Customer Management IQ  

With over 16 years in the call center environment, Southwest Business Corporation’s Darryl Flores has had many times when his Senior Management has said “show me.” As a result, his experience in developing unique approaches and distinctive metrics to prove the value of the call center is generous. These “show me” opportunities come in to play when asking for staffing, technology and process changes. Further, other divisions within a company’s call center can “show” Senior Management their statistics, which enables support from across the enterprise in meeting goals. At the upcoming IQPC Call Center Week, Flores will lead an interactive live forum called Showing your Value to Senior Management. Subjects will include: successful presentations to gain buy-in from senior leadership, metrics to better track the value of the call center to the company, how “cross telling” will engage other divisions of the organization to support the call center, identifying unique methods to build a “trusted advisor” relationship between your reps and customers that will generate revenue, as well as other topics that will help prove to leadership that the call center is not a “cost center” but rather a “profit center.” In this podcast interview Flores speaks about how his current call center at Southwest Business Corporation differs from his time spent at financial services firm USAA. He also discloses the best way to capture, analyze and distribute customer feedback and why marketing and IT departments need to be involved in this process.

Most marketers’ messages fall on deaf ears. Nothing shocks us anymore. It’s all been done, and marketers rarely step outside of their comfort zone to shake things up. Andy Nulman wants to change this and teach marketers how to profit by taking chances. Nulman’s new marketing book, Pow! Right Between the Eyes! Profiting From the Power of Surprise, shows the value of brand authenticity in today’s saturated information economy. Nulman is a marketing guru who has years of expertise in delighting customers as former CEO of Montreal’s renowned Just For Laughs International Comedy Festival, the world’s first and largest comedy event, working with comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno. Nulman knows the values of a surprise, which he describes as “the growth-spurting teenage boy at the big family wedding; loud, suitably impressive and potent on his own, but simultaneously too sophisticated for the kids’ table and not established enough to sit with the grown ups.” In his book Nulman makes the business case for ROI for surprise marketing campaigns (return on investment and return on interest). Why do some marketing campaigns knock your socks off and others put you to sleep? Nulman addresses this question in his ground-breaking business book. Detailing case studies from Target, Harvard University, Nintendo Wii, Kraft, P&G and Oprah, Nulman describes how to create pow!-erful, attention-grabbing campaigns. In this podcast interview, Nulman expands on ideas from his book tells Customer Management IQ’s Blake Landau what it takes for a knockout surprise marketing campaign and how we can keep customers on their toes even in an economic downturn.

In this rapidly evolving and challenging economic climate, it's critical to obtain the best from your call center representatives. Dr. Brooks Mitchell, professor at the University of Wyoming, feels organizations can better capitalize on the direct link that exists between behavior modification and immediate, relevant rewards. This is done by facilitating the design, implementation and ongoing administration of call center workforce incentive programs. Dr. Mitchell creates these incentive programs at Snowfly where he is CEO. After years of research, Dr. Mitchell created a program that he believes will be the catalyst for sustainable, substantial and documented improvements in call center workforce performance and morale. His approach to employee motivation in the workplace involves four major themes: immediate recognition, relevant incentive rewards, accountability and the behavior-changing power of intermittent positive reinforcement. Dr. Mitchell explains how to identify and reward the right behaviors and how incentives and rewards are directly related to: employee attrition, attendance, schedule adherence, conversion rates, call quality and morale. He also addresses how to define the best call center program for your company: short vs. long term, monetary vs. non-monetary and individual vs. team. Listeners of this podcast will learn the results of new call center research studies showing how several call centers have significantly improved attendance, retention, schedule adherence, conversion rates, call quality and morale, and why this topic is critical for maximizing productivity, especially in call centers with Gen X and Gen Y employees.