Beagle Research Group

I didn't blog this week

Instead, I took the family on an annual camping trip to the outer reaches of Cape Cod.  North Truro is about as far as you can go on the Cape, after that it's Provincetown and open water.  The seals that I see each morning on my beach walk think that's fine as do the whales just off shore, but I like the dry land.  There's a wonderful sense of calm out there, the trees are all about 20 feet tall and gnarly buffeted by sea winds and salt air year round and they make excellent buffers.  When the breeze comes in, it's filtered by pine needles that make a nice wooshing sound as the branches sway.  It's cool at night and a great place to sleep.

Last year, in addition to the seals and the whales we chanced upon a tortoise laying eggs in the woods, just not the kind of thing you see at home.  There are also lots of birds to look at, species that rarely if ever make it to the feeder in the back yard and whose songs are wonderful.

The land is rather fragile out there.  If you think about it, the Cape is just a big pile of rock and sand left behind when the last glacier moved through the area.  There's little fresh water and the place resembles a desert or Baja California without the cactus, at least in the summer.  Winter rains have the ability to rearrange the landscape and there are homes in constant danger of falling into the sea when the next big one blows through.  It's in part because the sand is coarse grained and doesn't pack down hard, even by the water's edge.  That makes it hard to walk and gives you some better appreciation for why Thoreau went to elaborate length to document his walk from Nauset (on the elbow) to Provincetown or P'town as the locals call it.

I am not sure what fish were running while we were there since they all had the good sense to avoid my hooks and lures.  We came by our fish in the traditional way at a market in Wellfleet where it was fresh and succulent and cooked up very nicely on the grill back at camp.

So there's no CRM blog this week and chances are good that the holiday next week will prevent any serious thought about it again.  But be patient, I am not gone, just recharging the batteries.

We need more than CRM

On my way out of Fenway Park the other night, I found a credit card on the sidewalk, an American Express platinum card to be specific.  There was no big moment of indecisiveness on my part about what to do with the card because I would expect anyone finding one of my cards on the street to act responsibly and I expect you feel the same. 

When I got to a well lit place I called one of the numbers on the back of the card and began my odyssey.  I am not picking on Amex and I have been a member of Amex before and found their products to be fine.  It turns out however that there really is no easy set of procedures for reporting a found card — lost yes. Found?  Not so much, as Jon Stewart might say.

I went through a menu of choices and initially chose to report a lost card but discovered that I could not do it without also providing a password even if I had the card and the number no matter how hard I tried and the system, being fully automated, was not programmed to deal with exceptions. 

There is a certain amount of logic to that, after all, you would not want someone wishing to play a prank on you to be able to cancel your card while you were, say, traveling overseas.  I understood the logic but it would have been nice to be able to hit a key (and I tried a bunch of them) to get off that merry-go-round and talk to a real person.

No matter, I hung up and called back and this time I chose the concierge services figuring a platinum card would be able to command the attention of a real person.  Instead, what I discovered was that concierge meant just another way to help you spend money.  You could book various things like reservations at restaurants, air fare, tickets to the ball game, whatever.  At least there was an option to get me to an agent.

I finally got a human being who thought surely I was reporting my lost card instead of the lost card I had found.  Eventually, though, I got to another human who was able to take down the card number and do the appropriate thing.  I cut up the card.

I found all of this endlessly fascinating and it got me thinking.  Even with a platinum card and “concierge service” the presumption was that a customer would approach the company with a pre-qualified (and limited) set of needs — either you want to buy something or you are prevented from buying something because the card is lost or you are behind in your payments.  That’s it, in a quest for something as close as possible to frictionless transactions, all other possibilities are defined away.

This experience made me think about CRM in general and its future.  For a long time we have been operating on the assumption that the CRM of today — what some of us refer to as CRM 1.0 — is just a down payment on something better which we have named CRM 2.0.  What if it is not a down payment, though?  What if this is as good as it gets and maybe we have to deal with the idea that as organizations find better ways to achieve frictionless transactions, CRM actually gets worse?

I don’t think CRM will get worse, but my experience with that call center made me think that CRM might be maturing and ossifying into something that simply manages bulk interactions.  If that’s the case then there is an additional market niche for something else, something that works in the realm of transactions that do not result in a purchase or a sale.

We all know that there are many times when we approach a vendor looking more for information than a product.  Maybe we are thinking about a purchase, like wondering how much space in the driveway to allocate for the bass boat we haven’t truly convinced our wife that we need.

Various people I know have estimated that this other kind of transaction represents about half of what drives people to vendors in the first place.  If that’s so, then we are doing ourselves a tremendous disservice by not attending to the other half.  I recently met with an executive at a large company in Silicon Valley and we spent an hour discussing this topic.  There really does need to be a suite of products that, while not exactly performing transactions, actually makes the transaction possible down the road, in part by keeping the customer engaged.

At the end of the day, I think it’s not a technology issue at all — it’s a business model issue.  Right now, we don’t think in terms of how to optimize what we do when we are not in a transaction, so we don’t do anything and we miss opportunities.  The opportunities are hidden so few of us quantify them to begin with but if some genius looks at our business processes with a fresh perspective then everything will change in a hurry. 

It is the difference between offense and defense.  According to Celtics great, Red Auerbach, “Basketball is like war in that offensive weapons are developed first, and it always takes a while for the defense to catch up.”  At this point CRM’s offence is pretty well established, maybe it’s time to think about defense.

Call Center Attrition

Earlier this year we did a study of attrition in the call center.  We wanted to know why even good or great call centers have such persistently high rates of attrition, especially when on-boarding new agents.  On-boarding is the process that starts with hiring and continues through training and the initial experience of dealing with customers.

As you might expect, we discovered a variety of issues that impact attrition in the call center.  The ideas coming out of the study ran a gamut including, new agents were improperly trained, agents’ job expectations were not properly set, the interview process was flawed, or prospective agents’ skills and backgrounds were not well matched to a particular job — and the list goes on.

There are lots of different ways to test some of these ideas, either with cross tabulation or direct questions but some of the things that I took away from the whole research experience are that the job of call center agent is pretty demanding and we don’t have a great handle on it.

Attrition is high, and depending on the call center it can be as high as fifty percent or even more depending on circumstances.  Every call center is not that bad and even bad call centers have good times, but it all puts me in mind of what the late management guru Peter Drucker once said: if you can’t find the right person to fill a job and people consistently leave the job, the problem lies in the job not the people.  Drucker’s prescription was to consider re-organizing the job, break it down into smaller parts and reassign certain tasks so that more brains could be applied to the various challenges.

Good advice, but in the call center we tend to do the opposite.  We script the job, micro-manage it and apply a withering array of metrics to track what we have euphemistically come to call progress.

What the attrition crisis in the call center tells me is something different.  Products —especially new technology products — are to one degree or another hard to use or understand or they are outright confusing, especially if they do something new.  Companies appear increasingly bureaucratic as they attempt through self-service and audio-menus to get answers to people without the need for person-to-person interaction.  In our increasingly difficult to realize efforts to constantly grow business we may be overshooting the customer’s ability to consume.

If that is true then it helps to explain the situation in the call center and how to fix it.  Very simply, we may be asking the call center representative to make up for flaws in product, service and after purchase processes design.  To go back to Drucker, the way to split the call center agent’s job and manage it more effectively may be to go up stream to build better, simpler and more elegant and intuitive products.  In other words, the split should happen with product designers and developers.

In itself this is no surprise; in fact, it is part of the product life cycle.  The only difference now is that many product life cycles were synchronized long ago by the high technology revolution.  There have been a lot of new products introduced to the market over the last few decades and there has been a cumulative effect of new product burnout the results of which land on the doorstep of the service and support department.

Early adopters take on products with little or no service or support and figure everything out on their own.  Middle and later adopters expect a modicum of service and support and assume it is built into the price of the product. 

Successful vendors are frequently behind the curve when it comes to these issues.  Early success and high profit margins lull them into a false sense of security and when the dam breaks the responsibility goes to the service and support department to minimize the problem.  Unfortunately, sandbags are not a way to prevent flooding.

So even though attrition in the call center might seem like a big problem, and it is, I believe it is temporary.  I expect that continued competition will force vendors to improve and simplify their wares and provide better modes of providing service.  User experience nearly killed several of CRM’s early leaders before they got the message and industry-wide it is hard to see how emphasis on the customer experience could be more dominant.

Focusing on the customer did wonders to revive the Apple franchise and it will do the same for any company that decides to think outside of the box and that will go a long way to solve the call center agent attrition problem.

Google, Salesforce, Microsoft innovate

It’s hard to avoid comparisons between Microsoft and salesforce.com this week.  While many see a zero sum game being played out in which Google plus salesforce.com somehow equates to a diminished Microsoft, I think there’s more. 

Late last week Microsoft announced a new product and a new category, its Surface product.  At the same time, salesforce.com and Google announced yesterday that they had formed a partnership in which the two would join ranks to offer a blend of products that would most likely challenge part of Microsoft’s dominant position in desktop applications.

First, if you aren’t aware yet, Microsoft Surface is a computer that looks like a coffee table and it links together different digital devices to enable users to easily access and swap their data.  Check out this short video at YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP5y7yp06n0&eurl if you need more details on how it works.

I think Cray was the last company to build a computer that resembled a piece of furniture but it doesn’t look like Microsoft was trying to imitate a super computer with the Surface.  Nonetheless, the Surface promises to turn a few heads and possibly ignite interest in a new generation of consumer computers.

Salesforce.com and Google on the other hand announced that they were joining forces to offer to the SMB market sales and marketing capabilities that larger companies usually pay quite a lot for.  The first product will involve a mash-up of Google AdWords and SFA so that users can get instant notification of leads, for example, make relevant updates to the database and take the necessary action. You might recall that within the last year salesforce.com bought an adword startup to bring this functionality to its core product.  This announcement specifically brings adword marketing to the SMB space with an attractive price point.

This is only the first of what you might expect will be many products that Google and Salesforce bring out that play to each company’s strengths — Salesforce offers a growing variety of compelling applications and Google sells advertising and serves up information.  The combination strengthens the overused definition of utility computing wherein computing services are delivered through a wall plug, just like electric power, and adds a twist.  Utility computing is starting to look a bit like TV in its golden age when programs were free and ads were what paid the bill.

In each case we see major technology companies building elegant products for their end customers that offer such sophistication that any knowledge of how computers work, or how applications link together, is almost unnecessary.  Salesforce.com and Google have hidden a lot of complexity in this mash-up and those that will undoubtedly follow so that small companies can play big.  At the same time, Microsoft did a smart thing in turning the computer 90 degrees—by changing perspectives it has transformed the utility of the computer from personal productivity to information aggregator and collaboration center.

What I think each offering has in common is that neither is a radical departure such as the invention of the PC or even the iPod or, to carry the analogy, the release of the first on-demand application, but that’s to be expected at this point in the evolution of the technology market.  People like me might bemoan the lack of more disruptive innovation, but hopefully not too much. 

It is in this phase of the market where a great deal of money can be made as vendors, who survived all of the early adopter madness that these companies have, land on Geoffrey Moore’s Main Street to sell commodity products to consumers hungry for something that just plain works and makes their lives some how better — without a lot of complexity.

Salesforce and Google may have stolen a march on Microsoft with their mash-up because it is so open ended in what it can deliver right into the heart of Microsoft’s cash cow application business.  This mash-up represents a renewal, of sorts, for desktop productivity which has grown stale and cumbersome with too many layers of complexity.  The choice of the SMB market makes a great deal of sense too since it is small companies that provide so much innovation.  Taken in the context of the AppExchange, the Idea Exchange and salesforce.com’s incubator this mash-up is a harbinger of a revolution in desktop computing.

At the same time, and for different reasons, the Surface also points to a new future in computing.  The Surface is an important computer form factor that has not existed until now and the example application that Microsoft is using to promote the product will look trivial shortly as businesses demand and, hopefully get, larger — perhaps even whiteboard sized — Surfaces that they can use for collaboration and innovation.  Imagine a whiteboard networked with your company’s vast data stores and the Internet. 

Forty years ago, when we were racing to the moon, I am told that NASA engineers would convene meetings to fill up whiteboards and then take Polaroid pictures of their work so that they could remember it in detail and take it home.  What might we accomplish with a tool like the Surface?

Your comments count!

I recently discovered that many of you have been commenting on the blog and I  was not aware of it.  The problem lies in a new Spam filter I installed to cover up the deficiencies in my wonderful Norton package (ahRrrgggHHH!).  Whatever.

Now that email from Typepad is no longer treated as spam by the filters I will be getting notice of your thoughtful comments on a regular basis and posting them too!

Thanks for reading and writing!

Denis