I live in the coldest place in Northern Ireland.  Officially.  The weather station positioned at Katesbridge, a few miles from my house, consistently records the lowest temperatures in the North - --12°C was recorded in recent days.   And, of course, living up a hill near the Mourne Mountains, accompanying these low temperatures are horrendously bad road conditions.  Getting up our driveway requires climbing equipment, going outside requires so many hats, gloves, coats, scarves and welly boots for the kids and myself that I’ve almost lost the will to live by the time we are ready to leave the house.  We have been able to sledge down the hill in front of us in recent days and yesterday I crashed the car into a ditch (well, actually, I did everything possible not to go into the ditch but the car refused to respond to any commands – loud verbal or otherwise).  

Despite the bad roads in my area, I choose to live in a remote part of the country and don’t expect the gritters to come right to my door.   However, I do expect them to clear the main roads that I need to travel to get the kids to school and myself to work and that hasn’t always happened.  There are a host of reasons provided – lack of machines, lack of salt, exhausted staff, the duration and severity of the cold spell etc – but I can’t help thinking every time I hear another excuse that this is just bad planning.

And this is not acceptable – we deserve better.  And I feel justified in demanding that because I know that in my professional life, gem delivers better.  gem manages a number of accounts that experience pronounced seasonal fluctuations in volume from the travel, technology, telecoms, retail and media industries.  We create surge management strategies for a number of scenarios for all our clients – in some cases, strategies can be activated within minutes, others within 24 hours.  We expect the unreasonable, we plan for the unexpected and we prioritise for the important contacts.

This might mean that we need to monitor community forums for our technology clients to identify and proactively address any emerging issues for our clients.  It might mean liaising with the operations sides of our telecoms clients to ensure that we understand any problems in the field and disseminate them immediately to their customers.

A good example, we have unfortunately encountered multiple times in the last few years, are security crisis affecting our travel clients which cause us to be both very reactive (handling excess inbound contacts) and also very proactive in dealing with the consequences (making outbound contacts to affected customers, IVR messaging, community forum updates) – manning 24 hour desks, using skill-based routing to direct complex enquiries, setting up triage services, making use of multi-channel communications to minimise handling times and extend our communications reach, using staff that we have previously trained for just such an emergency – in many cases getting all these methods active within 24 hours of the crisis starting.  Our responses then get better over time, not worse.  

We also monitor news sites etc to anticipate any potential problems affecting our customers and immediately start working on managing anticipated surges in volumes – we don’t wait until the cars hit the ditches!  

We are pleased to announce that gem is a winner at the NICE Excellence Awards in the category of Technical Innovation.

The NICE Customer Excellence Awards program celebrates and honours organisations using NICE products and services to drive creative, inventive approaches to managing their operations and optimizing business performance. With a diverse range of solutions, including workforce management, quality management, interaction recording, customer feedback, performance management and interaction analytics

gem will be attending the NICE Customer Conference and will be giving a presentation on how gem's innovative use of NICE enables us to represent our clients brand, build customer loyalty and deliver a superior customer experience.

gem is excited to announce that we have been shortlisted for two awards in the National Outsourcing Association Awards 2009, against competition such as NHS and Capita.

The two categories in which gem have been shortlisted are:

Outsourcing Contact Centre Provider of the Year
Outsourcing Professional of the Year – Louise Bone.

 

We spoke to Louise about her achievements and being shortlisted for Outsourcing Professional of the Year.

Louise, tell us abit about your background.

After spending 11 years working in retail from cashier to buyer to store manager I decided to try something different and knew I would have to prove myself in a new industry but relished the challenge. I heard about gem through my sister who worked for them in the early days of Amazon and she agreed that the company values and their work ethic was in-line with my own. After working as a Team Manager for 1 year I was promoted to OSM in McAfee and a year later as Business Manager for Clearwire. I feel that the development culture within gem allowed me to grow as a person and use all of my previous experience in my roles as I progressed through the company. I have also has the pleasure of working with amazing teams in all of my contract and had great support from the other managers within gem.

Clearwire, a supplier of instant wireless broadband, is one of your clients. How does gem enable Clearwire to offer exceptional customer support?

As Clearwire hadn’t outsourced before coming to gem, we were integral in helping them set up processes and procedures that helped their business to function more effectively. We were also able to handle more work with almost 50% less FTE.

What would you say has been your key achievement at gem?

Growing the Clearwire account and helping to bring across the extra business from their account services team.

How do you feel to be shortlisted for a NOA award?

Surprised and delighted! It feels like a real recognition for the effort I have put in over the last 2 ½ years and to be honest is recognition for the team that I have worked with both in operations and business support.

The winners will be announced on Thursday 15th October 2009 at the Park Plaza Riverbank Hotel, London.

gem has also been shortlisted for “Best People Practice” in this year’s European Call Centre Awards. The awards will be held in Hilton Birmingham Metropole on the 22nd September in conjunction with the Call Centre Focus & Customer Strategy Conference. With hundreds of entries received this year, this is a great achievement for gem.

CCF European Call Centre Awards will formally recognise professional excellence right across Europe. Now in its 14th year, the Awards have become a firmly established annual event rewarding the individuals and companies that have made a real impact over the previous 12 months. The key USP of the awards program is the site visit each of the short listed companies receives. The judges spent a day with each of the finalists to get a better understanding of their company.

Ben Clarke

I’m a busy person.  I have a busy job, a young family and many outside interests.  Life is a constant juggling act.   And the last thing I need is having to throw yet another ball in the air by conducting unnecessary conversations – in any media – with some of the companies that supply me services.  I want my eBay and PayPal accounts to work without me having to futilely search their FAQs and then email them to find out why eBay says I still need to pay for some of my recent purchases while PayPal tells me that I’ve already paid - with the result that the red Maine fleece top for my two year old has arrived but the pink Pampolina party dress for my four year old is nowhere to be seen!  I want my phone to work all the time and I certainly don’t want my electricity to be switched off “for essential maintenance” without advance notice.    So when I have to initiate conversations with companies about these types of issues it’s their fault and I’m cross.  

 

There are plenty of proverbs and mantras that suggest that we should constantly stay in contact with our customers, that all dialogue handled correctly with our customers is good dialogue.  Certainly all dialogue with customers is an opportunity but not all dialogue, even when handled well, is good.  This is because due to faults of our own making, the customer is sometimes forced to communicate with us.  Due to our own failings we inadvertently punish our customers that simply want to get on with their lives.

 

As a contact centre for many large organisations we often see patterns emerging that illustrate clear fault on the side of the companies we serve. For example an airline that doesn’t clearly state on its website the baggage limit per passenger or a product manufacturer that is having the same repeat issue with their latest device or a retailer that fails to inform customers about delays in delivery.  We constantly work with our clients to eliminate unnecessary contacts even when it means reducing contact volumes through our centres.  We do this because we know it is the right thing to do to deliver a good customer experience.

 

China’s most famous philosopher Confucius once said, “The real fault is to have faults and not to amend them”. 

 

When we fail to effectively communicate we’re at fault.  The subsequent interactions, no matter how well handled, could in fact be eliminated had we taken the advice of Confucius, implemented feedback loops from our contact centres and dealt with all customer contacts in the most appropriate way (from self-service to assisted service to no service).

 

So fix the fault and don’t make me call you – I don’t have time.

Are you aware of the benefits of social media?

Are you Facebooking and tweeting your customers?

According to a recent article in TTG Live, Michael Fausette (group vice-president of software business solutions for San Francisco-based market analysis company IDC) has warned of the dangers to your business of ignoring new media. 

“These tools are extremely powerful. If you are not involved you won’t know what people are saying about and that can be extremely dangerous.  People will  no longer accept service on your terms; they are looking for real time response.”

Some of the recent examples of how Social Media can have an effect on your business include:

Ryanair Employee Calls Blogger an “Idiot”, And Their Spokesperson Publicly Agrees.

United Airlines' share price plummeted after a musician uploaded a satirical music video – called United breaks guitars – to YouTube after the carrier broke his guitar -  click here to read more.

 

 

 

JetBlue was lauded for responding to a tweet by a passenger boarding one of its aircraft – click here to read what they tweeted back.

With the advances in mobile technology your customers can be tweeting from the check-in queue and rating your services as they are using them.

At gem we understand the importance of providing a “real time” customer support service and the need to tailor this service to the particular requirements of each of your customers.

 

gem is one of Europe’s leading independent providers of outsourced contact centre serviced across email, telephone, SMS, and live chat in 26 languages and providing a 24 x7 operation.  We also tweet, blog and can be found on Facebook and LinkedIn.  We understand the benefits of using Social Media.  So do EA, Expedia and Match.com who are just three of our major international clients.

- Fiona Magee

If the crowd is prophetic, is your business listening?

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.

The difficulty business’ face is that they are not built to listen to the crowd. They focus energy on improving efficiency, growing new markets or getting their latest product to market. Listening to the crowd can seem like a daunting task – there is so much information coming from so many different sources (customer chatter on calls/emails/chat/SMS directly into your company, front-line staff, community sites, blogs, surveys etc). Often the attitude is “what do they know, we are the specialists in this area.” How do you listen effectively to a sea of feedback and better still, how do you implement that back into your business?

The key to using the crowd’s prophesy is to look for patterns in customer feedback, analyse this feedback (and suggested changes) by assessing value to both company and consumer and then feed it back into the business in manageable, bite sized chunks. But the real trick is to proactively challenge your staff to use that data to improve your product/service, change business processes and improve customer satisfaction.