Chris Crosby

A big cheers to one of my favorite start-ups, DimDim (see blog post here). They just raised $6M in capital. Nice work guys. It demonstrates what’s possible if you come to market with a viable product in the right niche and execute well.  These guys didn’t come out of the gate as a “Web 2.0″ company trying to boil the ocean. They started small and grew organically through partners and beta customers until they worked out the bugs and kinks. My guess is that these guys will continue to execute well and get acquired by someone looking to get into the collaboration space to augment their existing apps (Google anyone?)

Here is a useful article for any software company considering using open source components in your applications. I can tell you from personal experience that if you think getting acquired is part of your exit strategy then you need to pay attention to what open source code may find its way into yours, because your acquirer certainly will. If you’re not planning on getting acquired, its still a good idea to understand what your legal exposures might be.

My suggestion is to make sure you document any third party (even commercial) code and how you’re using it across your applications; and then have an attorney review the appropriate license agreements.

Speech Recognition is about identifying what people are speaking.

Speech Analytics is about figuring out what people are saying.

I noticed yesterday on weather.com that the temperature here in Boston was a lovely 92 degrees F, but the Heat Index reflected that it felt like 98 degrees F. This sent me on a tangent that I think is analogous for the call center.

Can a customer interaction look like one thing to you, but feel like something else to your customer? Let’s say that your trusty ACD report shows you that a customer’s handle time was 300 seconds, and 300 seconds happens to be your Handle Time Goal. That would seem acceptable, right? But what if 200 of those seconds the customer was on hold? How would that variable impact the customers perceived experience? Or hypothetically the call was answered in the goal of 20 seconds, but that was only after spending 2 frustrating minutes in the IVR?

The heat index takes variables like humidity and wind and makes a relative, plus or minus, adjustment to the absolute temperature value to reflect how it is actually perceived by people. Sound like a reasonable approach?

If it seems like I’ve been harping on customer experience measurement lately, its because I am. Stick with me here…

I’m out at a customer site this week and overheard the following conversation from the Workforce Management Team:

The difference in customer experience between 93% Service Level and 100% Service Level is negligible. But the difference in staffing cost to us is huge.

Now, I’ll spare you my full rant about Service Level (you can find it here) but I think this is indicative of a larger perception and education problem in the call center industry. Simply put: Service Level is NOT a measure of Customer Experience. It’s an opaque metric.

Let’s assume for purposes of this argument that the service level goal is 93% calls answered within 20 seconds. By decreasing the goal from 100% to 93% you’re saying that it’s okay for 7% of your customers to sit in queue for longer than 20 seconds. Logically, and most likely what the Workforce Manager was thinking, the effect on customer experience by being answered in 19 seconds vs. 21 seconds is unnoticeable. However the real impact to Customer Experience between 93% and 100% is actually immeasurable from Service Level alone. You have no way of knowing how many of the calls in queue longer than 20 seconds were answered in 21 seconds or how many were answered in 20 minutes and 21 seconds.

Try explaining to the irate customer that listened to hold music for twenty minutes that his difference in customer experience was “negligible”.

DimDim just announced a new version of their open source collaboration suite. Imagine WebEx or GoToMeeting, but thin-client and open source. These guys are the real deal. I spoke with them early on in their venture as I was looking at embedding collaboration into the Latigent BlueVue Architecture. Needless to say we got acquired so that didn’t happen.

DimDim has a free hosted offering which I’ll probably test out for a non-profit I’m working with. Although, they should really partner with somebody like http://www.freeconferencecall.com/ to integrate free voice conferencing in as well (currently they support VOIP via a headset plugged into your PC).

As compelling as free web conferencing is, hosted web collaboration is a rather commoditized market. However, there OEM/ISV approach could be hot. The ability to embed web collab right into applications (like I wanted to do w/ Business Intelligence) could create a new market segment.

Call it Pervasive Collaboration.

Last fall I participated again in the ICCM Canada Keynote Panel: 60 Ideas in 60 Minutes moderated by Paul Stockford from Saddletree Research. Dave Butler over at NACC recorded the session and has been distributing the ideas presented in his monthly newsletter. I keep promising him that I’ll expand one of mine into an article for him, but in the meantime here is the one he sent out today. Since it’s one of my favorite rants, I thought I would share (pardon my grammar):

Take out the garbage, I am not talking about employees or customers, I am actually talking about reports and data. One of my pet peeves, and I could go on for hours but I will go on for 45 seconds, is when you walk into a call center and you see the reports that supervisors are looking at every day and the first column you see is calls answered,  and this is for an agent. Johnny had 27 calls yesterday and was logged in for 15 hours, blah, blah, bah, blah. Step back and ask yourself what value you are getting out of this information. So take your 30 column report and pare it down to four or five columns that you can actually impact and actually take action on. If you can’t impact whether an agent is logged on for six hours or seven hours, get rid of the column. Just say, you know what, what was their schedule adherence, or what was their hold %? In other words, what are the columns that you can influence? Then write out the business value for each column on the report. Are you going to see service level on there, or outbound calls? Write down why you need to see that so you can articulate that back to the people that are managing to that data every day and why it is important.

I couldn’t have said it better myself

I’m sure most of you saw that Barack Obama raised a record $55 million in the month of February, so I won’t regurgitate old news here. But what I find more interesting than the jaw dropping dollar amount, is how much of the fundraising activity is happening relatively under the radar. Yesterday his campaign made the rather boastful statement:

No campaign has ever raised this much in a single month in the history of presidential primaries. But more important than the total is how we did it — more than 90% of donations were $100 or less, and more than 385,000 new donors in February pushed us past our goal of more than 1,000,000 people owning a piece of this campaign.

My first reaction was “Wow! Go Baby Go”! Then my second thought was, “Wow! That’s roughly 900,000 donors we can’t track…”

The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) regulates that a campaign has to disclose all donors contributing more than $200 to Candidate. I downloaded the most recent FEC database and found only 84K contributors to the Obama Campaign at a time when he was claiming north of 500,000k. That means the vast majority of campaign money is originating virtually anonymously.

This raises questions around current Campaign Finance laws and if they will need to be revisited or reporting limits adjusted to adapt to current trends. My sense is that inevitably they will, but whether that’s good or bad for us is its own animal.

For example, last summer I contributed a whopping $25 to the Obama campaign. Should my Name, Address and Contribution Amount have to exist in a publicly accessible database as a matter of Campaign Finance Reform? From a privacy standpoint my reaction is “Not just no, but hell no”. But as a fan of Government Transparency, shouldn’t we be able to have visibility into the money flows of these campaigns? My answer is “yes”. So then, where in lies the balance?

The gray matter that exists at the intersection of Personal Privacy and Government Transparency when you participate in “public” activity will no doubt be the subject of much debate when the dust settles on this election. My gut says the issue will be raised from which ever side looses in November.