DISASTER PROOFING YOUR BUSINESS

We have all had to re-imagine our business models with the arrival of COVID-19. Those industries that rely on being the person on site - service providers like hairdressers, event related industries like wedding and entertainment venues - have had limited options other than to try to hibernate and survive.

Many other businesses have re-examined how they work and shifted much of their work online. Recently we have been challenged to get a simple Statutory Declaration signed in a locked down city. Contract Managers and lawyers are re-examining how this can work in practice, at least for the time being.

Even with a vaccine we can expect many work practices to change. Medical advice suggests multiple vaccines are needed and that they might cover only 75% of people. Many of us have found working from home offers some work-life balance dividends and reduces the carbon footprint of our businesses. It's not all bad.

Pandemic also highlights the importance of your business supply chain relationships. Who can you trust to make arrangements for your changing needs? Who has enough disaster recovery redundancy in their business to support you when you can't be on site? Who can augment your business processes?

Well Done International Pty Ltd is a provider of critical contact support services. We have already invested in virtualised systems and support for our clients and a National Distributed Network operating from three states to meet a service uptime KPI of 99.9%. 

Clients have been consistently able to contact us and make arrangements through this unfolding crisis. We've handled all calls 24x7 for Councils that had to close down as bushfires roared through their local government areas. We've have covered switchboards as our clients have moved their staff to remote worker arrangements. We've helped Clients cover alerts, alarms, GPS welfare monitoring, emails, and Customer Care with digital platforms and outbound follow up.

Our decentralised and virtual operations are a natural defence to illness at one site or failure at premises. We have adapted to the new business conditions and are here to help. 

It's a lot easier than you might think. Contact us on 1800 935 536 or make an enquiry at https://www.welldone.net.au/contact.php to find out how it could work for you.

Way of the Champion - expert tips for Success

Lisa Curry MBE, AO, Olympic, Commonwealth and World Champion swimmer, won 24 gold, 21 silver and eight bronze swimming medals representing Australia 16 times over 1977-1992. Lisa would have to be the very definition of sporting success. It was utterly rewarding to hear her speak frankly about her life and the nature of success at the #cssummit #customerservice National Local Government Customer Service Network annual conference at the Gold Coast earlier this month.

Lisa (centre) with Well Done operational staff (L-R) Kellie and Liz

Noticed at a young age at the local pool, Lisa was invited to join a swim squad. Inspired by Shane Gould world record breaking performance and three gold medals in 1972, she trained hard, followed all of her coach's instructions precisely and quickly generated outstanding results. By 1974 Curry was the fastest 12 year old female swimmer in the world and went on to compete at the Olympic Games in Moscow (1980), two world championships (Berlin in 1978 and Ecuador in 1982) and the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton in 1978.

Competitive swimming was conventionally held to be a young person's game at this time, and one reason why Shane Gould retired at 17. Curry questioned this and, bucking the trend, made Olympic come backs after bearing children not once, but twice, to swim for Australia in Los Angeles in 1984 and again Barcelona in 1992 when she was 30. While Lisa obviously had natural ability in this sport it was clearly mental focus that kept her in the top 25 swimmers in the world for the duration of her career since age 15 and helped her ignore critical comment going into big races.

The question is, what can a champion like Lisa teach us mere mortals? 

Lisa's honesty and emotional were appreciated by our audience. She also talked about handling failure, and eventually turning this around with her competition surf boat racing team. Too engrossed, I can't relay the biographical detail but I can report what I thought about later arising from what she said. Consider this...

Do you have a goal or an interest? Competitive sport doesn't reward mediocre. Commitment in this context is training every day, not flaking out if the weather doesn't suit.

What are you prepared to do to achieve your goal? You really have to consider all aspects of your life - personal and professional - to make the adjustments needed to reach your potential. Is it worth it? Do you want it? Are you prepared to commit?

Goals are about priorities. Goals help us prioritise the myriad of tasks that wash over us daily. They help us set course and tack back to where we want to go.

It's not about the winning, it's about getting there. The day after you've won gold and the congratulations have been made, you move on. It's really about appreciating progress and what sort of person it makes you. This is really where our resilience comes from, if you think about it. 

I doubt that there was one person there that didn't take at least one powerful lesson home - be they carers in their personal life like me, professional trainers, managers or aspiring newcomers - whether this was a personal goal, a review of work-life balance or a startling new business initiative. 

In some ways, Lisa is quite uncompromising, and this clearly sets her apart. However, if we are less so, and do compromise, it is worth doing so consciously with our eyes wide open and not by default.

The real costs of handling your calls

A recent blog in UK newsletter Call Centre Helper by Carolyn Blunt, Director of Real Results Training, highlights some real choices for businesses - http://bit.ly/1I5NgO4 This blog is written for companies managing their own customer care teams, but when you consider the role of an outsourced contact centre partner like Well Done, it becomes more complex.

Businesses usually hope to reduce the Average Call Handling Time (AHT) of their calls to reduce their costs, but this can be counterproductive if you…

(a) Lose the customer or prospect or

(b) Fail to address the problem and force the customer to call back.

Outsourced call centre providers come under this pressure from clients to reduce handling times and costs all the time, so productivity is a key focus across services.However, industry best practice now suggests that the better approach is to consider the Customer’s Experience. Many corporations are taking the opposite tack to bringing down AHTs. Instead they are providing online tools so that customers mostly don’t have to call and, for those who do call, forgetting about reducing the AHT and focusing on resolving the customer problem so that they will be happy with the service and not have to call back.

Refreshingly, Blunt suggests that in some cases, however, we can address BOTH costs and the customer experience. Simply, she suggests that we think about the impacts of reducing AHT or redesigning the process journey from the customer’s point of view.

For example, reducing AHT is great for customers if this reduces their wait time, so the question we need to ask ourselves instead is ‘what can we do to help with this from the customer’s point of view?’

You may come up with your own answers, but how about:...

• IVR routing to help you push calls to different answer points so that simple calls can be handled quickly (this could even be an answering service role) and perhaps customers may be prepared to wait a little longer for complex support?
• Considering what can you do to improve the process for customers? Streamlined processes help reduce AHT, too.
• What about your systems? Is there an easy link on your system to pull up the customer’s details so that less needs to be checked during the call? Web based systems are best - Virtual Private Network (VPN) and remote log in systems slow handling times dramatically in an outsourced contact centre environment.

Your outsourced call centre provider often isn’t party to this discussion and ends up handling the brief given to them, which isn’t ideal. At Well Done we prefer to see us both working as a team, so don’t be wary of asking us for an opinion!

INNOVATION FOR SURVIVAL

At the 2015 LGPro Annual Conference Dr Amantha Imber, world class thinker and researcher on the topic of Innovation, gave a keynote address on the topic Innovation Survivor: How to Outthink, Outsmart and Outlast [your competition, I presume]. Dr Imber is an innovation psychologist and consultant. She was recently awarded the BRW Client Choice Award for Best Management Consultancy in Australia, she has a PhD in organisational psychology, and she works with major corporates like Coca-Cola, Commonwealth Bank, McDonalds and LEGO to facilitate innovation.

The session was a mix of theory and practice.The theory concerns what we are trying to do when we innovate. The practice recognises that we're human, and suggests ways that we can use the model to create great, new ideas. 

Ideally, the process of innovation has the following elements:

• Someone submits an idea; 
• The idea is assessed;
• If successful, the idea progresses to a prototype.

However, in reality, is this process clear to anyone in your organisation who has a great idea? What is the climate for risk taking in your organisation; how comfortable are people with risk? Even if you have people generating great ideas, does the organisation have the skills to develop breakthrough ideas through to prototype? 

To embrace innovation, Dr Imber recommends that we analyse where our organisation sits in terms of the Innovation Framework (below) and assess the level of commitment that we are willing to make to nurture innovation. 

Which brings us to the key question - what prevents us from innovating? 
I wasn't surprised to hear that the main barrier is our assumptions. If we configure every problem with all the same variables as we have now, often this will prevent a new solution from being found.

Dr Imber recommends that we identify our assumptions and crush them - this might be to give our selves permission to imagine another outcome and ask 'What if the opposite was true?' We should consider all kinds of assumptions, too:

• Neutral assumptions - in other words, describe things as they are;
• Negative assumptions - try not to rule out options in your brainstorming;
• Positive assumptions - recognise that some assumptions may be contingent on factors that may not apply.

For example, how did Apple come up with the iphone, what must be the most commercially successful mobile telephone design to date? They clearly didn't assume that a phone had to have more than one button and their enquiries into touchscreen technology must have followed on from there...

A clever strategy she recommends is to consider how someone else might solve a problem; we could try thinking "like Apple", "like an airline", or "like a gamer".

She also warns against decision fatigue - apparently the research shows that the quality of our decision declines throughout the day, so important decisions are best made first thing. As we get tired, we become more likely to take the easy way out instead of thinking things through.

These days the pressure to keep up and pull ahead is on as never before, yet I always think that being over-busy is the arch enemy of great ideas. Being able to play is key to innovative thinking. Children know it. As adults it's time we gave ourselves permission to think outside the box and play with our ideas, too.

SOCIAL MEDIA AS INNOVATION

At the recent LGPro Social Media Conference in Melbourne we received a mind-boggling overview of Telstra's social media marketing paradigm from their Executive Director Communications and Chief Social Officer, Jason Laird. (All credit to Jennifer Bartlett at Red Rebel Communications for organising this.) This presentation became the back drop to all discussion that followed on the theme 'Transforming the way we do business.'

In recent years apparently Telstra decided to use its very scale to its advantage in social media, encouraging all 32,000 staff to use their networks to put out the word across an array of the company's brands. The reward for doing this might be a donation to their local preschool, for instance. Each store now also has its own facebook page. Some use this well, some don't. Telstra is running a numbers game and fielding enough horses in the race is part of the strategy. Most of us would worry about the risk management this approach involves, but Laird described mis-use of social media as a performance management issue like many others. Of those 32,000 only one person has been dismissed following misconduct, and in their view this particular incident could easily have happened on other channels instead. Tellingly, half of Telstra's customer interactions are digital and the rate of increase shows no sign of decline.

Various sessions at the conference looked at uses of social media in local government to meet key objectives - support disaster coordination, provide responsive customer service, promote events and services, engage people in decisions about their communities, give a human face to organisations and promote community spirit in local areas. Generally the people responsible for social media in local government juggled multiple roles and responsibilities and either monitored their channels on an unpaid volunteer basis after hours or not at all.

In some ways the concluding panel session was the most interesting. We considered the known facts, trends and threats:

• Volumes of social media interactions will increase dramatically as more of the general public (and particularly young people) elect and expect to interact online with organisations; 
• Social media is an opportunity for a conversation without media intermediaries; many Councils are releasing information on their facebook pages rather than via traditional media releases for this reason;
• Posting information online is cheaper than newspaper advertisements or home letter drops and is a viable alternative in many instances;
• We may need to rethink business processes as well as people go mobile - links to submit online are more user friendly than paper forms;
• Social media engagement can be immediate and measurable;
• Social media can allow extended conversations around complex issues and help Councils make better informed decisions;
• Social media can be more effective in engaging particular audience segments (e.g. the young) than traditional channels
• Social media communication is best harnessed with a whole of organisation approach, a diversity of voices and open two-way communication with audiences; 
• To do nothing leaves us at risk of irrelevance and mediocrity.

It was a classic innovation dilemma. In this room full of social media practitioners, who was really prepared to let go of control and invite others, perhaps many others, in their organisation into the inner sanctum to post, tweet and respond to the general public? Best thinking indicates that we need to encourage everyone in our organisations to be leaders and nurture innovation. But at the top, we are risk averse and hesitate to let go.

It's a massive cultural shift to be willing to open the agenda to new possibilities, try new approaches, admit the possibility of failure, develop what works, and move on. Some of the younger people attending were quite pragmatic about this, advising that it's OK to make a mistake because it's ephemeral - the discussion moves on in a day or so - just don't 'hurt the brand'. For the older and more risk averse this is a new frontier with new rules, but even most savvy social media practitioners attending were reluctant to release control (even with appropriate user guidelines). We were all put on the spot and left to wonder if, how and why we could open these channels more to others, given the signposts we'd seen in the course of the day.

DIY INNOVATION

There are such roles as Innovation Manager now in the world! I had the pleasure of listening to two such pioneers describe what they do; Rowena Morrow (pictured), Innovation Leader at the City of Booroondara and Rick Bottiglieri, City of Yarra spoke at the LGPro Annual Conference in Melbourne.

They characterised innovation as leadership, but the locus of that leadership varied markedly between the two. Rowena was tasked by her CEO to 'subvert' the order to change processes - outcomes were not specified. Rick took more of a leadership down tack, focusing on activities to generate new ideas at the top. I will focus on the bottom up approach here because I think that it is intrinsically more challenging for Managers to invite innovation from their subordinates, and this approach can potentially yield more results.

There was agreement, however, that important pre-conditions must be put in place for effective innovation - leadership and strategy. By this, they meant:

• Clear understanding of the purpose, vision and goals of an organisation
• Passion - managers must walk the talk
• Innovation must be encouraged at all levels
• Time (space) and resources must be set aside specifically to encourage innovation
• Someone must be scanning for trends and potential areas for innovation by observing and reflecting on what others are doing and benchmarking the organisation against best practice; and
• Opportunities must be provided to stakeholders (staff, customers) to give feedback on processes and results.

Further, to support innovation there must be trust. Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum:

• There must be a mindset to empower and support people to bring innovative solutions to completion;
• Organisations must build the agility to shift or obtain skills and resources to meet new and emerging needs and opportunities; and
• Be prepared to make it quick - give change a try and be prepared to let some ideas fail quickly.

Rowena Wallace told us that at Booroondara the innovation initiative started with a few premises:

• Make space for new ideas;
• Subvert the hierarchy - anyone can have great ideas; and
• Talk about challenges, not problems  - what can innovation do for you?

The first step was to allow people to allocate time and space to innovate. For example, there was:

• The 'Crazy Ideas Group', which focused on users and stakeholders and encouraged diverse input; and how about the....
• 'Randon Acts of Coffee' iniitative, where people were given coffee breaks with people outside their work teams to encourage them to get to know other parts of the business and build connections; 
• The 'Ideas Portal ', which invited people to submit ideas online for consideration; 
• Newsletter stories were published internally about what was possible;
• Unusual open office layouts were implemented (including some hot-desking) to get away from the physical (and by implication) mental delineation of roles in the workplace; 
• Ideation Teams - team volunteers invited to look at ideas, experiment with them and evaluate their practical implementation in projects; and
• Design It Challenges were held where teams of 2-3 people drawn from across the organisation were invited to deliver a report and potentially see it adopted.

The focus was squarely on learning from doing and trying to convert ideas to projects. To this end the following framework was provided to us to illustrate the approach:

It was clearly recognised that engaging staff was the key to making innovation work, so 'Innovation Temperature' surveys were conducted to see where staff rated Council's innovation were conducted at the beginning of the project and progressively thereafter. (By the way, these showed progress!)

This session certainly had me thinking and any medium to large scale organisation could probably find something in these ideas that could be of benefit in their workplace.

Work-Life balance is no zero-sum game

Don’t you just love it when someone tells you something that you just know is right but you hadn’t actually put it into words before?

A few years ago a breakthrough book by Daniel Goleman entitled Emotional Intelligence was published. It contained detailed physiological information about what happens when we engage, or don’t engage with each other. It went a long way to explain to me why some of the people you met in school who blitzed the tests didn’t necessarily go on to be amazingly successful in their professional life, and vice-versa. Reading David Klaasen’s guest blog at HR Daily on the effect of analytical thinking and social thinking on brain activity and how this relates to leadership in business advanced this discussion significantly for me.

Essentially the research shows that you use different parts of your brain when you are thinking analytically than when you are thinking socially and, when you have activated one, the other is correspondingly restrained. Klaasen is director of a niche HR consultancy, Inspired Working Ltd, so his focus is on how this impacts leadership, productivity and business performance. 

He cited a leadership study which showed a towering imbalance in the analytical and social skills of business leaders, with the percentage of leaders scoring highly on both analytical and social skills a trivial 0.77%, indicating that social skills are not being valued in leadership selection and development.

Here’s the trick. According to Professor Matt Lieberman, neuroscientist at UCLA, social skills are a multiplier. This explains why organisations with great team work and intelligent, highly competent staff consistently outperform those with high human capital but low social capital. Social skills are the key to engaging staff and unlocking their contribution to the work.

Lieberman then revisited some classic experiments with some of the new insights in neuroscience to show that when you learn information and your goal is to share it with others, you use the social thinking mechanisms located on the midline of the brain where the two hemispheres meet and therefore do not only rely on your analytical thinking. Apparently the more active this area of the brain is during a learning experience, the better we remember what we learn and the more inclined we will be to share it with others.

Sounds like a win – win – win. We learn (and enjoy) more, we share information, and we become more productive to boot! No longer is the work-live balance a zero-sum game. It just requires a subtle shift in our thinking from the outset to harness this powerhouse of productivity and innovation.

Timely News on Lone Worker Welfare

HR Daily is a free eNewsletter that I often find has useful advice for employers. You need to go to www.hrdaily.com.au to subscribe, but I draw your attention to today's article by Lisa Berton, partner at Kemp Strang. 

She points out that if something goes wrong and a worker working alone is injured or dies, the last thing a court will consider is the cost of safety measures when they are determining whether you or not you took reasonable steps to ensure safety. 

The Work Health Safety Act is the thing to consider. You need to ask what is applicable to your business, your work situations. 

Do you have people working alone after business hours? Do they work in a remote area? Are they the last ones to lock up? Do people travel to visit clients or make home visits as part of their work? Have you considered fatigue risks if they are working late - do you pay taxi costs so they don't have to take public transport after hours?

Even a periodic check that people are safe - this needn't be expensive - may be considered enough to establish a workable communications strategy in line with the safety risks.

It's no wonder then that we at Well Done have had so many enquiries in the past two years about lone worker welfare. We thought that if we are going to do this, let's produce our own application that can do more and work smarter than has been the general model in the contact centre industry to date.

We've produced a stand alone welfare service to fit the bill - the Lone Worker Check System. It's affordable, flexible, and offers self-service features that can reduce the cost of routine checks, and it's backed by our 24x7 Australian Network that handles a raft of complex escalation services for many industries - local government, trades, industry, mining and resources, infrastructure, IT...  

I do invite you to read the original HR Daily article - sensible free legal advice is worth having - but I've noted the key details from the piece above in case you don't! Work Health Safety is something that all employers need to consider, and if there are some situations like those noted above in your operations, please talk to us. We have an affordable, workable solution that it would be prudent to check out.

Call us 1300 551 796 or use this contact form.

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGIES

This morning I came across two timely reminders of the importance of what we do in the Contact Centre industry. The first was a short well written commentary on Leveraging unified communications to improve customer experience from our telephone software provider, Fonality, and I found this interesting enough to look at the original US article cited there by industry expert Rick McFarland at UCStrategies article

In business we all find ourselves stretched more to respond on multiple channels, so that answering the telephone is only one channel  among many - email, social media, groups, website interactions, conferences, advertising, public relations, newsletters, good old word of mouth all come to mind. However, I instinctively liked  his comment 'Technology has a role to play here, but nothing is more important than listening.' This is so true.

At Well Done we are often asked to quote on a simple service with the advice that we 'just need to take a message'; this is exactly the kind of thing that all the big telcos offer, but the question in my mind when I call back people who are using mass market messaging services is 'how much better was this than leaving a voice message?'. The verdict to this question for me is often mixed.

And here's the point - we're not a telco and providing contact centre support is what we do; it's our core business. Our training is geared for speed and accuracy in the call handling, and we follow your brief, but this is not at the expense of providing good customer service and listening to your callers. Our systems allow us to handle a range of call scenarios and we can link to FAQs, websites, rosters, staff lists and more for various services. In general, we give the operator the precise greeting, and there may be some scripted responses for legal reasons, in but general we provide instructions so that our staff can respond in the own words in a natural conversational flow. This does take longer than a bald 'Can I take your message please', but rapport with your callers and training to allow the contact centre agent to direct the call so that they can efficiently meet your service brief won't actually make a Live Call Answering Service call longer, it will only make it better.

It isn't one size fits all at Well Done. When we set up your service to work with your team we routinely ask ourselves 'what key information should we collect to make this message, or this service, more useful?'. We need to know what you are trying to achieve from the service so we can suggest the best way to handle it here. We will also work with you as your needs change and your business grows. 

Thinking of your call answering as part of a Unified Communications Strategy is an important shift to make. Websites are 'open' 24x7 and the general expectation from customers is that they will be able to contact you 24x7 at their convenience. They can also share their displeasure 24x7 via social media and do so. Well Done can offer that support for you at a fraction that your could staff it yourself, or we can seamlessly take over from your staff after hours. Much is possible.

Getting Serious About Quality

Have you thought hard about Quality in your business? Approached properly, it’s an opportunity to review every aspect of what you do that will identify gaps in your processes, save on costly mistakes, and increase customer goodwill – a win, win, win situation in one.

For a smaller businesses with a hands on proprietor, procedures often won’t be documented, and eventually a lack of systems and dependence on a few key people will put a brake on growth if this is not fixed. Once the proprietor is no longer in control of operations, the systemic detail and measurability of formal Quality Assurance accreditation makes sense. Inbetween these points, stepping through your processes and formulating a Quality System is essential.

Like OHS and Disaster Recovery plans, your Quality System should be conceived as a continuous feedback loop. Your need to map out the main functions of your work, who is responsible for what, how you interact with your customers and respond to a problem, and then consider what can be done to stop the problem happening again. Policies, procedures and job descriptions should underpin each element, too.

Wherever possible, measurable indicators should be used; even in a small business you can’t rely on personal impressions from year to year to track progress and performance.

You also need to assess the risk and impacts of mistakes against the investment in time and money that you need to make to prevent or minimise their impact. Will a particular mistake literally put you out of business? Your quality planning will also need to feed into your business plans; for example, can you afford not to insure?

High Service Quality is achieved through application and planning, not by accident, and how these elements are coordinated to deliver a product or service. Quality is mapped out in a plan, and functions as a system.

In our Network Operations this map looks something like this:

 

On the positive side, what could service excellence do for your business?

Well Done is a Contact Centre specialist. We work with many businesses and government agencies in a variety of ways to support their operations. That is, we may be a small or major part of their Quality System.

For example –

• We can provide simple to complex reception after hours to give the credible impression of your commitment to Customer Service in a 24x7 world.
• We may act as the daytime reception team for businesses that don’t want the overhead of generalist staff or, properly briefed, provide the backup team for your Disaster Recovery plans.
• Some businesses send their daytime call overflows to us to ensure that they don’t miss sales enquiries or ensure that they meet their own Key Performance Indicators.
• We also provide escalation services to support organisations that cannot afford to miss critical calls.

Even a great Quality System will not prevent all mistakes because to err is human, but irritating though they may be, each mistake is in a way an opportunity for investigation, review and change. For the quality-minded manager, the focus must therefore be on the systems and processes to build out error – ideally backed by an effective team with a common focus on continuous improvement!