Self Help

“I love those automated attendants, recorded voice answering machines and the endless opportunities I get to push my own buttons whenever I make a call looking for someone to help me.”

Said no one, ever.

It has been well documented for some time that customer satisfaction is adversely affected whenever a customer has to deal with or must navigate through one of those automated phone answering systems. Normally when they call, they have a question, or need help with an issue. They want to talk to someone. Otherwise they would have just sent a text. Or accessed the company web page and sent an email. But no, they had hit a threshold where this type of technological linking was not good enough. They wanted to ask another human being to help them. And yet despite their need for support and desire for human interaction, they are denied.

The problem is so rampant that there are now commercials by certain companies appearing on network television espousing the point that when you call them, you actually get to speak to “a real human being”. Some companies now feel that it is now a competitive differentiator that they will have a real live human being answer your call and that you actually get to talk to them when you call them. It is interesting how quickly times changed initially to the automated systems, and then just how quickly they are changing back. There can only be one reason for this service technology whiplash.

Money.

Companies originally saw these systems as opportunities to reduce the cost of support by in effect making the customer responsible for some of their own issue or support request. They would need fewer support people if they could make customers work a little bit in the identification of the type of issue they were calling about. Fewer people needed for support equated to reducing the cost of support. This is always thought of as a good idea for the bottom line.

What they learned was that for the most part customers didn’t really like this type of automated system. It may have saved the company money in their support costs, but it made their customers unhappy. And unhappy customers were not as likely to buy more equipment or products from the vendor that made them use an automated attendant system when they needed support. This is normally thought of as a bad thing for both the top and bottom lines.

Companies learned, or actually relearned the old adage:
“Penny wise and Dollar foolish”. (It is actually “Penny wise and Pound Foolish”, but, I live in Texas, USA, so I have taken a foreign exchange liberty here.)

They may have saved a few pennies with the automated systems which enabled them to reduce the number of people required to deliver customer support, but it ended up costing them many dollars in lost sales from their customers who were not particularly impressed or happy with the support that they got.

Now we have companies advertising that they are using people to answer their service calls, just like everyone used to do thirty plus years ago. Go figure.

While it is interesting to discuss the migratory aspects of the types of customer service and support, I think it might be time to discuss a group that may not have fared so well in the evolution of support: The Employee.

It is no secret that companies must spend significant amounts of money, time and effort supporting their own communications and networking needs. Every company has a corporate network. Every employee has a Personal Computer. The employee productivity gains that have been created are enormous and well documented.

It has also put an enormous strain on and demand for corporate Information Technologies (IT) teams for support by these employees. Security and the ability to keep hackers out has almost become an industry unto itself. Requests for networking, applications, upgrades and support continue to grow as the complexity of what is required by the corporate knowledge worker increases. In the age of Virtual Offices (VOs) the demand to deliver these services to locations outside the classic organization structure or office has boomed.

And what is the diametrically opposed force that companies must deal with in this time of burgeoning employee technology demands?

The desire to reduce, or at least limit the growth of Information Technology support costs.

Companies are facing explosive demand for new and innovative Information Technologies applications and services by their own people in order to continue to generate ever better productivity, but are having to temper responding to this demand due to a desire to keep their IT costs in check. There are many innovative ways that companies are dealing with this issue, and unfortunately there are also several ways that may not be considered quite so innovative.

When I was in college, I once had a physics professor who was preparing us for a rather extensive round of midterm exams. He informed us that once the test was passed out that there would be no talking. He also said that if we had any questions we would be encouraged to raise our hands. He noted that by raising our hands above our heads, blood would obey the laws of gravity and flow out of our arms. This would in turn increase blood flow to our brains. This in turn would cause an increase our brain activities in the firing of synapses and neuron transmission, which in turn should enable us to solve the problem on our own.

I am not sure, but I think the gist of his comments were that we were not to ask him questions, because it was a test.

I am concerned that many of the IT leadership of many businesses today seem to ascribe to the same school of thought when it comes to staff support. If you don’t believe me, try and find the internal organizational phone number to call and actually talk to someone real time if you need IT help with you technology based connections. Emails and instant messaging are by far the preferred mode of communication if you need help. And if by some chance you do locate the telephone number for IT support, I think you have guessed it: You get to deal with the corporate IT automated attendant.

It seems that what was once done for you as a valued productivity asset of the company, when it comes to new applications and upgrades, are now being pushed down to you to try and do on your own. The new definition for employee service seems to include unlimited numbers of IT based emails with directions on how to update, upload and upscope the many new, mandatory or desirable IT capabilities.

Sort of a raise your hand and hope for increased blood flow to the brain when it comes to IT support.

I think part of the reason for this internal support shift is that the cost of IT and support is a very identifiable amount. There are direct numbers, budgets and staff associated with it. In budgeting and costing terms, it has become a very identifiable target. There is a defined amount being spent and as such becomes a prime candidate for cost reduction.

The issue that arises is that for every identified and quantified dollar that is saved from the IT budget, there is not a specific quantifiable amount of incremental time or lost productivity that can be identified or captured by the employees, as they are forced to pick up the slack. The measurable IT budget is reduced and a real dollar cost reduction is recognized. But it is far more difficult to measure how much is “spent” when all the additional hours that all the individual employees must now spend completing these IT tasks are totaled up.

An extra hour or two, here and there spent by each employee doing what was once an IT task gets lost in the count. The employee’s work load doesn’t decrease to accommodate this new additional effort. The deadlines aren’t extended because there is now more to do. It’s just another issue to deal with.

Just like happy customers are known to buy more products, happy employees are known to be more productive. However, employee productivity is something of a subjective measurement where IT budgets are very quantitative. This leaves the decision in the realm of reducing a measurable budget, known quantity at the risk of reducing an unmeasurable, unknown employee satisfaction and productivity quantity.

When the cost of cost reductions is reviewed in such a manner, it is best to expect continued pressure on corporate IT budgets for the foreseeable future.

I think it is probably safe to assume that there will be a point where there is a recognition of the value of supporting employee satisfaction and productivity via increased, direct tool and technology support. My guess is that corporations are probably getting close to that tipping point.

When bellwether companies such as Yahoo! and IBM have already decided that there is in fact greater value to the company when employees interact with each other in the office as opposed to the convenience of working via Virtual Offices, it probably isn’t too far a leap to think that they will also recognize that the small, but highly visible investment in the IT resources to support them is also probably money very well spent.

The Five Stages of Change…..and Grief

A friend of mine asked me to look over a document that he was going to issue to his most prized customers. He wanted to prepare them on how he saw things were going to change in the coming (if not already here) digital world. I was flattered. Normally the only people who ask for my opinion are some of my myopic golf buddies when they are having trouble reading a putt. My friend wanted to make sure that his message was not viewed as just another document to be scanned and thrown on the pile of other documents his customers read. As usual, this got me to thinking about how we can relate to and react to the now inevitably changing processes, as they continue to barrel down the tracks at us.

As is also usual I first went out and looked around to see if there was anything written on the five stages of change. I wanted to know if I was capturing some original thought or possibly just rehashing something that someone else had already said. It was with only a modicum of surprise that I did indeed fine information on the five stages of change. According to the article I found, the five stages of change are: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance. I correctly assumed that anything that includes both precontemplation and contemplation in its description is somehow academic in nature and not fully business oriented. You too can see this at: http://www.cpe.vt.edu/gttc/presentations/8eStagesofChange.pdf

I have never really encountered “precontemplation” in a business environment, but I will now be on the lookout for it. Most of the time I am both surprised and thrilled if I run across anything that even resembles contemplation, let alone precontemplation. For those of you wondering what precontemplation is, it is the point in time when people are not even considering (contemplating) change.

I had to look it up because I didn’t know either.

The five stages of change that I want to deal with are a little more basic and deal more with the human factor associated with change. They are, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Some of you may recognize these five stages of change also as the five stages of Grief. Since there is very little in business these days that causes more grief than change, I think that they are most appropriate.

I have had the opportunity to be a change agent in several different roles for several different organizations. I have found that the two primary reasons that businesses need to change are: The business is doing well and it is anticipated that the market will require the change, or, the business is not doing well and the change is required by the market if the performance is to improve.

Pretty simple, huh?

In either instance, you are almost guaranteed that the universal initial response by those who must change will be denial. They are already doing everything in accordance with both their objectives and the existing process. It will be others who must change, not them. And they are usually at least partially correct. However, I have found that the proper response to such a denial is that others will also change, not just them.

Denial can be one of the longest lasting stages of the change process. Too many times change is seen as an invalidation of what the business has been doing. This not and should not be the case. All business environments are dynamic. Change is an inevitable requirement.

I promised myself that I would try to avoid platitudes of that type. I guess I will continue to try and promise myself that after that last statement.

The next stage in the change process is anger. If denial is not the longest stage of the process, then anger is. When people are made to do something that they don’t particularly want to do, they do tend to get emotional and this usually translates to a little angry. They can also perhaps be a little angry that they were not the ones that recognized the necessity of the change, or that they were not the ones that proposed the change, or even perhaps that the change occurred on a Tuesday as opposed to a Monday or Wednesday.

The idea here is that the response to change can be emotional. And the first rule of dealing with an emotional response is to not get emotional in return. Understand why the response is present, but don’t slow down or alter course.

So now everyone is denying that a change is necessary, and they are now also angry that you are not paying attention to their denials. What’s next?

Bargaining is next. This is an interesting stage in the change-grief process. It denotes the understanding that some change is going to occur. It is also the beginning of the internalization process for that change. It is the methodology by which people begin to take ownership of the change.

It is always good to engage in the change-bargaining process because no one has a corner on the market for good ideas. You never know where the next one will be coming from. Listening to the team that is preparing to change is always beneficial. There is one thing to remember though:

It is not a negotiation.

There may be pieces and parts of proposals that can and should be incorporated into the change process, and there may be those that may best be ignored. Most organizations will not change of their own volition. It takes someone to change them. And it will take will power to overcome the inherent resistance to the desired change.

Once the bargaining is done, along with all the associated renting of clothing, gnashing of teeth and general keening, there is usually a quiet period. This is where the depressing truth of the pending change sets in. It’s going to happen. People will have to change the way they do things. There may even be pending changes to the people themselves.

It will be up to the change leadership to do two primary activities during this period. The first is to make sure that the period between the acknowledgement of the pending change and the actual implementation of it is minimized. It is up to the leader to keep this stage of the change process as short as possible. They need to minimize the length of this negative effect.

The second is to continuously communicate with the changing team during this time and process. Over communicate. Be visible. The change leader must assume the responsibility for moving the team, not just the process, forward at this time.

Finally, if everything has gone right, and the implementation of the change has begun, there should be the final stage of the change-grief process: acceptance. And as with almost every other stage in this process, there will be varying levels of acceptance. Some will embrace the change and move forward with it, and some will begrudgingly go along with it. The only way to make sure that all are on the same page is to take one more additional step.

Review.

What was the reason for the change? Why was everyone put through the grief inducing process? What was the outcome of the system before the change as opposed to the now current outcomes?

In short, show the team what the benefit of the change was. Look at the business performance before and after. Document what is was before, what the implemented change was and what the performance is after.

The idea is to close off the change-grief process with a review that (hopefully) shows that all the effort was in fact worth it to the business. Having a final review of what was the situation and performance before the change and what the new baseline is after the change closes the loop with the team that has gone through the change.

There is no doubt that change induces grief into an organization. Even the prospect of change can and will generate grief. I think that organizations might have a little better response to change if they focused more on dealing with it as grief instead of just change. While the idea of change has its own connotations, it does not engender the appropriate management response. Change is almost an intellectual concept.

Dealing with the organizational upset generated by change from a grief point of view enables management to understand more of the human response and emotion that is created. After all we like to think of change on organizational levels, but it is really on the human level within the organization that the meaningful changes actually take place.

Off-Shoring

One of the hottest debates going on in business these days is the debate regarding what work, if any, will stay in the supposedly high cost country and what work will be sent to the supposedly low cost country. This is the function that is usually referred to as off-shoring. There are many factors that seem to be taken into account with this decision, but there are also several factors that don’t seem to be included. It appears that the only major factor that companies really consider in the off-shoring decision is the relative wage differential of the existent workforce versus the prospective workforce. Having gone through, worked with and reviewed some of these types of working environments, it has made me wonder if there are other factors that should be reviewed before these decisions get made.

The bottom line in all of these out-sourcing or off-shoring decisions seems to be doing what is perceived as best for the organization’s bottom line. This is also somewhat subjective depending on which of the shores you find yourself. The idea is to save money. All other factors will be dealt with or considered in due course. And one of the best ways to save money is to try and reduce the cost of your labor associated with the function in question. Are there other people in other places in the world that can and will be paid less per person to do the work in question?

On the surface the answer to this question is almost always “yes”.

If the only factor to be considered is the wage rate paid to the resources doing the work, then the decision is always an easy one.

But things are usually never that easy.

The first jobs to experience this sort of movement were the production and manufacturing jobs. Production lines and repetitive functions were sent elsewhere. Business cases were built containing the incremental cost of building a new factory as well as the reduced cost associated with the low-cost labor to staff it. Questions were answered about how long the pay-back was on the needed off-shoring investment and decisions were made. Factories and production lines were built in these low-cost countries. The production of simple and basic products was then moved.

I am not going to continue too far down this line of thinking because we all know where it goes. More and more, and more production functions have been off-shored. These are finite directed positions that perform repetitive processes at a fixed rate, to create large numbers of similar products.

Let’s now fast forward a few decades.

Almost every business function is now subject to the discussions associated with which shore it should be on. One of the biggest issues associated with any proposed move now, is that the work being considered is usually more variable than the production work of the past, and it is more subjective in its execution.

While a production line will move along at a fixed rate enabling all participants in the production line to work at the same rate, the same cannot, and should not be said about knowledge based disciplines. Do all people who write software code, or design hardware do it at the same speed? Are they all equally proficient at their respective disciplines? Are all accountants or financial managers at the same competency level?

On an even more basic level, do all locations have the same financial drives, work culture, language fluency and associated work styles when it comes to delivering the required work products? Remember now we are discussing complex or service oriented work products, not physical products such as consumer electronics or other real goods.

It is no longer just a question of the difference in the hourly wage rates, or salaries of the teams involved. The question now moves into the somewhat murkier areas of work force effectiveness and work force efficiency.

Efficiency and effectiveness refers to how many resources it takes in each relative location to accomplish the desired work, and how long it takes them to do it. Too many times it is assumed that one workforce is as proficient as another. This might have been the case on the fixed speed production line (after appropriate training and time to come up to speed), but is it correct to apply these same principles to non-production line types of work and service products?

This is neither a case for or against the off-shoring and cost reduction push. These are tidal type forces that will continue until some sort of economic equilibrium is reached. This is more a question of identifying, accepting and analyzing the total costs associated with each proposed workforce location decision.

Just because it takes ten highly motivated, well educated, relatively expensive resources in one global location to deliver a satisfactory work product, does not mean that it will take the same number of similarly motivated, similarly educated relatively inexpensive resources in another global location to deliver the same work product in the same amount of time.

Research has shown that it usually takes more people, and more time for the lower waged (and supposedly lower cost) locations to accomplish the same tasks and deliver the same work products. (https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/offshoring/failures.html)

What this means is that it is not just the relative cost of each hour of work that must be examined in the off-shoring decision. It is also the relative number of hours of work that are required at each location that must be included in the equation. That means that the relative number of people (spending hours on the work) and the length of time that they spend (how many hours) should also be taken into account.

If it takes five people one month to do the work at a higher cost location, and it takes eight people two months to do the work at lower cost location, the resulting total cost of work delivery may yield a very different work location decision that just the straight hourly wage comparison that has been so popular in the past.

On the other hand, it should be noted that if the relative wage differential is great enough, even these types of labor inefficiencies can be overcome.

I try to focus on real and definable costs. The relative number of hours used and the relative wage rates at each location in question are either known or can be estimated with some relative amount of accuracy. These are usually real numbers that deliver real relative costs. As always there are other factors that can be associated with the off-shoring question. I’ll list a few of them, but as they are less quantifiable in their effect, it will be difficult assign an actual value to them.

Are there incremental but hard to quantify costs associated with the increased complexity of the operations, IT, infrastructure and security associated with an off-shoring. In today’s hacker infested world one would think that adding facilities and resources in other global locations would have an effect on these types of costs. However, it is hard to add them into any comparative costing discussion.

There are considerations that should be observed regarding the relative quality of the work product generated in each location. Are there bugs in the software? Are there differences in the way customer support is provided that affect customer satisfaction? These are difficult issues to quantify, at least prior to having to try and resolve them.

Communications will also become more difficult. What was once a real-time conversation may now become a series of emails, depending on the relative time zones associated with the differing locations, potentially across multiple days. The overall speed at which things are accomplished, or issues resolved can become problematic.

The cost of management should also be expected to increase as well. At least initially, expatriate management will need to be present at the off-shore site to setup the new functions and oversee them. Depending on how things progress, their presence could extend over a significant period.

For those of you not familiar with the expatriate role, these people are expensive. They are normally paid at the “high cost” location salary rate, and their expenses for staying in the low-cost location are usually also covered by the company. They are in effect paid close to twice for the inconvenience of living in one location and working in another.

The final “soft” cost that I will address is the public perception of moving jobs out of their current location and to another, as well as the potential exposure associated with future governmental regulations associated with this activity. Market movements associated with drives to “Buy Local” and legislation designed to increase the expense associated with off-shoring are gaining traction in multiple locations.

It is easy to see why low wage rates in other parts of the world may be attractive. As companies continue to become more virtual in their natures’ Virtual Office can mean an office anywhere on the globe. The initial success and savings generated by moving the simple and repetitive off-shore has given rise to the desire to move more and more complex and unique functions as well. This complexity and uniqueness affects the efficiency and effectiveness of the model.

While the relative wage differential will continue to be an important factor in the off-shoring equation, other factors will continue to increase in importance as the off-shoring drive continues to move up the business complexity curve.