Customer service seems to fall into that category. We have all cried at times. Sometimes somebody will make us laugh about it (as all the best humor taps into something real). NPR also has three hilarious customer service from hell stories.

There has to be a solution and it must be easier than a cure for cancer or cheap renewable energy. Can this really be the uncrackable problem? Are we doomed to endure this forever? I doubt it. Its such a big opportunity, people will figure it out.

The big issue is economic. The price of products keep coming down, from a mix of Moore’s Law and Globalization. The price of service does not. Service involves humans and they have to be paid and to get them to provide great customer service you have to pay them well, give them great training, motivate them beyond money to reach their potential in what can be perceived as a dead end job, create a pleasant working environment, provide great IT systems so that the front line person really has the information they need, empower the front line person to make decisions on the spot that may cost you short term but enhance your reputation and so on. All of that costs real money.

For example, the best margin in the PC industry is warranty. It works as hardware is pretty reliable. The trouble is, most problems are software related and almost all of them fall into the “stuff happens” category that nobody will take ownership for. It’s like Sicko for your PC, all the “insurers” are running a mile to get away from your nasty, expensive disease.

This is particularly bad when the cost of service is bundled into a transaction or subscription fee. Think travel services and ISPs. They simply cannot afford to take the call.

Nobody wants to take the call. Everybody is working hard and smart to “take the human out of the equation” and this is what gets us all the automated nonsense such as “IVR hell” where there really is not a human available, forums where people pontificate and have attitude because “hey I am not paid to do this” and various other attempts.

Yes, the really radical solution is to design products and services that work so well out of the box that live customer support is not needed. There are examples like that. Software is getting better. But this still leaves a mass of products and services that absolutely do need support, lots of it.

Here are 4 major ingredients for success in customer service:

1. Get labor costs on your side. The lower cost of offshore centers CAN enable a better service. As we all know, it does not always result in a better service. The other pieces have to be in place as well. However simple economics will dictate policies such as wait time and average call time which directly impact customer satisfaction. Being able to afford to spend more time is a strategic advantage.

2. Be passionate about providing great service. If the offshore team is told its all about reducing cost, they will act accordingly. You cannot say “we are passionate about great service” and put in place policies that clearly demonstrate exactly the opposite.

3. Understand and measure the real competitive advantage of great service. If you cannot do this, then all the passionate talk will disapear. Is it about retaining customers versus the cost of acquiring new customers? Is it about cross/up selling? Is it about reputation damage from a few high profile mess-ups that get into the Blogosphere?

4. Make user experience the key to process design. This may sound obvious but it is not always or even usually the case. The way we are passed from one person to another and have to explain the same information many times over is done for good reasons, but user experience is not one of them.

It is easiest to see this from an example. Assume a magazine with 100,000 subscribers, with the following subscriber acquisition profile:

· 70% via Telemarketing

· 15% via wrappers

· 15% online.

Assume that the average Telemarketing cost per subscriber is $6 (mix of long and short, new and renewal) or $420,000 for the example magazine. Taking that offshore could reduce costs by 20%, a saving of $84,000 in our example.

Telemarketing is a very intrusive marketing tool

Few people love getting a telemarketing call. Yet we reach for this tool in our kit-bag when we have to hit the numbers. The reason is the same, we just describe it differently depending on where we sit; it is a wonderfully/terribly intrusive marketing tool.

So it does not really matter how courteous and empathetic the person on the other end of the phone is; we just don’t like getting telemarketing calls. Unless of course we are being told that we won the lottery. In practice the value proposition is seldom that compelling; that’s why the marketing team selected telemarketing to break through.

The telemarketing “agent” can make a difference

In reality, they cannot make much difference – it’s the value proposition that really matters – but they can make some difference. So we use the least expensive people we can find to make these calls. In America that tends to mean people with limited other opportunities; simple, scripted call center telemarketing is not viewed here as a highly prized career. So, with some exceptions, the level of education and motivation is quite low.

Offshore, in India for example, this is different. Call center work is comparatively well-paid and offers reasonable career prospects for an ambitious person. It attracts people with a higher level of education and motivation than in America. The obvious downside is the callers did not grow up in America and so their natural accent is different.

So the question is how to accentuate the positive – that good education and motivation – and overcome the accent negative.

The ten steps to better offshore telemarketing

As we are experts in telemarketing for publishing, we thought we would reach for that old editorial standby, the 10 point list. Some of these are specific to offshore, but most are just call center best practices:

# 1. HIRE THE BEST

There is a huge pool of call center workers in India. IQR has rigorous hiring standards to ensure we get the best trained and most motivated agents. We pay higher than average to achieve this.

# 2. GIVE THEM GREAT TRAINING

Good call center agents come with a basic level of skills. IQR then puts the agents through our own training program to enhance skills in areas such as accent neutralization, listening skills and phone courtesy. Then we add title-specific training. We work in partnership with Publishers on objectives related to scripts, desirable demographics, key data points to acquire and data quality and these become part of the training program.

# 3. AVOID THE PREDICTIVE DIALER.

We don’t use a predictive dialer, even though it can increase efficiency. You know when a call center is using a predictive dialer. You get the call, pick up the phone and there is no sound for say 30 seconds. They called you and now they are putting you on hold!

# 4. BUILD TEAM CONSISTENCY OVER AN ANNUAL CAMPAIGN

You need people who are calling on your behalf to have some knowledge of your titles and familiarity with the “lingo” – the acronyms and unusual terms that people in your market treat like their mother tongue. No matter how good the agent and how good the training, this is hard to do when the team is assembled for a quick 6 week campaign and then disbanded.

# 5. ENABLE EFFECTIVE OVERSIGHT (OR DID WE MEAN “OVERHEAR”)

IQR enables “random barge-in” for our long term clients. This is the ability for publishers and audience managers to listen in on calls. It is like having the call center in your same building and walking in and listening to what is going on. This may help with training. Or it may help to listen to “the front lines” when you are considering a major decision such as changing the qualification form.

# 6. MEASURE WHAT YOU WANT TO MANAGE.

Telemarketing is a “numbers game”. You use it to ensure that you get the required number of subscribers by a specific data. However that is only one crude measure of success. Based on the mantra that you can only manage what you measure, IQR places a big emphasis on metrics. We capture all the key data points in real time at the “point of contact” and then report through online dashboards where you can drill down from summary to individual record. We can look at the data by title, or by date or by agent. Here are two of the key metrics that we work towards:

· % Conversion to file. This is critical because a lost renewal has to be made up with an expensive new acquisition; and most audience universes are limited in size so it is not always easy to identify enough potential new subscribers.

· % Conversion to contact. This is an important early warning sign. If one is reaching people and then they say they are not interested and that % is increasing it may indicate problems with the title, the market, agent training or script.

IQR also works on strategic initiatives to increase the audience quality. These can then be measured and managed in the same way. For example, you may have a specific objective to get more people with a certain job title or more contacts from a niche market segment that advertisers are keen on.

# 7. ENABLE RAPID COMPLAINT DIAGNOSIS AND CORRECTION

Telemarketing will lead to some complaints; busy people do not like the interruptions.

Complaints can happen because a subscriber is “having a bad day” or because the agent has done something wrong. The key is to be able to find out which is the case, quickly and efficiently. IQR does 100% voice recording; we use this regularly for on-going training. So if we know the subscriber who has complained, we can send the voice recording and you can make the call. If it is a problem with an agent we can take corrective action. If it is a “bad day” issue you can ignore it or send a polite mail.

Monitoring the actual number of complaints is not that helpful as most people do not complain when they are unhappy; if they are too busy to renew your title they are usually too busy to complain. The more important metric (see Best Practice # 6) is the % Conversion to Contact. That tells you the motivation to renew.

IQR clients have not seen any increase in number of complaints or decrease in % Conversion to Contact after moving telemarketing offshore; but it is reassuring to know that there is a clear process in place for dealing with any complaints that may arise.

# 8. HIRE A SPECIALIST

There many different types of Telemarketing and they take different skills. In America you use firms that specialize in Telemarketing for controlled circulation magazines. We think you should do the same when you move offshore. We admit we are biased on this point, as IQR is the leading offshore firm that specializes in Telemarketing for controlled circulation magazines.

The specialization matters for two reasons. The first is that we understand the nuances of this type of calling and we know the issues related to process, metrics and data delivery. As a specialist we also understand and help manage the demographics/profile required to meet your sales/advertiser needs. The second, more important reason, is that our reputation in the B2B Media industry is core to our success, as that is where all our clients are; our motivation to do excellent work is therefore much higher than a generalist who can move onto other markets.

# 9. MANAGE THE AGENTS

Of course every call center manages their agents. However, the level of management does matter. IQR has a high supervisor to agent ratio and we do both data and voice quality checks on every agent. This enables us to measure and therefore manage not only the hard targets such as conversion %, but also the soft targets that impact your brand. Each agent is tracked, managed and paid according to multiple performance metrics.

# 10. INTEGRATE TELEMARKETING, EMAIL AND ONLINE

IQR delivers the Telemarketing targets, but we also offer email campaign management and online registration. This level of integration yields efficiencies in many ways. For example an email bounce-back can be sent immediately to the telemarketing team. Confirmation or prompting emails can be sent after a call as required. If someone says “not interested” or “would rather do it online”, we can immediately send an email.

There are two ways to get more online registration and neither is easy:

1. Make it easier when the reader is on your site.
2. Get more readers on other sites who might be interested in your title.

Most publishers like to think that their online registration is easy enough. However in too many cases this is all too common:

1. I register for one webinar. I then try for another webinar. Does it have my details? Nope.
2. So I see Register with Publisher. I do that. Yet another form. Does it recognize me? Nope.
3. It then asks me if I want XYZ mag. I say yes and get into the qualification form. Does it recognize me from 1 or 2? Nope.
4. It then asks if I want ABC mag. Most of the form is the same as for XYZ. Is anything pre-populated? Nope

(This is a real example, I kept it anonymous to save embarrassment).

The ideal system enables “speed dating to a relationship”, getting whatever little bits of data somebody is willing to volunteer at the time, always building the profile and never asking for redundant information and always prompting for an intelligent cross sell.

It seems odd that this should be hard to do right. We are used to sites like Amazon that have been doing this right for ages. I think it is hard for publishers because it involves integrating technology, data and processes across multiple channels and that involves getting multiple profit centers to align to a common objective and that is always hard. (This is very different from an audience “data warehouse” that sits within the organization but is not connected online, real time to what readers are doing online).

The next challenge is getting more readers from other sites to subscribe. There are two basic techniques that work:

1. Search Engine Marketing (SEM). In effect, getting traffic from Google. Theoretically we can also put Search Engine Optimization (SEO) into this category, but that is more to do with driving traffic to your site generally and cannot be fine tuned enough (as far as I am aware) to be a useful, scalable tool for subscriber acquisition. SEM is a very precise tool in the right hands and with the right tools. I don’t know of any publisher getting any subscriber volume from SEM, but it is theoretically possible. It is definitely not Zero Cost, as you pay Google for the relevant Adwords. The question is can you create the landing page to registration process in a way that generates a high enough conversion to make the numbers work right? Lets say you target $2 per Subscriber. If you get 10% click to conversion, you cannot pay more than $0.20 per click. If you can get that up to 25%, you can pay as high as $0.50 per click (or if you can get the click for $0.10 you get a cost per subscriber of only $0.40). What this does not factor in is the cost to manage this whole process. Don’t believe any purveyor of “magic sauce” for SEM. It simply takes a lot of testing, analysis, landing page design and other labor-intensive work and there are not that many people who know how to do this well.
2. Affiliate Marketing. This is what companies like Commission Junction offer. In the controlled circulation world this is offered by specialists such as FreeBizMag, TradePub and Mecury Magazines. They do the heavy lifting of building affiliate networks (which is rather like SEM, a well-understood technique that is also labor intensive). This can be bi-directional, which has been called Co-Registration. I have seldom seen these “lets all cooperate” type deals work in practice. You still need your own affiliate program and you can pay another publisher through their affiliate program and if that nets out its OK.

Is there a way for publishers do this directly within their own infrastructure? Possibly, once the first step – the integrated online audience database – is in place. Then it would be possible to put on a Web Services interface and then add Widgets that can be syndicated out across the Web. This has broader implications than simply subscriber acquisition. Random House has an interesting widget syndication strategy that may point the way for other publishers.

As a newcomer to blogging and somebody who is old enough to remember using a Telex machine to send a proposal, I needed to use something that was pretty intuitive. After about an hour working with WordPress I can say that WordPress is as good as it gets; it is as close to “free, perfect and now” as I have seen. I can see that there is tons of functionality that I have not yet used and I am motivated to experiment and learn more as my experience to date indicates that my frustration level will be low.

During 30 years in the software business, I have got used to the idea that software is mostly pretty bad – no, lets be frank very bad. Pre the PC I learnt that software was monumentally hard to develop, always (I mean always) over budget and and the green screen text stuff was for people in back offices and data centers only. My first hands-on experience was with a Mac (great) and then decades of frustrations with Windows.

WordPress is part of a new wave of software that looks like it may actually get it right. This looks like second generation Net native software. The first generation of Net native got the “wow” factor but rather the same way one goes wow when you see a dog walking on its hind legs (amazing that Rufus can do it, but he still does it very badly). The second generation takes Net native as a given and really focuses on usability. It has to be usable as adoption is based on thousands of individuals voting every minute with their mouse.

This is not how the Enterprise works. Somebody makes a decision and everybody has to use the clunky monstrosity. Of course people do still vote with their mouse but in destructive, passive aggressive ways that derail the project. These are the projects where the CFO at the post-mortem meeting asks “So are are you telling me that after 3 years and $x million we are facing a write-off decision? Can somebody tell me how we got here?”

I can see how systems like WordPress can avoid this by growing more organically. Add a few colleagues/partners as posters. Add some traditional semi-static pages. Add some social network, a bit of video and a podcast or two. Pretty soon I have a modern CMS, with minimal implementation costs and all on a pay as you go basis – it has been free so far

This is what the analysts are touting as Enterprise 2.0. The problem of course is how much we are all invested in legacy systems. I suspect that these new systems will come in the back door, through a totally new projects, departments, services that get set up without having to use the legacy inheritance. Then  some time later the old and the new get compared and by then people are familiar and comfortable with new system…

I am hopeful that this is a genuinely new era for software and that the teams who have enough experience with the old ways will stick to their design vision and keep it growing with Einstein’s famous phrase in mind:

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.”