Why it’s Almost Impossible to Implement a Service Culture Plan

I have been talking and writing about customer service longer than anyone else in the world, letting both large and small companies know that it’s fiercely competitive out there and the only way to compete and win is with superior customer service. It will help you retain customers, build market share and improve worker performance. I, for one, am relentless in this.  I work on it daily

For 40 years I have said the major reason organizations are not customer driven is because top management has no grasp of the financial impact and the impact it has on employee performance. They are not relentless.

CEO's like to delegate customer service to HR, Human Resources. This is the kiss of death. The vast majority of all HR leaders have no grasp of strategy. If the company increases market share and sales for them it is just more work and no increased compensation. About the only time I have seen HR drive the service strategy is when the CEO demands it now.  Most HR will then work to kill the project.

Service leaders like Metro Bank, Amazon, Mayo Clinic, Costco, Southwest Airlines and Apple do not delegate this to HR. It is a strategy that is, or should be, the vision of the CEO and they relentlessly pursue it.

Another problem is most CEO's are not relentless. This is a 1 or 2 year project.  What is worse is many firms who have a service culture when the CEO retires delegate it to a Financial CEO like Michael Dell at Dell did with Kevin Rollins and Sam Walton and David Glass at Walmart did with Lee Scott. They put blinders on and dealt with numbers only, no thought to strategy and customer service.  Not even paying any attention to the fact that it is very difficult to recover the service brand. Good example of that is the $1000 I invested in Dell in May 20013 is worth $475 and at Walmart $2323, and this is after 15 years.

Vernon Hill, Founder & CEO of Metro Bank London said it "starts with a thousand cuts.” It is very difficult for the Board to buy into the Service Strategy. The United States bank he founded in 1973, Commerce Bank, was sold to TD Bank in 2007. Today it has little resemblance to the customer service culture it was built on.  You used to be able to call 888-751-9000 and a live person answered the call in 1-2 rings. Today it requires an IVR system.  The hours are no longer the same and inconvenience the consumer. It’s so much worse and has little evidence of improving.

I think Internal Politics destroys the focus on customer service. There is so much infighting. Everyone wants to fight for their own petty issues. It just becomes too much work. NO one wants to take responsibility. Unless the CEO is relentless it will die. If a Financial person is put in as CEO it will die. They just do not understand the power of the service strategy.

In order to create a service culture the CEO needs to be relentless. Needs to drive this as a strategy and needs to develop a management team that understands this culture. They need to focus on keeping customers, building market share and improving the performance of the entire work force by developing a culture of delivering superior customer service.

We are relentless:

For 40 years we have been helped companies succeed.

For 40 years, over 1 million people trained using our system.

For 40 years we have tailored programs for motivating frontline employees.

For 40 years we have helped companies save money and watch their profits grow with great customer service.

2023 Buyers Guide

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Workforce Management

 

1.)

Alvaria Alvaria Workforce Alvaria Workforce (formerly Aspect Workforce Management) is a high-performance contact center software solution that provides the forecasting, planning, scheduling, employee self-service and real-time agent tracking to ensure that all agents and supervisors are productive, engaged in their work and delivering an exceptional customer experience.

2.)

Alvaria Noble ShiftTrack WFM Maximize the efficiency of your contact center and meet/exceed customer expectations with workforce engagement tools that help you accurately forecast workloads, match the right resources to your needs and keep agents motivated. More than just scheduling agents and tracking shifts, Noble’s ShiftTrack WEM solutions optimize labor costs, manage capacity more effectively and improve service levels.

3.)

Calabrio Calabrio ONE Calabrio ONE offers contact centres the complete toolset to unlock the tremendous value buried within customer interaction data and use it to transform the entire business. One seamless solution combines a fully integrated workforce optimization suite with powerful voice-of-the-customer analytics tools deployed—in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment. Capture every customer interaction across all channels. Extract predictive and prescriptive insights. Elevate customer experiences, improve employee engagement and increase operational efficiency. Then, extend customer-centric strategies across the business to accelerate sales, drive innovation and move your business forward.

4.)	eGain Corporation eGain Solve Rated #1 by analysts and trusted by some of the biggest brands in the world, eGain Solve helps businesses design and deliver smart, connected customer journeys across social, mobile, web, and contact centers. You can sell smarter, serve better, and know more.

5.)

Eleveo Eleveo WFM Eleveo WFM was designed to simplify scheduling, forecasting and adherence for commercial contact centers with 500 agents or less. The product is easy to use for supervisors who are not WFM experts, but provides value for scheduling, shift changes, schedule adherence and supports multi-channel and multi-skill requirements. Eleveo WFM was built using open source, cloud technologies but can be installed on premise, in a hybrid environment or hosted for you in AWS.

6.)

ethosIQ, LLC BPO Optimizer ethosIQ’s Business Process Outsourcer (BPO) Optimizer allows clients to manage their vendor contact center resources without requiring manual intervention through our manufacture-agnostic data collector processes. ethosIQ collects schedule and exception data, based on your desired parameters. Collection of data is transparent and doesn’t require intervention from either you or your vendor resource. You know your needs, and now you can manage those needs effectively, efficiently and effortlessly, using ethosIQ’s BPO Optimizer!

7.)

Lieber & Associates Technology Consulting Services Lieber & Associates provides consulting services to select, contract for, test, implement, and optimize workforce management systems. It's technology consultants have worked with all major systems and many smaller ones. Counsel is informed by several decades of WFM experience.

8.)

MFE International Agyletime Cloud Workforce Management Agyletime is an enterprise grade true Cloud WFM and t is channel agnostic . Its ease to Use , easier onboarding, forecasting and better scheduling. You can integrate to CRMs such as SFDC, Zendesk, ServiceNow and others and to telephony systems such as AVAYA, CISCO, Genesys and other cloud telephony systems ; to independent Chat systems to aggregate data for WFM omnichannel forecasting, scheduling, optimisation and reporting.

9.)

OpsTel Services SPEED & PLUS The SPEED solution solves for service level issues while cost optimizing the environment with automation. Provides an enhanced way to speed up & optimize invoking temporary agent skills configuration changes into the contact center environment. Speed allows you to schedule both future changes & temporary changes that auto-revert back to the original state when scheduled time expires. Speed features: *Automated / Scheduled Temporary Agent Skills Configuration Management *Immediate Temporary or Reoccurring Schedule Skills Configuration Changes *Easy to Use/Operations Administration Focused *Descriptive Monitoring Activity Dashboard *Detailed “End to End’ Audit Trail and Perfor... (read more)The SPEED solution solves for service level issues while cost optimizing the environment with automation. Provides an enhanced way to speed up & optimize invoking temporary agent skills configuration changes into the contact center environment. Speed allows you to schedule both future changes & temporary changes that auto-revert back to the original state when scheduled time expires. Speed features: *Automated / Scheduled Temporary Agent Skills Configuration Management *Immediate Temporary or Reoccurring Schedule Skills Configuration Changes *Easy to Use/Operations Administration Focused *Descriptive Monitoring Activity Dashboard *Detailed “End to End’ Audit Trail and Performance Monitoring & PLUS provides a single interface, where operations teams no longer have to rely on HR, IT or any other organization to administer agent profile data across multiple technologies in the contact center. The PLUS solution allows for simplified provisioning & maintenance of agent profile data reducing processing time from days, weeks or months in LESS THAN 10 MINUTES! The PLUS features: *Agent Provisioning Cycle Time Reduced from Days/Weeks to 10 Minutes or Less *Fully Automated Agent Onboarding / Updating / Maintaining / and Offboarding of Agent Profiles (Identity, Access, Utilization) *Overlays and Enhances Existing Contact Center Solution Set *Enables Operations Staff to Maintain all Aspects of Managing an Agent’s Profile through “Single Pane of Glass” *Supports Multi-Faceted Agent Profile Attribute Configuration Requirements; e.g. Union Rules, Seniority Dates, Etc. *Detailed Agent Profile Audit Trails

10.)

Phonestat Phonestat Track staff performance, capture meaningful feedback and deliver quality customer experiences using Phonestat. Our cloud based solution allows you to create simple scorecards to provide instant feedback and training to your staff. There are powerful integrations to source interactions from anywhere and an open API to allow you to build your own.

11.)	Vads VADS Workforce Management VADS Workforme Magaement is a smart tools that gives connectivity to the workers while working remotely. An intelligent workforce management system that aims to improve operation efficiency with the end goal to provide first.

12.)

QPC Ltd. QPC WFM - Calabrio/Teleopti Specialism QPC has a long and successful history of delivering tried and tested innovative workforce management systems, and the training and consultancy needed to ensure organisations can leverage the customer service and operational efficiency benefits workforce management principles and automated workforce management systems can deliver.

13.)

Simucall limited Assessment of Contact centre job applicants Pay As You Go remote assessment tool for contact centre job applicants. NO set up or registration fee and NO minimum use contract Assess your applicants ability to listen to a caller, recognise the important pieces of information and record them into a logging system swiftly and accurately under pressure. Full management dashboard Pay per completed assessment (no charge if abandoned or not taken by the deadline you set) Choice of assessment environments - including Insurance claims, Financial transactions, Emergency service calls, Utility defect report and IT Helpdesk Variety of UK accents used by callers (of different ages and genders) You retain control of all communication with the applicants

 

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