Management, Human Resources, and Life in a Customer Focused World » Risky

Focusing Human Resources on Customers

pmesritz — Thu, 28 May 2009 11:32:19 +0000

Human Resources is one of the areas that is a challenge. The definition of Human Resources tends to be one that is nebulous because each company uses it differently. In some companies, HR is simply the people that handle internal complaints and concerns including hiring, firing, harassment, etc. In others, HR’s role is expanded to include performance management, training and development.
One of my readers posed the question:

How can HR be more Customer Focused?

The answer to this is that it, again, depends on your definition of HR.
If it is the first, then there isn’t a huge impact that HR can have on being “customer focused” in my opinion. The biggest area where they can make a difference to the customers is by being responsive and quickly addressing the internal problems. This, indirectly, helps fix problems that could otherwise negatively impact a customer.
If it is the second, however, a HR professional can be leveraged. Their skills in training and development as well as performance management can be put to use developing both on- and off-line training for customers. They can also focus on trying to understand where the current customer offerings are missing opportunities and help identify the best areas of ROI.
Human Resources is, admittedly, a challenging area that is a strong support role for the company with a difficult transition to becoming a leading customer focus role. Anyone else have thoughts on great ways to turn HR into a customer focused organization?

Quality v Quantity

pmesritz — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:26:16 +0000

Contact centers tend to be at the core of this arguement. Quality vs Quantity. What is truly the most important? Does a person’s Average Speed of Answer (ASA) mean more than their customer feedback score? Is the abandon rate the key or does customer satisfaction play a role? In truth, the answer is not a simple one. One thing does hold true regardless of your company’s size, situation, or industry.

Contact Centers are the primary point of contact for your company and have an immense impact on customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention.

A contact center for a small company may be the only employee, programmer and owner — it is still the place where customers come. Larger companies, more obviously, have call centers that have an impact on the customer. Ranging anywhere from 5 to 500+, these customer support organizations (including billing, customer service, technical support, returns, etc) are crucial.

There is a simple reason that the QvQ quandry is not easily resolved. Both are important; Neither can be sacrificed. If your customer satisfaction rating, of those customers spoken to, is through the roof but 20% of your customers abandon before speaking to them, you’ve alienated 20% of your customers. More than likely, these 20% would also rate your customer satisfaction extremely low — you just can’t easily survey them as they’ve hung up before speaking to someone. At the same time, if you’re able to reach a 1% abandon rate and your customer satisfaction is on the floor, the center is not doing your organization any favors.

It takes a strong team who understands client support and call center management to put together metrics that are appropriate for your organization. This team can be a consultant company or an in house team — its irrelevant, but it is important to make sure that you have someone measuring the right data.

Some crucial scores to look at:

Average Speed of Answer
Abandon Rate
Service Level
Overall Customer Satisfaction
Professionalism
How well was the issue resolved

One pitfall to avoid while looking at these numbers — it ignores the outliers. An average abandon rate of 5% per day (fairly industry standard) when measured over the course of a month may show that 4 days a week has a rate of 2% and one day a week has 20%. This is an extreme example, but all too often, contact center agencies and management tries to expand over a month — days do matter.

13 Things Not to Share with Your Co-Workers

pmesritz — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 01:25:49 +0000

MSN’s Careerbuilder.com wrote an article called 13 Things Not to Share with Your Co-Workers. Most of them make sense.

Medical history? Gossip? Religion? Politics? You are at work, so keep it to a minimum or, preferably, not at all. The fact is that people spend 40+ hours a week in the office together, nearly as much as they do with their family at home. Most of that time is spent interacting, whether by email, instant message, phone, or face-to-face with people in the office. This tends to lead to conversations and loose-lips. You have to be careful with it, obviously.

#1 on the list, however, is “Salary information”. I’m going to keep my neck out on that limb and say that this is an antiquated way of seeing things. There’s really no reason to hide what people make, to keep it hidden that person A makes $2 per hour more than person B.

It’d fix gender and racial inequality faster than any legal or morale requirements — those haven’t had the impact that many people would like. Whether you agree that there is or isn’t a disparity (I’ve seen arguments both ways), the fact of the matter is that if there isn’t this would bring that situation to light and if there is, then the solution would become clearer.

It’d ensure that there is a fairer distribution of money for work — people who work more, better, harder, effectively would generally be able to justify a better salary than those that simply “do the minimum”.

Human resources and managers tend to the be the people who are afraid of this salary discussion. HR because they fear the possibility of lawsuits or more easily proven discrimination. Managers because .. well many of them are overpaid for the efforts that they take to help the company and because they can keep their budgets down by shaving half a dollar here, twenty cents there.