cage lined with shredded ACD reports were 17 times more likely to develop malignant growths than were mice whose cage was lined with shredded long-winded speeches free of any abbreviations. The study led medical researchers to conclude that excessive exposure to acronyms may be more dangerous than smoking two packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day while standing next to a Japanese nuclear power plant. The researchers implore contact center and customer service professionals to start using fully spelled-out terms as much as they can, and to do so ASAP.
 

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_ It's that time again – that time when my fearless journalistic tendencies flare up after a year of repressing them. I can only keep the lid on controversial and shocking contact center-related stories for so long before they start to gnaw at my conscience and disrupt my daily mid-morning and mid-afternoon naps.

Here are a couple of the most contentious contact center news stories our industry has been censoring for months.


Overly Convincing Speech Recognition App Blamed for Customer's Death

Managers at Ephemeral Airlines' reservations center knew that callers would love the company's new advanced speech recognition system. However, it never imagined that a caller would actually fall in love with it, nor that it would cause him to perish of a broken heart.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened to James Dumas, a 31-year-old accountant from Bloomington, Ill. Dumas, who first called Ephemeral's reservations center on July 12, 2011 to book a flight to Boston, became enamored with the sultry and overly friendly voice of Ephemeral's automated attendant. The highly advanced system features natural language recognition that gives customers the impression they are speaking with a live agent, or, in Dumas' case, a really sexy woman.

"The poor guy called our center about 15 times a day, each time asking the system for its name and if it would meet him for a drink," explains Amy Powers, Ephemeral's Director of Reservations. "Sadly, the system was only programmed to handle reservations-related inquiries, and thus repeatedly responded with, 'I'm sorry, I don't understand your request, could you please repeat it,' which Mr. Dumas interpreted as playful flirting and teasing."

After over 100 calls to the reservations center, Dumas reportedly starting telling friends and family that he was madly in love. Consequently, his mother insisted that he invite the "woman" to dinner. When Dumas called the reservations center to extend the invitation, the speech recognition system – which had just received a new upgrade that expanded its vocabulary from 10,000 to 15,000 words – told him that it had to wash its hair that night. Enraged by and despondent over the torturous game of "hard-to-get" he had endured, Dumas told the system that he would stay on the line and hold his breath until he received a "yes." Eight minutes later, he was gone.

Although Ephemeral Airlines was full of remorse over the tragedy, the company found solace in the fact that that its very expensive speech app was good enough to dupe a human. "We are deeply saddened by Mr. Dumas' untimely demise," said Brian Richardson, spokesman for Ephemeral. "And while our thoughts and prayers are with his family, we are tickled over the ROI we expect to see from this new technology."

To ensure that a similar incident does not occur in the future, the airline is looking into replacing the current voice of its speech system with that of comedienne Kathy Griffin.


Contact Center Consultant Wins "Nobel Prize for Ambiguity"

After years of penning obscure white papers and books, leading non-distinct seminars, and providing incomparably vague advice to clients, contact center consultant Stephen Blank has finally earned the recognition he deserves. Yesterday, Blank was awarded the Nobel Prize for Ambiguity – a new category in the prestigious award series – for his groundbreaking ability to gain a huge professional following and earn a substantial income without actually providing any specific insights or actionable practices to speak of.

Blank was up against some worthy adversaries for the award – including five multinational CEOs, three U.S. governors and the guy who coined the term "mission-critical." Experts believe that what likely tipped the scales in Blank's favor was his best-seller, Applauding World-Class, Best-of-Breed, Synergistic Customer Care Organizations.

During his acceptance speech, Blank said that it was difficult to describe exactly what he was feeling, and then spent a minute thanking nobody in particular for helping him earn such an honor.

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_ “Take the Calls”
(to the tune of “Deck the Halls”)

Take the calls, the queue’s exploding
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Satisfaction’s fast eroding
Fa la la la la, la la la la
FCR is non-existent
Fa la la, la la la, la la la
Reps are sobbing in the distance
Fa la la la la, la la la la

Call arrival is so random
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Callers sigh and some abandon
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Callers’ rage is all recorded
Fa la la, la la la, la la la
Always say “Your call’s important"
Fa la la la la, la la la la


“Violent Rep”
(to the tune of “Silent Night”)

Violent rep, crazy rep
So much stress, you haven’t slept
Punched your manager right in the nose
Told seven callers just where they can go
Please stop pressing “release”
Please stop pressing “release”

Violent rep, crazy rep
Opened the window, then you leapt
On the way down was a thunderous laugh
Thanks to you now we are so understaffed
Just when the season has peaked
Just when the season has peaked


"Working in the Contact Center, Man"
(to the tune of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland”)

Hear the phones? It’s ballistic
Reader boards flash statistics
The systems are slow
We’re pissed and it shows
Working in the contact center, man

Calls attack, chats defeat you
Holy crap, now there’s tweets too
Channels expand
I can’t feel my hands
Working in the contact center, man

In the center you can build a forecast
And do your best to keep things gliding smooth
But customers are always on the warpath
And you get left there crying in your cube

The job’s a beast – it’s getting scary
But at least it’s sedentary
We sit on our butts
We quit or go nuts
Working in the contact center, man

 
Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good laugh.

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