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If you’ve been around the call center industry any length of time (say, 5 minutes), you’ve heard the buzz about “agent empowerment.” It’s a hip-sounding phrase, and if you’re a call center representative it has a nice ring to it. If you’re a call center manager, however, it may sound more vague and perhaps threatening to you (“I’m supposed to be the one with the power, right?”).
Of course, if you’re a call center manager, the chances are you’re a “people person,” anyway — since that’s an essential quality for success in the people-intensive call center environment — so you may already be touchy-feely and confident enough to appreciate the idea of empowering your employees. Don’t be scared: it will be good for you!
To help everyone understand the truth behind the buzz about agent empowerment, ICMI assigned our crack research team (that would be Greg Levin) to investigate. You can read the report for free if you’re an ICMI Member, or download it for $24.95 if you’re not so privileged. Here’s what you can expect: Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve heard it before — humor helps to break the ice, etc. — but Professor John Morreall explains in this Fast Company interview specifically “Why You Should Include a Joker in Every Brainstorming Session.” It’s a short, fun read and it may give you some ideas for improving your next brainstorming meeting.
Humor makes us think more flexibly. People who think funny do better on creativity studies. To put it really simply, humor loosens up your brain to think of more possibilities and be more open to the wild and wacky ones.
If you’re looking for (or considering) a call center management position, you should read Layne Holley’s article in ICMI’s Customer Management Insight (CMI), “Sales and Analytics Driving Contact Center Compensation,” first. In addition to being a rich source of call center management salary data compiled from various sources, the article offers valuable insights regarding the skills being sought in call center management roles.
“The individuals who are going to be highly sought out or compensated differently to some degree are those with the proven ability to develop a sales or service strategy — or both — and who have strong analytical competence to measure and manage metrics — not just look at the numbers, but interpret that data and either develop a successful customer segmentation strategy or a cross-sell or upsell component to get more value out of each call,” he says.
Gotta recommend Bill Taylor’s blog to you: it’s called Game Changer, hosted on HBR’s website. Here’s another compelling post from him, “Authenticity, Openness and Competitive Advantage.” He describes BzzAgent‘s founder and CEO, Dave Balter’s practice of blogging about his company’s inner workings, including failures.
Why be so open about how his company works? For one thing, it’s a matter of authenticity. One way to demonstrate your commitment to openness is to lift the veil of secrecy around your operations. “Openness is in our life blood,” Dave says.
Sounds like an interesting concept, but what practical good does it really do? Oh, here’s one answer: Read the rest of this entry »
The most creative CEOs I’ve met don’t aspire to learn from the “best in class” in their industry—especially when the best in class aren’t all that great. They aspire to learn from companies far outside their field as a way to shake things up and make real change.
Hear, hear! I’ve taken issue over and over with what I call blind benchmarking, myself Read the rest of this entry »
Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick, have a regular column in Fast Company. This one is titled, “Make Goals Not Resolutions,” and it offers a bit of a different take on a familiar topic, but certainly it’s a timely one to review around this time of year.
To sniff out whether your business is pursuing a goal or a resolution, follow the fun. What’s fun about goals is the end point, the completion. If your goal is to “grow sales by 13% in the Southeast region,” and you nail it, you’re ecstatic. What’s fun about resolutions, on the other hand, is the announcement.
I’ve admired Seth Godin’s mind for many years. He’s always been cutting edge, yet down to earth — it’s an effective combination. In his latest post from Seth Godin’s Blog, titled, “Tribe Management,” he succinctly makes the case that brand management should not be the focus anymore, because “Tribe management is a whole different way of looking at the world.”
It adds to that the fact that what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about.
I just posted a great rant from a CSR about Average Handle Time (AHT) objectives in her call center, and how miserable she is trying to work under them. It’s not the most eloquent argument you’ll ever read, but it is heartfelt, passionate and shows that she “gets it” better than her management team does: doing a good job responding to callers’ needs is more important than an arbitrary (and in this case, unreasonable) AHT target.
The post is in ICMI’s QueueTips, under the topic, “Average Handle Time Standard.” It’s Response #6, so scroll down the page if you want to skip directly to it. If you’ve got AHT standards in your call centers, this rant is must reading! Could she be working in your center right now? call center management
Good stuff here from Polly LaBarre’s blog in a posting titled, Freedom = Success (And not the other way around). Insights into why people are successful at work, and a nice summary of the results of Best Buy’s radical initiative, ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment). Good reading.
“If anything, we have a surplus of ideas. Excess ideas are our greatest cost. What we need is fewer ideas.”
This article, top-rated on Digg at this moment, is a great example of contrarian thinking, and while I don’t completely buy into the argument, the underlying point resonates with me: having too many ideas can inhibit the implementation of ideas. Food for thought.
