Like many of the young professionals my age, I work in a cubicle.  This isn’t an ideal situation, but at least it gives me an incentive to work up to an office some day.  Given the limitations of working in a cubicle, I’ve been forced to make the most of the space I’ve been allotted.  I don’t take it completely for granted, though, because I likely have more space than most customer service representatives (reps, on average, have 40% less space than other functions provide).

It is thus important to make the most of what you’re provided, so here are some strategies I would recommend to improve the use of space within your organization and enable reps to perform their best: Read More »

I’d like to share some information related to one of the most unique research questions I’ve fielded across the last six years of working with CCC members.  Specifically, one of our Canadian members was building a proposal to institute a “clean desk” policy that would require contact center staff to eat lunch anywhere other than their desks.  Considering that 75% of office workers eat lunch at their desks two or three times a week, and nearly 50% do so every day, this member had her work cut out for her. 

This prompted a brief search on secondary literature, and, wow, we were surprised by the data we found.  Since we are in the peak of flu season (according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control), I thought it would be appropriate to re-surface insights we found:

Health/Safety Risks—there are a number of very disturbing statistics that may give you pause the next time you lunch at your desk or even reach for the phone:

• 75% of office workers eat lunch at their desks two or three times a week, and nearly 50% do so every day.  One in three workers eats breakfast at their desks as well.
• Only 24% of workers always clean their desks before eating at them, and 20% of workers never clean their desks.
• The typical desk has 100 times as much bacteria as the typical kitchen table.
• The typical desk has 400 times as much bacteria as the typical office toilet seat (20,961 germs per square inch on a desk vs. 49 germs per square inch on a toilet seat).  Think about it…most office restrooms are cleaned at least daily.  When did you last wipe down your desk?  I’ll bet it wasn’t this morning.
• The telephone (more than 25,000 germs per square inch), keyboard, and computer mouse tend to have more bacteria than the desk, yet 60% of survey respondents do not clean these items more than once a month.
• Germs found in studies included both viruses (causes of colds and flu) and bacteria (causes of strep throat and pneumonia, among other illnesses). Read More »

This is a guest post by Kayleigh O’Keefe of the Communications Executive Council, our sister program for Corporate Communications professionals.

Business is in a state of permanent crisis. In its most frightening definition, a crisis is “a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events, especially for better or for worse, is determined; a turning point.” How many of these turning points have you and your company experienced in the last two years? How many more do you foresee in the coming years?

The pace of change and level of uncertainty in the external environment is putting pressure on companies to build a new competency within their organization—adaptive leadership. In a 2009 HBR article, Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis, the authors argue that leaders need to solve for the underlying causes of major crises while simultaneously making the changes that will enable their organizations to thrive in unpredictable environments.

Adaptive leaders, according to the article, do three things well. Read More »

We’re now in full swing of that time of year when busy executives frantically try to cross items off of to do lists and hold last minute 2011 planning meetings.  All while maintaining solid end-of-quarter performance (and squeezing in time for a family vacation).

For those executives trying to close out 2010 business, CCC presents a quick recap of its best research of 2010, with the hopes that it helps refocus and fulfill organizational priorities in the coming year.

1. Drivers of a Low-Effort Customer Experience—Many companies wanted to know what causes high and low effort customer experiences so we researched this and find that companies have more leverage over customer experience scores than they ever imagined and the way to take advantage of this is by influencing how the customer interprets the interaction.  The best technique to do so is experience engineering, or actively guiding customers through an interaction designed to anticipate and preemptively react to emotional responses for mutually beneficial outcomes.

2. Modernizing Quality Assurance—CCC finds that efforts to improve the quality of the customer experience are fruitless if companies do not overhaul their quality assurance processes and bring the customer closer to the process.  Leading companies are successfully rebuilding QA by: asking the customer to measure quality, using evaluations to identify staff performance trends rather than isolated missteps, and embedding QA teams within organizations to build better relationships. Read More »

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and within CCC we all have very distinct (and sometimes diverging) outlooks.  And while we can all agree on the basics (i.e., coaching is the best way to drive rep performance, focus should be on customer effort rather than customer delight), we often have spirited conversations about the particulars of implementation or more granular concepts. 

I thought it would be cool to bring these dialogues to our blog so you can get a peek behind the research curtain and see what really goes on in our research meetings. 

Let’s take the topic of experience engineering: once we found out two-thirds of customer effort (the leading indicator of customer loyalty in service transactions) is driven by how a customer ‘feels’ about their service experience, we looked for ways to manage the customer’s perception their effort levels.  Enter experience engineering, a way to actively guide the customer through an interaction designed to anticipate emotional responses and preemptively offer solutions that create mutually beneficial outcomes.

Not just being nicer or more polite when you tell the customer ‘no’, but actively choosing words and framing conversations to leave the customer feeling like it was easy, even if it was a complex transaction.

Sound like it could cross some ethical boundaries? Sure it could, so I asked two fellow researchers, Pete and Dalia, to answer the following question: Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

Are leaders in your organization constantly on the road? Is your organization geographically dispersed? We all recognize it’s important for employees to feel a connection with their leaders, but many executives struggle to make their presence felt where they can’t be in person.  Add the growing numbers of remote reps to the equation and you have a real engagement challenge on your hands.

Our sister program for corporate communicators, the Communications Executive Council, recently received a question on their Employee Communications Forum from an executive eager to hear about how other companies drive virtual engagement with leadership. Most organizations are using the Internet and other visual media to bridge the gap — here are a few of the takeaways from the thread:

• Get “face time” in real-time. Employees can get virtual face-to-face contact using a video chat program.  One member suggests Live Meeting, which hosts web conferencing in real-time meetings, training sessions and events. Read More »

This is a guest post by Vanessa North of the  Communications Executive Council, our sister program for communications leaders and their teams. While applicable to all employees in a company, it’s got some great tips for contact centers whose employees are contantly multi-tasking with technology as they work with customers.

I  just got back from a glorious ten days in Croatia (which by the way, I would HIGHLY recommend– totally beautiful and so far, unspoiled) and now that I’m back, I am noticing more than ever the constant bombardment of information, emails, & instant messages that distract me from doing any true thinking.  Matt Richtel has coined the term the “three-day effect” when you are away from all technology and distraction.  After three days you start to relax, sleep better, and lose that nervous twitch of checking your blackberry every 3 seconds.  This is probably why the average weekend just doesn’t feel long enough; you get close to relaxing and then get pulled back to reality with a thump.

The New York Times reports that the average computer user checks 40 websites a day and can switch programs 36 times per hour.  Think of what that means in terms of how much information that you are subjecting yourself to on a daily basis.  It’s no wonder we hear, “I haven’t had time to think” so often.  It is only when you actually stop reading and taking in new information that you can sit back and really think what it all means, and actually process it.  By constantly rushing from one idea to the next without giving ourselves the time to think, we aren’t giving ourselves time to know what we really think.  I’m probably not the only one who sits there and has revelations when I’m on holiday.  You realize opinions you never knew you had.  You make life-changing decisions (or at least come up with the ideas for them).  In short, you think.

So as companies are striving to add more channels to reach their employees from all angles– are we actually doing more harm than good?  Read More »

Last week a manager at a member company told me, “We’re having trouble making consistent decisions about terminating staff.  How do you know when you’re overinvesting in one person, to the detriment of the rest of the staff, and you should just let someone go?”

The first thought that struck me?  Gardening.

I have a bit of a green thumb … not a “should’ve been a horticulturist” green thumb, but it’s pretty good.

And this time of year is prime season to decide “grow it, or get rid of it” with my plantings.  Some are thriving, others are obviously goners, and some reside in between.  These plantings may do well with some nurturing, or may be too much trouble, and I need to decide quickly, lest they cripple their soil-mates.

Now, this particular manager finds himself in a similar situation with his staff.  Managers need to invest energy into diagnosing and addressing staff members’ behaviors in order to improve performance, and while it’s certainly important to dedicate time and energy to coaching and upskilling, it’s important to know how much is too much. Read More »