low turnover and community - cellular teams?

I have recently talked with the VP of our parent Support organization and he shared a lot about how he has set up and run things - what I noticed, and was shocked by, is that they are really doing most things (everything?) as well or better than we are - how is that for arrogant! I assumed that there would be some gapping holes in their processes, because, well, their team has been beaten up over the years in terms of support quality. Their metrics are improving (a lot) however they are still significantly lower than the customer satisfaction marks my team is getting. They do call routing, first call resolution, escalation handling, self testing and training programs - this is all great stuff - so what is going on?. There are two areas I noticed today where my little team excels - could they provide a boost for our parent organization?

Low turnover - probably the easiest to justify - if you can focus on taking care of customers as apposed to training newbies then that is better for customers. Also, if your current people grow in breadth of knowedge then they can handle more questions in a call from a customer, again saving time and making customers happier.

Community - what is this worth? It is not easy for big companies to pull off - see the conversation below:

• Customer: "Hi, I am haveing trouble with (insert problem here)"
• Tech Support: "John Doe I haven't heard your voice in over a year - I hope that means things overall are going ok? Are you still working with ACME? Great, lets get this current issue resolved..."

Our customers LOVE it. In a small support center, handling a small number of accounts, relationships develope naturally around solving problems together. Pick up the phone and help people, you pretty quickly learn enough about them to work well together.

I wonder if our parent companies larger support teams could find a way to interact with a smaller pool of customers to build relationships back into their business. I think that they could recreate this by breaking into small cellular teams made up of different skill sets and skill levels, and then have them deal directly with a relatively small group of customers - 'their' customers - to increase their opportunity to form value adding relationships.

This also creates internal oportunity for team leaders and section leaders watching over multiple teams to create advancement oportunity (reducing turnover) and competition among teams that could be used to drive continous improvement efforts. Lots of fun potential!

A changing of the guard - Is the CAD sales process Agile or Robust?

I am in a unique spot to watch a changing of strategy in our US sales organization - that is what I think is going on anyway. Our last sales manager was previosly an Agile coach for Franklin-Covey and his skills and biases clearly played out in how he ran our US sales team - sales is primarily the art of catching people when they want to buy, so call them a lot and make it easy and quick to get through the sales process (please correct me if I misrepresent you). The current sales manager appears to be all about tools to track and predict the needs of individual accounts - then offer them the solution they need based on the information you have gathered and processed. Certainly a different paradigm. Also he has been in contact with David Ullman from http://www.robustdecisions.com/ and author of "Making Robust Decisions" and from this I am making the leap that he really buys into the Robust Decision mindset - I could be way off base (again, please correct me if I have gotten it all wrong), even so I am really excited to see how the aparent change in tactics plays out in our sales effectiveness in the CAD market. And to see how this new paradigm could trickle through the rest of our organization.

Phone responses to email?

When was the last time you got a phone call response to an email you wrote? And then how did it change the interaction? My team is turning to this question as a part of our march to improve customer satisfaction. The strategy we are discussing is to interact on the phone with customers we don't know well, even if the answer is really best communicated by email. A short call to let them know the work is getting done, or that the email is on it's way, or to check up and see that the email got there and to follow up on any further questions. The phone call is intended to be a pleasant surprise, a chance to build a relationship and to improve communications for future interactions. Hopefully we will find out quickly if customers value the short personal interaction more than they dislike the additional interrupt.

Is your favorite Support/Call Center moving to India? Consider Celebrity Status Support

If you have been paying attention, or have read "The World Is Flat" by Thomas L. Freidman, then you know support centers are moving to cheaper ground, and have been for a while. I think I can understand the economics of low-wage call-centers, and the industry is getting better at both language and support skills training, but I disagree that this is the best route for economically taking care of customers. There is great value in the local response center. They speak your language after all and they live in and understand your culture. Of course I also want them to continue to thrive in part because I work in one, and I like my work, but I call for tech support on other people’s products and know the value of being able to understand the help. So how do locals compete with the ever moving low-dollar-wage centers?

This is how I think that it can work – Build Celebrity Status Support teams and invite your customers to be insiders with them. Your customers are already ‘insiders’ - they call you and you help them and they love that, especially when you get it right the first time. Improve that customer experience by making more resources available to your people and by making a name for each of the players on your team. Team them up with a research group that they can use real-time in that first interaction with the customer. Heavily involve them in public user forums (using their real names), get them in front leading content delivery, and get recordings of them doing video segments - anything to build a positive name-face-voice connection and to build in them a solid understanding of what the customers need. Use another part of your team or a low-dollar outsourced team to be that research group and to respond to your celebrity teams needs for real-time troubleshooting help, presentation content and in depth research assistance. In essence I am recommending we retreat up the ladder into higher dollar work (any relation to the ideas in “Innovators Solution” by Clayton M. Christensen?) by turning our current team of response center engineers into public company figures, resource managers and investigative reporters.

Is this a crazy idea? My coworkers think so, but it’s already being done in newsrooms all around the country. Isn’t this what high-profile ‘anchors’ do? They build an understanding of their audience, they search out stories that their audience wants to hear and gather those stories together from field agents that were either already there, or sent there by the anchor to pull the story together. They represent the company in a very personal way. People tune in to hear what they have to say. And they would be very hard to replace with a low-wage-center talent.

I am working to protect my teams by moving them closer to the customer, building rapport and name recognition with the hope of putting more resources at their disposal to immediately resolve issues and provide tons of content back to our customers. All-in-all I am upgrading my local support team to a Celebrity Status Support team.

Getting people talking

I have been working on increasing CoCreate Support's customer satisfaction metrics by increasing our availabillty to our customers and by helping put our customers in better control to get exactly the help they want when they want it - I don't currently see how I can raise our support metrics through changed processes once my current plans are in place, so as those ideas perk along I am turning my attention to marketing.

I recently stopped into a local nation-wide-electronics store and I was excited to see how many of their products were designed with our stuff, and at the same time sad to hear that the very knowledgeable and talkative sales guy didn't know who we were - we are only a couple miles away after all. I penned the following for our sales team to consider for a local campaign. The idea is to give local sales people a story to tell, and maybe get a little popup space on their shelves in return.

"85%of the high-tech and electronics industry worldwide designs with CoCreate Software, a local Fort Collins, Colorado company. Likely one of the printers, copiers or storage devices you are looking at - What could you do with free software from your local CAD company? www.CoCreate.com/FREE"

It doesn't releate to my Support team, but hopefully those marketing ideas will come along too.

In other news - our baby boy made it - Asher was born on Saterday - baby and mom doing well.

Spy Gadget: Social Networking

This was a very satisfying article for me to see pop accross the headlines: Newest Spy Gadget: Social Networking
I had proposed this idea to my management a few months ago (were the spooks listening?) and still think that there is potential here for delivering better customer support - the idea is to build Facebook type pages internally for customers - the primary difference is that internals update their pages, and the customers never see them. Once the pages are set up then people within the company use the page as a sort of internal abstraction of the customer - a profile that is maintained and updated and refined by the many different people within the company that interacts with the real customer. This allows any internal at any time to get access to all of the recorded information about the customer at one site and also allows a place for multiple people to interpret what is going on at customer sites, to store their thoughts for others use, and as a history of what has gone on at the customer site. The problem that this is primarily solving is that of making your company look small and personal with respect to your customer - if they tell a salesperson about a problem issue they would expect that customer service/support would also know that they have this issue and also any other representatives that they may interact with. Fun thoughts that I hope to oneday implement -

Decision Strategies presentation

Yesterday I delivered a presentation I wrote on Decision Strategies to the staff at my church. They ate it up and I think that they will put the tools and ideas to good use. The overall presentation went very well, and I loved delivering it (and am working on another oportunity to do so at work) however I still need more practice at writting out the story and the slideset. In the meantime I have aproached my boss and our marketing manager about me delivering sales pitches - I am not sure how this will fit into my current life as a support person, but I think that we can work it out. We have a need for more good presenters in our company and I am really enjoing doing it.

In other news baby is comming soon - how soon? Hmm. Mommy is 3cm dialated but could still be a couple weeks away. Having fun rearranging our home and setting up for the new addition, plus all the family that is comming out to celebrate.