Our Contact Info:
David Butler
Executive Director
National
Association of Call Centers
100 South 22nd Avenue
Hattiesburg MS 39401
Tel: 601.447.8300
David.Butler@nationalcallcenters.org
http://www.nationalcallcenters.org

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Underwriters

Fortune 500 Site Selection Company
Call Center Practice Group
Sam Weatherby 214.414.9707
sam.weatherby@am.jll.com
All leading call center companies and suppliers should examine the
new NACC Underwriting
opportunity in 2008 as evidence of their dedication to the growth of
call center industry. See the
2008 Media/Advertising Guide
link below for more information.
In This Issue
Our First Underwriters-Jones Lang LaSalle
Business Value of Contact Center Knowledge
Management: A Strategic Perspective
60 Ideas In 60 Minutes Round VIII
Call Center Comics
Share the Knowledge Send this newsletter to colleagues by clicking "Forward this email" at
the very bottom and end of this newsletter or sign up for this
newsletter by
clicking here.
NACC Investment Portfolio

Original Value start 11/6/2007
=US$90.00 or US$10.00 per stock
Total Portfolio Value Now=
$65.36
The NACC Investment Portfolio
gained a few dollars in the past week with several companies in our
portfolio like Nortel, Sykes, and TeleTech reporting new business or
good news the past two weeks. As the equity market continues to find
a stable point the more good information that is reported in the
call center sector the more faith in the sector will accrue and then
investment in these stocks will continue.
NACC Composite Index
The NACC Composite Index was up
3.61% over the past two weeks. This means, well, who knows what this
means? Two weeks ago it was down 17.18% and two weeks before that up
1.51%. To date the index has lost 32% of its value since inception
in November 2007.

The NACC Composite Index
outperformed all of the other major indexes for the past two weeks.
Over 1% outperformance over the Dow and S&P 500 but just a few ticks
above the NASDAQ.
One problem I have is the action by
the US Federal Reserve. In the past, under the Greenspan Fed, most
actions were predictable based on what is known as the "Taylor
Rule," which in essence says that the Fed is an inflation fighting
organization. If that were still the case, with core and non- core
commodity prices increasing, the logical response of the Fed would
be to raise interest rates to slow down the heated inflation.
However, the Fed is not raising interest rates, nor is it keeping
them steady, it is lowering interest rates, counter to the inflation
fighting logic that prevailed for many years. The Fed has
articulated that the weakness in the economy, measured by the equity
markets, personal spending, and overall general negative mood, is
more threatening short-term than is inflation. Therefore, they are
going to focus on stimulating, jump-starting, the economy first,
then they will focus on inflation second. A key question is, should
the Fed be in the jump-starting the economy business? Or should we
allow the subprime market mess work its way through the economy,
with some people and organizations getting hurt, but arrive out the
other side all cleaned up? A very difficult decision, especially
during a big election season coming up.
So what will happen? Worse case
scenario is that the Fed will try and spur on the economy just
enough to make sure it is not in decline, and then rush to raise
interest rates, and oil and other commodity prices continue to rise
or be high, all items too late and we are stuck in stagflation,
where our economy is stagnant but inflation continues to rise. This
undercuts all of us and our purchasing power. Best case
scenario is the commodity prices start to drop, slowly and steadily,
back to more rational levels, the Fed slows its interest rate cuts
and then goes neutral and slowly starts to raise them again as the
market re-starts and the institutions that have bad debt on their
books bite the bullet, make the announcements, write off the bad
debt, take the hit on their stock price, and then move forward
again.
Somewhere between these two potential
realities are market opportunities for call centers within
organizations and third-party providers to indicate their value to
organizations as a way to communicate to customers effectively and
inexpensively (compare to other channels) and as a means to keep
customer loyalty high and long term revenue in check.
Real Estate
If you are looking for a new call
center location you should check out the
NACC Real Estate page by clicking
on this link to see some of the available existing sites.
Quotes
"The beginning of
knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand."
-Frank Herbert (1920 - 1986)
Picture of the Week

This is a photo in Switzerland of a person paragliding. Because
Switzerland is very mountainous, most of their sports revolve around
mountains. In this sport, you start at to top of a mountain and then
jump off and glide via parachute thousands of feet down to the
valley floor with wondrous vistas on either side of you and every
direction you look. I think I have convinced my wife to let me do
this when we travel there this May/June.
Advertise with Us
Our
2008 Media/Advertising Guide is
available for downloading and viewing. Did you know we are one of
the least expensive avenues of advertising in the industry? Click on
the image below to download a copy. Read it over and see the great
opportunities that await your company by advertising with the NACC.

To advertise with
the NACC, please contact the NACC at:
Tel: 601.447.8300
Fax: 601.266.5087
E-mail:
David.Butler@nationalcallcenters.org
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Our First Underwriter-Jones Lang
LaSalle
The National Association of Call Centers is pleased to announce our
first Underwriter for 2008, Jones Lang LaSalle.
Let me explain to you briefly the purpose of an
underwriter and then a bit about the company Jones Lang
LaSalle. As a not-for-profit organization we were
founded on the mission to help improve the call center
industry. We take this mission very seriously. Over the
past several years since our inception, we have turned
down many revenue making opportunities since they would
compromise our hard earned unique neutral position in
the industry of "telling it as it is." To ensure we have
a solid revenue stream to keep meeting our mission, we
launched a limited number of underwriting slots in 2008.
Underwriting allows us to showcase the best in class in
a particular sector/product of the call center industry
as a partner that shares our values and in turn their
underwriting revenue allows us to continue to bring to
you this newsletter and other research, products and
services this year and into the future. The more
underwriters we have, the more services we can offer the
industry. Now onto our first underwriter!
Jones, Lang, LaSalle (JLL) is an established Fortune 500
real estate site selection company with the largest
presence overseas of any of the leading site selection
companies in the United States. One element that makes
this company unique is their Call Center Practice Group
which goes beyond "find a building and collect a fee" of
most other call center site selectors in the industry. I
have worked with JLL for over a year now and these folks
know the industry and quite frankly are just good people
to work with. Their call center site selection process
which includes a pre- assessment, finding the right
unique location for each call center and then an unheard
of complete post-assessment to be sure what they
promised you in your new location is being delivered to
your satisfaction. The JLL Call Center Practice Group is
a great organization, with great people, doing a great
job an we are happy to have them be our 2008 Site
Selection Underwriter. If you need a new call center
site, to expand, contract, or just move locations, give
Sam Weatherby a call or email him. He is a super nice
Texan and a fun person to talk with. Sam can be reached
in Dallas at 214.414.9707 or at
sam.weatherby@am.jll.com
or see his logo and contact information on the left hand
side.
So if your company is interested in underwriting the NACC, just let me
know and check out our Underwriters page at
http://www.nationalcallcenters.org/underwriters.html
and our Media Guide at
http://www.nationalcallcenters.org/files/NACC-2008-Media-Advertising-
Guide.pdf.
Business Value of Contact Center Knowledge Management: A
Strategic Perspective
Ashu Roy, Chairman and CEO, eGain Communications Corporation,
aroy@egain.com.
As the US economy slows down, business leaders pause to evaluate their
organic growth strategies. Most of them involve
maximizing the value from existing customers. Your
customers are more likely to buy more from you than your
prospects. In response, contact center and customer
service leaders are looking for ways to improve customer
loyalty - as measured by repeat business - through
differentiated customer service and service- led sales.
The strategy is sound but difficult to execute. Given
the training cost, attrition rates, product
sophistication/proliferation, and compliance
requirements, no sustainable solution can be based on
simply hiring smarter agents. There just aren't enough
of them. And they are too expensive.
One novel approach that works well is Knowledge
Management (KM). Unfortunately, KM has had a mixed
record in enterprises that believed it would solve
ill-defined (hence intractable) business process
challenges. The fact is that KM is a powerful tool when
applied expertly to well-defined business processes that
are somewhat repetitive and practiced by employees
amenable to behavioral adjustment. Contact center and
customer service business processes exhibit these
attributes.
Here are four strategic benefits of deploying KM in
contact centers and customer service organizations:
1. Build customer loyalty: KM sharply reduces the need for escalation
within and beyond a contact center. A large software
company saw its technical support escalations (level 1
to level 2) drop by 13% after it implemented KM. Beyond
the obvious cost efficiency of reduced escalation, there
is a bigger strategic impact on customer satisfaction,
too. Not surprisingly, the same company saw an 8%
increase in the "agent informed" score in customer
surveys. As consumers we remember positive service
experiences (rare as they are) and reward the providers
with repeat business. Think Amazon.com.
2. Improve business model flexibility: KM allows the company to capture
the knowledge essential for best practice-based
operation. It enables employees and customers to access
the knowledge easily - right knowledge at the right time
for the right user. A leading European wireless provider
implemented KM with the express purpose of reducing the
cost of customer care. Having implemented KM, the
provider was able to offer its customer care business to
open bid, driving down the cost of its service operation
by 20%. By eliminating the switching cost of domain
knowledge, thanks to the KM platform that captured the
process know-how effectively, the client wrung out much
more cost while retaining flexibility.
3. Gain authentic customer insight: Customer feedback is notoriously
difficult to gather and authenticate. Focus groups tend
to suffer from the "Hawthorne effect," and market
research can be dangerously tilted by its very design.
The one place where customers really say what they think
is when they ask you for help. Unfortunately, most
customer feedback is captured in contact centers as
"resolution codes." It is hard to derive trends from
them when the default resolution code is "selected"
disproportionately because of convenience than
correctness. KM-powered contact centers enable
businesses to accurately capture the rich customer-agent
dialogue. This dialogue is effectively mined for churn
traps and up- sell windows!
4. Capture and leverage intellectual property: Without KM, most
companies suffer from the "Yoda" effect. Given any
situation, there is always some "Yoda" in the company
who can best address it. Unfortunately, the "Yoda" is
not as easy to spot as in "Star Wars." A well-defined
and effective process to suggest, review, and capture
knowledge is an invaluable strategic benefit of a KM
system. This closed-loop process fuels continuous
organizational learning that is hard to replicate for
competitors.
60 Ideas in 60 Minutes Round VII
For an introduction to the "60 Ideas in 60 Minutes" essays, or to read
previously published rounds, please visit our archives
and start with
Volume 2, Issue 22 of In Queue.
David L. Butler-If you go and get an MBA, you will acquire all
of this math so you won't have to hire anyone for that
(referencing Kevin Hegebarth's response in Round VII,
Volume 3, Issue 5). So you can insource it to
yourself.
The calls that Penny receives (referencing Round VII,
Volume 3, Issue 5) are similar to the calls that I
received which are "tell me a benchmark that we need to
meet, do we need to send something to someone to say
that we are doing everything right to cover our butts."
The second most frequent call type that I receive is
around the idea of customer satisfaction. "Show me a
customer satisfaction form; what do we need to do" etc.
There is only one variable that matters when it comes to
customer satisfaction and that is the repurchase rate.
If you ask someone if their experience as "pleasurable,"
very pleasurable" or "the most pleasurable that you have
experienced" it means nothing. Unless they are going to
repurchase your product or service or recommend someone
else to do so actively, the customer satisfaction scores
are almost meaningless because that is where the revenue
comes from and the revenue is what runs your centers,
especially if you are a cost operation.
William (Bill) Durr-So I have a story to share with you about
workforce management. The story goes this way. Once upon
a time there was a king whose young son the prince was a
little short in the brains department, a little royal
inbreeding problem I suppose. The King wanted nothing
more than for his feeble minded son than to play chess.
And chess master after chess master paid with their
lives because the prince could not learn to play chess.
Finally, the King decided to bring in a workforce
management person to teach the prince how to play chess.
And after only a few hours, the workforce manager said,
"mission accomplished." The King said, "How did you
manage to do that?" I made a simple assumption that all
pieces moved the same way. And you know that chess does
not work that way. The connection though, there are a
lot of workforce management software programs out there
that do make that simple assumption that everybody in
the center with the same skill does the same job with
respect to HT, that is not the correct model. Check.
Penny Reynolds-Try and turn some of your unpleasant situations
in a call center into opportunities. For example how
many of you find Monday a difficult day in terms of
staffing? You are probably getting the majority of your
calls and is that when your absenteeism is the highest
is that surprise? What can you do to make Monday a more
pleasant experience. Turn that Monday around. A lot of
call centers have a program called Magnificent Mondays
so that is the day where it is free muffins and pizza.
That is the day where instead of casual Friday it is
causal Monday. Get them out of bed a little easier. All
the little drawings and things that they earn tickets to
draw prizes, guess what, the drawing happens on Monday
and you must be present to win. So try and turn Monday
into the fun day, or whatever day it is for you. The
same thing with those complaint calls I mentioned
earlier. Nobody likes getting those. We need to have our
staff equipped to handle them properly, but nobody likes
to get those. Well, turn that around. Most quality
monitoring systems have the capability where an agent
can activate a recording if needed. So as soon as you
get one of those calls, let the agent record it and
enter it into the "worst call of the week contest" to
see who can turnaround one of those complaint calls the
best way. You will then have some great calls for
training purposes too.
Garry Schultz - Grounding your managers, supervisors and
executives within the contact center is important. I
have found too many people are not clear in what they
should be doing. "I am statistics", "I manage the line",
"I am the telephony guy" - these claims are too narrow,
too restrictive. I suggest you take your entire
operation and get all of your managers together and
explain to them that they are there to remove obstacles
for the agent in order to facilitate customer
satisfaction. Once they are all aligned under one
guiding principle you will find the management layer
will all be pulling in the same direction. Your managers
are there to remove obstacles so that agents can better
serve your customers. Reposition your contact center -
re-center the mind set.
Chris Crosby-Read Paul Stockford's monthly column in Call
Center Magazine. A shameless plug. I am actually
serious about that, it is a great column. The point is
continue your education. You don't have to go out and
get an MBA (reference to Butler Round II,
Volume 2, Issue 23) to run a contact center. It is
not building rockets but it can be confusing. Just today
you have heard ten different perspectives on service
level, workforce management, that sort of thing. You are
not alone in the industry. There are a lot of great
resources but obviously you guys are here and that is
one. Take a couple of hours each week and get involved
in your different user group forums and do the research,
watch the webinars, they are not just vendor spins,
there really are a lot of good content in there, take
those new ideas and see how you can spin those into your
operation. I am a big fan of moving the contact center
out of the box. Don't do it the way you have always done
it because that is the way you have always done it.
There are resources and go after it.
Kevin Hegebarth-I would be interested on Garry's take on this
one when it comes his time. My one tip here is to become
a strategic partner with your marketing or product
development or product management organization. A lot of
times we work in silos. The only time the call center
finds out about a new marketing initiative is "oh my god
now I have to go and train 5000 call center agents on
this new product that is coming out. I have no idea on
what it does all I have is a bunch of Excel
spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents,
whatever, and now I have to go and train people." See if
you can go and sit on those product teams. See if you
can get a seat with the product manager, with the
marketing people so you kind of get the advanced warning
flyer that these things are coming. Also it allows you
to set up a bi-directional communication between
yourselves and marketing. Marketing can tell you what is
coming down the pipe, you can go back and tell marketing
"here is what has worked in the past that you have
shoved at us and here is what has not worked in the past
and here is how we can team together to make it
successful for everybody."
Call Center Comics
I lied. I said in last
issue that this issue we would announce our winners of
the call center comics and show you the comic ideas they
generated and Ozzie drew from their ideas. But since we
were announcing our first underwriter I did not want to
take the limelight off of Grace and Shelly so they will
be highlighted in the next issues.

If you like this comic and
would like to see more write Ozzie at
callcentercomics@yahoo.com and visit his website at
http://callcentercomics.com/cartoon_categories.htm
or just click on the comic to take you to his page. The
NACC appreciates Ozzie letting us use some of his comics
in our newsletter.
To view past issues of
In Queue, please
click here.
If you would like to contribute to
In Queue, please reply to this email with "Contribute" in the subject
line.
Copyright 2008 National Association of Call Centers
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