Xerox CEO Interview and American Jobs

Xerox CEO Interview and American Jobs
May 23, 2012
By: David L Butler, PhD
Executive Director, National Association of Call Centers
www.nationalcallcenters.org

This morning on the National Public Radio show Morning Edition, the CEO of Xerox was interviewed. At the end of the interview the following exchange took place.

"MONTAGNE: You know, Xerox now has nearly 140,000 employees. More than half of those employees are operating out of the United States. And I'm wondering if - do you think corporations like Xerox have an obligation to provide jobs for Americans?

BURNS: This idea about a responsibility is an interesting statement. Xerox, as an American company, has a responsibility to have jobs in the U.S. But we also have a huge business in the U.K.; I have a responsibility to have jobs in the U.K. I have a growing business in India; I have a responsibility to have jobs in India. I have a big business in the Soviet - in Russia, etcetera, et cetera. So, I don't look at it as myopically or as single-focused as providing jobs in the U.S. only.

I think that because we are here, I will bring back jobs, we do bring back jobs, we bring jobs into the United States, as long as the U.S. can continue to be competitive. And we can. We are an innovative group of people in the United States, and we can be competitive in both cost, but also in quality, and as I said, in innovativeness" (source: http://www.npr.org/2012/05/23/153302563/xerox-ceo-if-you-don-t-transform-you-re-stuck).

I know personally that Xerox has call centers in a variety of locations around the world. What is interesting to note from a call center perspective, and something that I have been blogging about, is the idea of being creative, innovative and efficient in your call center operations. If a call center has the right people (staff) and the right mission (goals to achieve) and the right processes (steps and technology both) to achieve those goals the the operation will be a value-added to the organization and will be productive. If any of these pieces are missing, the operation may falter and become a liability instead of an asset to the organization and support will be found elsewhere. As the CEO of Xerox says, Americans are innovative, so become innovative within your call center. Try and test new things, shake things up a bit, do not be afraid to try and fail at new opportunities for within each trial there are lessons to be learned on the road to success.

Copyright © 2012 David L. Butler

Business Process Mapping Part 4
May 20, 2012
By: David L Butler, PhD
Executive Director, National Association of Call Centers
www.nationalcallcenters.org

This is the fourth post of series. To see the first post in this series go to Business Process Mapping Part 1 on May 10, 2012, the second post Business Process Mapping Part 2 on May 13, 2012, or the third post Business Process Mapping Part 3 on May 14, 2012.

An article from January 12, 2012, titled, "Another e-retailer brings its call center back to the United States," caught my eye. These sorts of articles are nothing new. Most of the time when I talk with reporters about the industry one of the most common questions asked is, "Is it not true that most call centers are coming back from overseas?" I am less interested in whether or not eBags Inc. is bringing its call center back to the United States from the Philippines and more the reason given for bringing the call center back. The answer to the reason why eBags brought its call center back are multifold: customer service,  information technology improvements, fulfillment upgrades that reduced the need for 24 hour customer service calls, talent/skills of the American workforce, first call handling ability, and an increase in sales both volume and per order.

Embedded within the story is an unstated situation. The call center costs of a customer service company in the United States is going up. The manager or director of the call center/contact center does not have the skills, education or data to explain the value-added the call center brings to the full customer experience and thus the bottom line of the company. A third party call center company offers the executives of the company huge savings with the same or increased customer service. The company bites and then is faced with a overseas contract. The customers of this company begin to see declining customer service which is always followed by decreases in sales and revenue within the next few quarters. An executive, or an outside consultant, is hired to find out what is the matter with the company. The problem is found to be the customer experience. A decision is made to bring the call center operation back in house and back to the United States. However, and this the kicker, the call center cannot be brought back and put together again the way it was before it was offshored. Instead, it needs to be remade from top down and bottom up as a fully integrated piece of the company and when the call center succeeds with customer contact, the business improves.

It is not necessary to offshore your call center, lose market share, and spend weeks, months or years trying to figure out what is wrong. To skip this step you need to create a Business Process Mapping exercise, from top to bottom and bottom to top, and then once this is understood, fix it to they way it should be run rather than how it is currently managed and operated. Save your organization the headache and expense of the offshoring pain, make continuous improvements each year to the operations to meet the market and customer needs. To make these changes each year you need to understand your business and to understand your business you need to integrate process mapping as part of your strategy for success.

When creating Business Process Map of an organization the people in the organization need to support the exercise. More on that in Business Process Mapping in Part 5.

Copyright © 2012 David L. Butler

Business Process Mapping Part 3

Business Process Mapping Part 3
May 14, 2012
By: David L Butler, PhD
Executive Director, National Association of Call Centers
www.nationalcallcenters.org

This is the third post of series. To see the first post in this series go to Business Process Mapping Part 1 on May 10, 2012, or the second post Business Process Mapping Part 2 on May 13, 2012.
Business Process Mapping, when completed well, shows when, where and whom does what within an organization. It is a virtual representation of the processes occurring each and every minute that the organization is open. It provides a map of the white noise going on in the background. It offers order to what may seem chaotic. However, the real power of process mapping is not in its ability to show what is going on at a given time or location, even though that is good, it is in the ability of the user to then begin to ask the all important "Why" question. The what, when and who questions can be answered by any number of people within an organization from those in human resources to the trainers who teach the people about the "what" and the "when." Most organizations are set up to handle these questions with relative ease. What is missing from most organizations is asking why a person does what they do, why do they do it there and why do they do it that way as opposed to the any number of other ways one can do the similar task.

Let's look at a typical contact center. There are 100 customer service representatives on the phones. Each of these people have specific skills and take specific calls based on a routing from the system. The expectation is for each representative to successfully complete 20 calls per hour with less than 5% call backs to improve first call resolution. All of these are facts with each having some sort of data or metric to go along with the process. What is missing is someone coming in and asking, why 100 representatives instead of 50 or 150? Why skill based routing rather than non-skill based routing? Why 20 calls per hour versus 10 or 30 as the metric? Why do we hire more women than men? Why are most of our employees employed with us an average of 28 months? And the questions of "why" can go on for a long time.

The reason to use the "why" question is not to undermine the processes in place in the contact center. There was at one time a logic by which the processes were set up and that logic may still prevail. Then again, that logic may not still prevail and only institutional momentum is carrying the organization forward. Thus, is is paramount, as the process mapping exercise is occurring, each step of the process needs to have the "why" question asked to be sure that the basic principles still apply for keeping the process in place the way it has historically be completed.

When creating Business Process Map of an organization the people in the organization need to support the exercise. More on that in Business Process Mapping in Part 4.

Copyright © 2012 David L. Butler

Business Process Mapping Part 2

Business Process Mapping Part 2
May 13, 2012
By: David L Butler, PhD
Executive Director, National Association of Call Centers
www.nationalcallcenters.org

This is a second post of series. To see the first post in this series go to Business Process Mapping Part 1 on May 10, 2012.

In the absence of a clear and deliberate effort to map out the business processes in a contact center you are left with a legacy process that my not fit your organization's needs or your customer's needs at the present time.The may be processes that you are undertaking that are redundant, obsolete, or that there is now a software that can accomplish the same task at a fraction of the cost. Therefore, it is imperative that a clear process map is in place, and posted for everyone to see, and that is revisited each 12 calendar months to determine if this is still the best approach possible.

Source: http://www.fpm.iastate.edu/worldclass/process_flowchart.gif

Examples of what may not be editable in your process mapping in your contact center are those related to federal, state or local regulation. For example, my student loans are serviced by the company Nelnet. Each month I receive a paper statement and a bill. Each month I go online and make my payment. I pay more each month than the minimum payment and therefore when I do, my online balance due for the next month is always a bit lower because they subtract out what I have paid extra from the next month's minimum payment. However, when I receive my paper statement in the mail, the minimum payment is always the same, no matter how much I pay in advance. To understand why the online and the paper system did not mirror each other I phoned the Nelnet call center. The agent who answered the phone could not answer why these two items were not identical, so the call was escalated until I reached someone with the answer. And the answer is, that the federal rules around federal student loans requires the servicing company to send out a bill, by paper, each month that is equivalent to the minimum amount due over the payment period. So Nelnet has read this as a policy that cannot change and so I receive a bill for the federally define rule of minimum amount each month invoiced over the life of the loan while the online, and more flexible system, allows for the minimum payment to decrease over time reflecting the extra payment amount. Clearly the federal, state and local rules must be followed, but in the absence of such regulations, ALL business processes within the contact center should be mapped out in a high level of detail and then reviewed each year to determine if there is a better and more efficient way to run the operations. More on Business Process Mapping in Part 3.

Copyright © 2012 David L. Butler

It is Not Self-Service if You Have to Call

It is Not Self-Service if You Have to Call
May 11, 2012
By: David L Butler, PhD
Executive Director, National Association of Call Centers
www.nationalcallcenters.org

Besides being the Executive Director of the National Association of Call Centers, my wife an own a consulting company where we work with organizations assisting with their call center operations. The consulting company carries the standard business insurance, workers compensation, liability, and so on. One of these policies is through Travelers. Each year we receive a letter that says something like, "You have been randomly selected to be audited..." which is clearly not random. If it were random, I would own my own Caribbean island having won the lottery at least 2 times with such randomness.

This year the letter, instead of asking us to go through out files for the past year and make copies, and send them into to them, asks us to go online to their new system, ePHR, to submit the information electronically. While I a still a bit peeved at being "randomly" audited each year for the past forever, at least Travelers is moving to a self-service model, which is efficient and cost effective. Something that you should know, besides researching the call center industry for the past 15 years, I have also been studying the self-service emerging industry for the past 5 or more years as well.

All was going well last night when I was completing my self-service audit online until I had to upload my last 4 quarters of payroll data. When I searched for the file it found it just fine, and then pressed "upload" and poof!, the field disappeared (see image) and nothing was uploaded. I then searched again, cleared out again, nothing uploaded. I re-read the instructions, nothing about no .pdf documents, the size of my file was only 1.6M nowhere near the limit to upload. So, I tried again, nothing. I was stuck. So what did I do? I search out help of course. The problem was it was 8pm CST when this problem occurred and the hours of available support are EST and not open when I am doing this project. Note number 1, if you are going to have a 24 hour self-service system, at least for the first trial period have 24 hour support available.

So this morning, after getting done my much needed items I tried the self-service system again. This time I was hoping that there was only a technical glitch and that it had been reported and fixed by now. Same screen, same problem. Note number 2, if you are going to have a 24 hour self-service system in place you must have a 24 hour technical support available on call as well. With the problem not solved, I called the audit department help desk. I explained the problem to the nice woman on the phone, and she told me that it was a common problem. The system would not allow me to upload form my computer but if I emailed her the document, she could upload it for me. So I did email it to her.

Note number 3, and this is a big one. Self-service is intended to not only offer the customer flexibility in a 24 hour system it is also supposed to add a channel that reduces cost by moving simple tasks to the self-service channel and away from the more expensive channel such as the call center. However, since the system does not work, or not always works, then the cost of the self-service solution is sunk and also the cost of the call center is also still ongoing. In essence, I cost Travelers double because I used the self-service and the call center. This brings me to note number 4, test, retest and retest again before launching a self-service application. Otherwise, you lose the one chance of migrating your customers to this channel and cost savings down the road. You can be assured, when I am "randomly" audited again next year, and it will happen, I will probably chose to call and send in the documents via mail or email since my first experience with the self-service channel was less than successful.

If in doubt, go purchase something at Amazon.com. If your self-service channel is not as easy as purchasing an item from Amazon.com then rework it so that it is. Amazon.com is the standard that we are all expecting as consumers.


Copyright © 2012 David L. Butler

Business Process Mapping Part 1

Business Process Mapping Part 1
May 10, 2012
By: David L Butler, PhD
Executive Director, National Association of Call Centers
www.nationalcallcenters.org


For the past several years an issue within the contact center industry continues to be brought to my attention. The issue is that of business process mapping, or process mapping as I sometimes call it. If you are not familiar with this term it is basically the process of mapping out, in detail, all of the process from the smallest transaction to the largest global flows, to understand what is happening within an organization. The real strength of process mapping is not only the visual tool of seeing how the organization works, who does what and when, but also to answer the all important "why" question. Why does this employee do this at this time? Why do they do it that way? Why is this considered essential to the organization? Why has this process not been automated? And so on.

Source: http://markbland.com/processmap.gif

The reason why process mapping is critical is that when many organizations are formed they set up processes. These processes are then cemented in place, training put into place to reinforce these processes, people hired to fill each needed process hole and the organization runs. The issue is that as people leave and new people are hired to replace them in the organization, the new people are trained to do the same processes as the person before them, and before them and before them. If someone not at a high enough level asks a question such as, "Why do we do it this way," the most common response is, "that is the way is has always been done." If someone with sufficient authority within, or from outside the organization (re a consultant), asks the same question, there is an opportunity to review the business processes, mapping them out, and asking the "why" question at each juncture. More about Business Process Mapping in Part 2.


Copyright © 2012 David L. Butler