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Focus on Quality
In almost every Call Center including Focus Services, there is a team of specialists in the area of agent feedback. This team is called the Quality Assurance Team. The Quality Assurance Team records and monitors the calls that the agents on the floor participate in. They then grade the employees on specifics that occurred on the call. Once these statistics have been scored, the team then provides feedback to the agent that performed the call. Once the feedback is given to the agent and the meeting is concluded, the Quality Assurance Team takes this information and provides it to upper management. For the team of Quality Assurance Specialists, the most difficult task of all is providing feedback to the employees in the call center. Focus Services had been reviewing ways in which one may effectively provide the feedback to make it easier on both parties – the one giving it, and the one receiving it.
Sometimes getting a score from your respective QA is subjective. To be fair to both Quality Assurance Specialist and agent, a team compose of Quality Assurance Manager, Training & Development, managers, supervisors would listen to the call and would calibrate it. It is imperative that all these departments are there so they could do necessary steps on things that they need to work on to improve Quality.
This will be done randomly or if an employee insist that it was a good call. I have noticed, in my many years working in a call center, that many times the members of management will start to forget about the most important members of the call center – the agents taking and/or receiving the calls. This has a negative impact on the work environment in the call center and should be avoided at all costs. While you may not be able to change the mentality of the management team, you are perfectly capable of changing your own mentality. You should remember, each day that you arrive at your desk, that the agents that take and/or receive the calls that you monitor, are the most important part of your company – apart from the customers. You should learn to value the agents, and in return, they will value you and your opinion. When you provide feedback to employees in the call center, if they feel that they are valued and respected, they will be open and receptive to what you have to say.
The next important step in providing feedback to the employees in the call center is to ensure that you gather their input on their performance. Give them an opportunity to get their feelings out about their performance. You may find that there is a learning gap and you may be able to help. I have seen and monitored many Quality Assurance Specialists as they have given feedback to agents, and I have seen a severe lack of consideration as far as what the agent has to say is concerned. I have seen cases where, during feedback, the agent has attempted to speak their concerns, and the Quality Assurance Specialists literally interrupts and is quickly to add, “This is just the way it is”. Allowing the agent to speak during your feedback session is one of the main keys to communication and resolve when it comes to improvement in the workplace. It is vital that you allow some time to chat with the agent and let them give you feedback as well, which leads into my next suggestion.
Each time that we monitor an agent and provide them with feedback, We would give a questionnaire to them and ask them to fill it out. We tell them that they are not required to write their name on it. We want them to be as honest as possible without worrying over their jobs. We then request them once they’re done, to give the answered questions to their Team Manager and instruct them to make a copy for themselves and give the other copy to management. This would ensure that the management team knew what the agent thought of the QA performance and that if there was an issue they could hold be accountable to uphold the suggestions and responsibilities as posed by the agents.
Questions like:
1) Are you monitored on a daily basis?
2) Do you receive feedback from your supervisor or QA?
3) Is the Quality Assurance Agent positive and respectful when they give you feedback?
4) What are the weaknesses of your Quality Assurance Agent?
5) Do you have any comments or suggestions so that we could improve our Quality Assurance Specialist and Quality Assurance Department?
This is a sample only on some of the questions on the questionnaire form. Not only did this help the Quality Assurance Specialist on their self-improvement, but also it allowed management and agents to work together with Quality Assurance Team in an effort to maximize everyone’s potential within the company and made feedback more constructive.
Agents who have low QA scores should require to undergo a retraining program, a prescription period or nesting period ( weeks or a month) to improve their scores, with the supervision of Quality Assurance Specialist. These agents will be monitored on a daily basis and will be given feedback by their respective Quality Assurance Specialist.
If you are assigned to provide feedback to employees in a call center environment, and take these tips and apply them, you will see a change. The agents will become more receptive to their feedback. The management team will start to see a change in their call stats each day, and you will make a difference.
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People and a sense of purpose is the way towards Success.
I always believe our Company’s achievement was done by an attitude of teamwork, a common purpose, hard work and unending dedication to achieve our goal no matter what.
But I always believe that one of the most important ingredients of achieving success in life – the power to connect. I have always believed and focused my message on the importance of Attitude in creating SUCCESS. Through the years, we’ve also learned that while attitude is where it all starts, “connect” carries attitude out into the world.
Our attitude comes from our ability to connect with ourselves, our goals and most important, with other people. We succeed through relationships with people. Nothing in this world was ever created, built, produced, acquired, or utilized without the support of other people. In today’s interconnected world we lived in, most companies understand that the best way to get results comes only through bringing people together. When our business connects, it’s easier for companies or businesses to weather the ups and downs of the business cycle.
Connected employees are likely to go the extra mile. Connected customers mean referrals and brand loyalty. But to create meaningful and lasting success, people and companies must create that emotional links not only with each other but also with a strong uplifting purpose. We believe that making that connection between people, performance and purpose can be achieved clearly and simply. When you create and sustain the power to connect, your success is not only possible but virtually guaranteed.
The drive to connect is innate in us. Physical connection like a child to a mother, and our need for emotional connection is just as important, if not more important for our very survival. We will do almost anything to feel linked to someone else. When we connect, we have the power and drive. When we feel disconnected, there is a sense of apathy, a sense of something missing, and a big part of our motivation and inner drive disappears.
Today’s day and age, it seems we’re more disconnected than ever from much of our world. We rarely connect face-to-face, even voice to voice, anymore without some kind of electronic device being use. We use e-mail, fax, IM, text messages, teleconference, or voice mails. We often shop online and spend most of our free time playing online games or channel surfing in front of our TV. When we’re in public we’re either plugged in to our iPods and listening to music.
We don’t even bother to connect with our families, friends and people standing in front of us because we’re too busy with our gadgets. This electronic connection makes us feel as if we’re connected or linked to other people, but this can cause a kind of emotional vacuum. It’s like eating in a fast food restaurant. It may taste good for the moment, but it will not nourish you in the long run. Nothing can replace for a real meal. In the same manner, all this electronic talk cannot take the place of the deep personal bonding that we human beings long for.
I read a story about a married couple whose neighborhood area lost power one night during an earthquake. They describe how they both, and their children left their various computers, TVs, and gadgets and came together in the basement. With nothing else to distract them, they all started playing board games by candlelight. In that short time, we made what I called a soul deep connection,said the husband. It was strong, positive, and was based on shared emotions. We all both felt better for having spent time in each others company. When we connect, it doesn’t just makes us feel good, it makes us do better. I have found that our success and fulfillment in life are tied to the quality of the connections we are able to make.
They spent the whole night laughing, talking, singing, dancing, sharing about their lives and had a marvelous time. The family connected on a personal level. We all want to connect in that way, regardless if it’s with our families, our team, our co-workers or our customers.
We always have that chance and opportunity every day to connect and experience that joy and happiness that comes with it. I love people, and I love hearing their own life stories. There’s almost always something wonderful to be discovered about each human being we encounter. When we connect to positive emotions, to amazing people, to great companies and causes that makes a difference, then we are more likely to achieve great things and feel great while doing so. We have to choose who, what, why and how we will forge the connections in our lives. We have to make sure the things we choose to put our passions into are worthy of us.
“My family brought me up to always look for the best in other people. I love other people, I love spending time with people, I love learning from people. “ – Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Group.
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What is Edgerank and How Does it Affect Your Business?
Facebook is a part of life, that is just something we have to accept whether we like it or not. You can hardly turn on a the TV, read a magazine, or visit a website without seeing a business asking for you to like their page. Maybe you have asked yourself why they care so much? Should I be caring more about my Facebook image?
Many marketers still struggle with a Facebook marketing strategy. They slap up a page and turn on the open sign and wait. Because Facebook is so savvy and has successfully navigated through the waters of spammers and viruses (the very same waters where Myspace sunk to the bottom) they have made it tricky for a business to promote their pages on Facebook. You have to buy an ad or promote the page through your own personal Facebook page, neither of which I would recommend.
This is why it is important to know what Edgerank is. Edgerank is the algorithm that Facebook uses to decide whether or not your page will be visible and to whom it will be visible to. The Edgerank algorithm bases its results on three factors.
1. Affinity.
You need likes, comments, and most importantly, shares. This shows Facebook that what you have posted and where you have posted it might be interesting to the friends of those who have liked, commented, and shared your post. Have you ever noticed in your news feed that the last person you engaged with on Facebook is now showing up in your news feed? That is because Edgerank assumes you will interested in what they are doing based on your interactions with them. The same holds true for Businesses.
2. Weight.
Edgerank places a weight of importance on each action that takes place. The more involved the action, the more weight it holds. For example likes are easy, it takes a few seconds to do and therefore hold little weight. Comments take more time and show more engagment, thus they hold more weight. Shares are hold the most weight because it is as if you are personally endorsing the content within that post.
3. Time Decay
Edgerank wants to promote the newest and freshest information to its users. The longer a post has been up, the less impact it has according to Edgerank. If you have a post that is attracting a lot of attention and creates a conversation that is ongoing, then your post will remain the freshest and the newest. Bottom line is that Edgerank likes new and fresh posts and content.
EdgeRank has become so important that third-party businesses are being built on measuring your effectiveness with it (EdgeRankChecker.com) and determining how to improve your results with it (PageLever.com). Facebook continues to experiment with how to best filter content to users from their friends and favorite Pages. Recently, Facebook was testing a headlines feature that also seemed to use EdgeRank. The question is will Facebook improve EdgeRank, or jettison it in favor of something else?
Further, will Facebook begin to incorporate ways to see what is most popular across all of Facebook? At this time, everything we see on Facebook is personalized, but thousands of people might be sharing a news item or video. On Twitter it’s always possible to see what the biggest trends or hashtags are- will Facebook move forward showing globally popular content, even to a small degree?
Google has been the leader of Internet marketing and web traffic for years now, receiving the majority of all search traffic, remaining the top website on the internet for many years now. After beating all its competitors, including Yahoo! And Bing, and acquiring YouTube, which is the second most searched site on the internet, it seemed no one could challenge or beat them.
However, Facebook has been neck and neck with Google for the past year, and it no longer seems unlikely that Facebook will overtake the search giant. What’s more, Facebook’s ad revenues continues to climb, and it uses keyword technology in its News Feed to group related posts. If Facebook improves on its keyword-finding abilities and extends that kind of targeting to its advertising, it will overcome the last barrier to targeting superiority and unlock even greater ROI for advertisers. And this could relegate Google to a disappointing also-ran within two to three years.
Google’s competitive edge has always been understanding exactly what people want right now (buying intent signaled by keywords), and Facebook’s has been its effectiveness at social media. Google has been unable to break the social puzzle sufficiently to get big momentum, so if Facebook figures out keyword intent within social activities, Facebook might just win the race.
As previously suggested, Facebook has the opportunity to distinguish itself as the single login across the interwebs. Along with this, Facebook could provide tools to these websites that could be integrated easily and also have users interacting with the Facebook flatform. While Skype has continued to increase in popularity with both individuals and the business sector as an instant messaging service and a cheap way to connect with others via video, and also as a substitute for phone service.
Suggestion is that Facebook could chip away at Skype with a video chat service, but in July 2011, Skype and Facebook teamed up to merge functionality. What’s interesting is that Microsoft acquire Skype, as well as a small percentage of Facebook, and when buying Skype, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft insisted on meeting with Mark Zuckerberg to create a functional and strategic alliance. All of this is part of their war against major competitor Google.
Facebook will continue implementing many more features over the coming months and years. Some of these will be refreshes of current features, and many others will be new ways for us to become even more obsessed with the social network. Whatever these new features are, we advise you to review them in a marketers point of view. Try to explore how you can use these features to be more useful, develop community, and engage your fans, prospects and customers.
Whether we choose to use Facebook solely as a personal social network to connect with friends and family or to help humanize and grow your company, remember that Facebook is a tool. The real value of Facebook is how you use the various features for you and your community. Facebook is positioned to become the first social network to reach a billion users. With that growth will come more features, and more ways for you and your company to connect with your prospects, customers, colleagues, and fans. Facebook in many ways has always been part of any company’s marketing plan.
So be creative, engaging, and interesting as you can be on your Facebook page and over time you will see great benefits.
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What Social Media Does Best?
The best way to explain to management , your team or your family what social media does, why it’s different than the old way people used computers and the web, and why people are spending a lot of their time about it, here are some thoughts to begin with. Looking at it from a business point of view, but you will find these apply to nonprofits and other organizations as well. Further, social media isn’t relegated to the PR teams and marketing team only. It is a bunch of tools that can be applied throughout businesses, in different forms.
Blogs allow chronological organization of thoughts, status, and ideas. This means more permanence than e-mails. While Podcast (video and audio) encourage different types of learning. Social networks encourage collaboration, can take the place of intranets and corporate directories, and can promote non e-mail conversation channels.
Social networks can pull together like-minded people around shared interest with little external force, no organizational center, and a group sense of what is important and what comes next. While Social bookmarking means that the entire groups can learn of new articles and other Web properties instead of leaving them all on one machine, one browser, and for one human.
Blogs and wikis encourage conversation, sharing and creating. Social networks are full of prospecting and lead generation information for sales and marketing. Social networks make for a great avenue to learn and understand the mind-set of the online consumer, should that be of importance or value to you. Online versions of your materials and media, especially in formats that let you share, mean that you’re equipping others to run with your message, that should be important if you are a marketer. Online versions of your materials and media are search-able, and this helps Google to help you find new visitors, customers, and employees.
Social networks contains a lot of information about your prospective new hires, your customers and your competitors. While Blogs allow you to speak your mind and let the rest of the world know your thought processes and mind-sets. Podcast are a way to build intimacy with information and can reach people who are trying out new gadgets, like droids, iPhones, iPods, gadgets from Apple, Zunes and many more.
Tagging and sharing and all the other activities common on the social Web mean that information gets passed around much faster. Human aggregation and mediation improves the quality of data you find and gives you more “exactly what I was looking for” help. Innovation works much faster in a social software environment, open source or otherwise. Conversations spread around and people likes to feel heard. What else does social media do best?
Blogging is understanding what people think of you. If you cannot learn from your critics, where are you getting all your advice? Only from fans who raves about you? One important tip about blogs is just don’t post press releases and marketing junk into your blogs. No one will read them, and things will go poof quickly.
Try keeping your blog open to more than just pitching yourself, your organization, and your services. It’s your place, so you can do what you want, but if it’s just a big fat ad, it will get boring, fast. Sounds like there are lots of negatives about blogging stuff, huh? There are lots of ways to make a bad first impression.
Blogging, when you are comfortable with it, is a great way to keep your audience in the loop about what matters to you. It’s a great way to represent your organization. It’s a wonderful way to share information back and forth, especially once you have started learning from experiencing other people’s blogs.
To be continued. See you guys on my next post.
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Your Social Media Strategy And Who Owns it?
Beyond conversing with your audience in social media, understanding who owns your conversation within your own company is not always easy or simple. In big companies, a lot are saying that they can do social media better than the others. If you outsource some of your marketing, your vendor is thrown into the mix, too.
Would it be your PR department? Because they know how to get the press interested? Your marketing department think they are right people to do the job. Your online marketing team believe they can do the best job because this is their world or your ad agency or your IT.
But who really is the best qualified for the job?
The tough part is deciding who it is. It’s never the same answer for every company because there’s no solution when it comes to social media. Finding out who is truly the best at handling social media efforts within your company can be difficult.
Is the best answer to use a mix of people from all departments, to come up with a new one? Or do you hand over the job to one department? It’s as much about knowing your audience as it is about understanding the internal workings of your own company. No matter who ends up owning the conversation within your company, the most important piece is to make sure that all departments communicate and buy into your social media strategy.
Anyone in your company can affect your social media strategy. Getting your people to buy into your social media strategy might seem easy, but it can be one of the hardest job to implement. Not only does it involve the departments communicating with each other, but it also involves setting in place policies for employees who are not directly involved with your social media strategy but are active in social media platforms.
Remember that your employees have a life after their working hours and are likely involved in some social media site in some way. Getting them to understand the implication or impact of their actions on these social media sites in their after office hours is just as important to communicate. Even the security guards or janitor of your building should be made aware that what he says about his work or job on Facebook or Twitter etc. affects your company. They also should buy into your social media strategy.
Even if it seems inconsequential to your efforts, everyone on your team should be aware that you have some kind of social media strategy in the works. While your employees couldn’t help or harm marketing efforts targeted to more traditional marketing outlets such as radio, TV or newspapers, your people can affect your social media marketing efforts.
Your people have just as much of an effect on your social media marketing strategy as do your customers. You never know how your employees lives can either hurt or even assist your strategy, the only way you can even start to understand those possibilities is to share what it is you are planning to do.
The biggest bait that brings companies into social media is the thought that this will be a quick, easy and cheap answer or way out to all their marketing woes. Although it seems a no brainer to set up a Facebook page or a Twitter account and take it live to everyone in just a couple of minutes, that is the only easy and quick part.
A lot of hard work goes into creating and implementing a social media strategy using these platforms. Do not be fooled by all the hype, there’s really nothing fast or cheap about a successful social media strategy. So with all that out-of-the-way, we all have to get down to understanding the hard work that goes into succeeding in social media and marketing effectively in this medium.
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Introducing Ourselves to Social Media Marketing
You need to study your audience and customers thoroughly. Without it, you are only guessing at where to start and be wasting a lot of time and resources in areas that most likely will not help you achieve the goals you want to reach with your social media marketing plan.
Social media marketing is a lot more than just a laundry list of items that a company prints out on a marketing slick. Social media marketing, just like any other form of traditional or online marketing, needs a strategy. You need a well thought out plan with goals set in place so that you will know where you want to be and how to reach there.
It’s not just your social media marketing team that’s involved in pursuing and participating in social media communities. Everyone in your company has some sort of stakes, whether it’s the stories your customer service agents hear on the phone, or it’s people totally removed from marketing who Facebook pages stating they worked for you. Everyone in the company has some sort of involvement in your social media marketing strategy. So understanding that different level of involvement all have different affects is key to making sure you plan the right strategy for everyone in your company.
One of the big questions when it comes to applying a social media marketing strategy is, “How will I know if it’s successful? How do you now if what you are doing is not successful and when to stop doing it?”. Your social media marketing strategy needs to be measured. Measurement comes in many different forms, from the number of re-tweets your content is getting and from website traffic.
Social media is one of my passion and so are the millions out there. I have found companies that understand how to harness the power that social media communities offer and have become successful and usually have a loyal group of brand evangelists ready to promote them at a moments notice. Helping companies and marketers understand how to reach and engage their audiences through the power of social media is something I love to do, and I cringe when I see or hear so-called consultants selling social media services as if it were the next gimmick they need to get into.
Social media marketing is not a gimmick. It’s hard work that can be extremely engaging when use in the right way. No more than ever, it’s very important for companies to be where the questions and conversations are going on that affect their bottom line. Social media is a perfect way to do that.
Optimizing your social media marketing efforts involves everything from making sure your profiles includes your brand, product or service names, to ensuring the content that you are placing out into the social media communities you become involved in is not only findable but relates to what those community members are discussing about.
A lot of companies miss perfect opportunities on making the link between social media and search marketing in their online marketing plans because they don’t know the link between social media and search is being found. People in these social media communities still need to find you and your content that you are providing, so understanding how to optimize what you are doing with your social media strategy is very important.
When the internet started to take off, people started to tune out those carefully crafted messages and take more control over how they voiced their experiences with products or services. From websites to blogs, to forums and message boards, conversations have had more influence on what others buy, subscribe to, and believe is valuable than any marketing message could manage. Before we heard the term social media, these conversations were happening with very few companies knowing that they were even going on, and even fewer understanding that they needed to participate in those conversations.
Now that social media is on everyone’s mind when you talk about online marketing, companies are starting to grasp the power this medium holds. It holds as much power for the consumer advocate as it does for those who never find good in anything and just want attention. It’s also not easy to sort the constant complainers to find consumers who truly want you to listen to them as they share their experience with your product or services. Although it’s not easy to sort through, companies are still investing resources into their social media efforts because by the end of the day, these real conversations leads to real relationships and those trusted relationships leads to referrals and sales. These real conversations also produce some of your most loyal fans and greatest evangelists.
First we must begin to understand that a customer who seems to be complaining is really a customer who was very disappointed in your service or product after you put a lot of trust into what you were selling. Then distinguish them from the Troll – One who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument and constant complainers.
However, this takes time and understanding. It does not just happen because you made a decision to participate in social media. It happens because you take the time to become part of the community and share on an equal level with your audience. For all the successes in social media touted in the mainstream media, thousands more efforts launched and failed because they regurgitated offline messages to social media communities.
The companies didn’t plan a strategy because they figured it was a simple as transplanting their carefully crafted message within this new medium. The reporters who feature these successes failed to mention the companies hours of research, man-hours of networking and effort put into listening to audiences. A lot of big companies are putting extraordinary efforts into holding the right conversations, in the right environments and at the right time with their audiences. Unfortunately, the mainstream media rarely highlights their effort.
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Core Purpose Is The Organization’s Fundamental Reason For Being
An effective purpose reflects the importance people attach to the company’s work-it taps their idealistic motivations-and gets at the deeper reasons for an organization’s existence beyond just earnings and profit. Here are some example of the powerful purpose statements that had propelled some of the visionary companies of our day to great success.
Merck: to gain victory against disease and help mankind.
Disney: To use our imaginations to bring happiness to millions
Johnson & Johnson: To alleviate pain and suffering
These are big ideas that can make a lot of difference in the world, ideas that separate the great from the ordinary. Purpose isn’t everything, but it influences everything else. Sure, every organization must also have strong leadership, management, succession planning, execution, strategy and tactics, innovation and more, but in working with a vast range of companies and organizations, it all has to start with a purpose. That is the hinge that everything else hangs upon. The simplest way to explain purpose is: Purpose is a definitive statement about the difference you are trying to make in the world. Having clarity about the ultimate purpose of the time and energy you spend doing what you do is the cornerstone of a culture of purpose. It’s what drives everything you do. It’s your reason for being that goes beyond making money, and it almost always results in making more money than you ever thought possible.
If you have a purpose and can express it with clarity and passion, then everything make sense and everything flows. You feel good about what you’re doing and clear about how to get there.
You’re excited to get up in the morning and you sleep easier at night. If you don’t have a clear purpose, everything feels a bit chaotic, harried, and maybe even meaningless. Without a core purpose in place, the way forward is often a real challenge. The textbook definition of purpose is: the object toward which one strives or for which something exists.
Without a purpose, what are you striving for? What are you resolved to accomplish? If you have no answer to these fundamental questions, your business (and your life) may be a real struggle. The power of purpose is not a marketing idea or a sales idea. It’s a company idea. Purpose drives an entire organization and it answers why the brand exists.
Why should you want a purpose? Why does purpose matter? Why not just work on sound strategy and positioning year after year and have a good, viable business in the marketplace? You can certainly do that, and you may even have reasonable success doing it. But in our experience, purpose offers up a host of benefits, including easier decision making, deeper employee and customer engagement, and ultimately, more personal fulfillment.
Having a purpose not only helps builds innovation inside your organization, it also helps all the stakeholders and partners that work with your organization to develop visionary innovations on your behalf. When we are working on behalf of truly purpose-based organizations, the visionary ideas and innovations tend to flow much more easily. Ideas move beyond the realm of clever tactics that might be noted in an industry publication to meaningful messages, experiences, services, and interactions that will be loved by the customers who are being served.
I suppose our pursuit of purpose-based organizations may in some ways be self-serving. It’s a lot easier to be in the business of “visionary ideas that make a difference” when we’re working with organizations that are hell-bent on making a difference too.
Purpose can make the seemingly impossible possible. It can rally the troops to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds. It can ignite a fire in the belly to fight the fights that seem impossible to win.
Purpose will hold you steady in a turbulent marketplace. Market is always changing. Competitors come and go. Trends rise and fall. Without purpose to hold you steady, it’s very easy to get distracted by marketplace fluctuations. You may find yourself reacting to every competitor that comes along. Wall Street pressure may send you desperately looking down unchartered paths. Trends may suggest you need to consider a new line of business.
Purpose injects your brand with a healthy dose of reality. When companies don’t have anything substantive to say and their product or services is relatively ordinary, they often rely on advertising to create an image they hope will add value to their brand. However, the best advertising in the world will not save a mediocre company. The company has to have something of true value to offer to consumers.
This is not rocket science and more on common sense. If you tell consumers one thing in your marketing, and they experience something entirely different or ordinary when they go to use you, the relationship won’t last long. Your behavior will catch up with you and people will notice.
When you have a purpose at the heart of the company, it will drive the business and ensure that something remarkable is happening with the product or service. The thing about purpose is that it starts with the leaders, works its way through the organization, and finds its way into the products, services, experiences, and ultimately, into the marketing. If the company is not truly delivering it, the marketing shouldn’t be talking about it.
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It’s Not What We Sell, It’s What We Stand For.
I got it! Got what? “What you guys can be the best in the world at!”
We’d been struggling with the answer to a very difficult question – what can you be the best in the world at?
“It’s right in front of you. Look at the clients here today. Focus Services has somehow managed to attract extraordinary companies with a purpose beyond making money. They’re companies that want to make a difference.
I think you can be the best in the world at delivering visionary ideas for companies that actually have a purpose.”
I realized we have put our finger on the articulated secret that has mold the most successful client relationships we had developed in our years of running this company. While we often talk about the difference and using it as the cornerstone for building some of America’s most successful brands.
We work with a vast array of clients and have always done whatever it takes to build their businesses. Some relationships have been a disaster from day one, while most have unfolded into lifelong friendships and true partnerships that have built both the esteem and the profits of everyone involved.
We realize that our most successful relationships are with clients who are genuinely passionate about making a difference in the marketplace. And our gift is being able to identify, simplify, and articulate that difference to the world.
Our company and its management have shared the same lifelong goals – to stay together, and to make a difference. We have people who are mavericks, visionaries, and leaders committed to making a difference.
Focus Services is just one of those organizations that are winning in the marketplace because of its commitment to a higher purpose-a purpose that we have had the privilege of helping to discover and bring to life through the power of media and marketing.
The road we’ve taken comes from our core values and our outlook on life in general, that life is short, so live it out doing something that you care about. Try to make a difference that best way you can.
We’ve had fun; we have cultivated the success of others and enjoyed a lot of it ourselves. At the end of the day, it’s been much more rewarding to work with clients that are trying to make a difference than it is to work with clients that are just trying to sell more products.
An organization needs the passion and strengths and the needs of the world stands a great purpose. Every company is capable of having one. No organization is too big or too small, too niche or too mundane, too high or low-interest to have a purpose.
We’ve worked with every kind of enterprise imaginable: from soap to social causes (smoking cessation, colon cancer),from software to finance, health-care to real estate, Telecom to food business. It’s not the category you work in, but the business model, the leadership, and the positioning that ultimately determine whether or not you will find and live out your purpose.
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ClearView: Revolutionary Metric Software for Customer Relationship Management.
The essence of the information technology revolution and, in particular, the World Wide Web is the opportunity to build better relationships with customers than has been previously possible in the off-line world. By combining the abilities to respond directly to customer requests and to provide the customer with a highly interactive, customized experience, companies have a greater ability today to establish, nurture, and sustain long-term customer relationships than ever before. The ultimate goal is to transform these relationships into greater profitability by increasing repeat purchase rates and reducing customer acquisition costs.
Indeed, this revolution in customer relationship management or CRM as it is called, has been referred to as the new “mantra” of marketing.
Numbers are the life blood of contact centers, customer care centers and call centers. Most call centers of any size depend heavily on performance metrics to measure how efficiently they are running and how well they are meeting the company’s and the customers’ needs.
But while call center software produces a slew of metrics, most of them are very low-level. The paradox of these measurements is that while they’re useful for managing the call center, they don’t do much to advance the customer relationship or further the purpose of the call center.
ClearView will disparate sources into a shared and central system of record and deliver a real-time, holistic view of the customer relationship to contact center agents or other customer facing staff. A holistic view of a single customer relationship, as well as visibility into customers grouped by region, type, affinity or other segmentation, permits call centers to track key performance indicators and operational metrics which are much more customer relevant and more in alignment with the company’s market, revenue, and customer strategy objectives. Giving the CSR the customer’s complete history for example, not only provides opportunities to better satisfy the customer, it can also substantially reduce the average time per call because the customer doesn’t have to bring the CSR up to speed on purchase history, outstanding incidents, or prior interactions.
Clearview will change the way the industry views customer relationship management. Below is a demo of ClearView, see for yourself how you can realize the untapped potential of your customer support. Focus Services has been dedicated to transparency and accountability to all their clients, the launch of ClearView not only exemplifies this mission, but gives their client’s insight to their campaigns they have never had before and can only get from ClearView.
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Highly Successful Companies Attributes Success to its Corporate Culture.
Strong company cultures can be positive and an asset or it can be negative or a liability. If the company’s values are constructive and support its goals, then having a strong corporate culture is an asset. It is defined as a functional culture. If the company’s values are negative or dysfunctional, then having a strong culture will be a liability.
The culture at Ford Motor Company in the late 1960s and 1970s is a good example of a dysfunctional culture. The informal corporate culture at Ford was captured in a statement often made among its employees: “If you can get it to drive out the door, we can sell it!” This was not a formal corporate pronouncement, of course, but a statement often heard and prevalent in conversations around the company. It contained an implicit disrespect for the customer and suggested that working to achieve high quality products was not that important.
The lack of focus on quality and reliability was also reflected in how customers talked about the company. Many customers said Ford stands for “Fix and Repair Daily.” Which is very negative of course. Ford later made the pronouncement that “Quality is Job One” – a clear response to the damage that had been done to its brand.
Unfortunately, it took some time to overcome the perception of poor quality in the customer’s minds. This is an example of a strong dysfunctional culture in action.
In contrast, the Four Season Hotel chain is a good example of a strong functional culture with respect to customer service. The Four Seasons trains its employees to stop what they are doing and escort “guest” to their desired destination whenever the latter ask for directions to someplace in the hotel. Employees live the culture of excellent customer service, and customers see it in action.
A culture can also be weak and functional, or weak and dysfunctional. In companies with weak functional cultures, employees behave in a way that supports achievement of company goals, but there is no overall understanding of the company’s true personality because the culture is not being actively managed. Employees may understand that the customer is important, but they may have quite different interpretations of how to treat the customer. To overcome this problem, people must be trained or told how to treat customers under various situations.
What is presented in a values or culture statement is not necessarily what the real culture is within a company. The real culture, by contrast, consists of the values, beliefs, and norms that actually influence employee behavior. A company can state that it values treating all employees as “assets” but then fail to invest in their development. A company can talk about its most important assets as being its people, but then treat them poorly. These are example of lack of alignment between the stated and real cultures.
Culture is very important to all organizations. If managed correctly, culture might well be the ultimate strategic asset and competitive weapon for most companies. Corporate culture has a big impact on organizational performance. Culture affects goal attainment. More specifically, companies with strong cultures are more likely to achieve their goals than those with relatively weak cultures.
So called strong culture organizations are thought to have a high degree of organizational success because of a believed link to motivation. An increasing number of highly successful organizations have, at least in part, attributed their success to effective culture management. Among them are Starbucks Coffee, Google, and Walmart, to cite just three.
Google, the undisputed leader in the Internet space through its search engine technology. Its continuous development of that technology is the talent and creativity of its people, which in turn is influenced by the company’s culture. Google is the best companies to work for, and this attracts talent-a truly virtuous circle.
Having recognized the importance of corporate culture. They instilled three distinctive core values:
1. Don’t be evil
2. Technology matters.
3. We make our own rules.
The first value refers to integrity and fair treatment of customers. We never manipulate rankings. Our users trust Google’s objectivity, and no short-term gain could be ever justify breaking that trust. The second value, concerning technology, is self explanatory. The third value, about Google making its own rules, refers to various unorthodox practices.
In his book The Wal-Mart Way, Soderquist attributes the company’s success to its culture, which is labeled “The Wal-Mart Way.” As he states it, “The Wal-Mart Way is not about stores, clubs, distribution centers, or computers. These tangible assets are all important ingredients in the company’s business plan, but the real success is about people.” It is about how Walmart treats its people and customers.
The culture of Walmart consists of three key values.
1. We treat everyone with respect and dignity.
2. We are in business to satisfy our customers.
3. We strive for excellence in all that we do.
These values are the cultural foundation of Walmart.
Let’s take a look at Focus Services. Bacolod City is one of the homes of Focus Services international facilities. Focus Services is a privately owned call center service provider, specializing in multi-product telesales and customer relationship management. Founded in 1995 with two employees, Focus Services has grown year over year by building strong, collaborative and effective vendor relationships with clients across multiple industries. Currently, Focus has over 3,000 employees working in 8 Focus facilities, both domestically and internationally.
Focus Service Culture consist of three core values:
1. People – We Challenge and Train, Instill Ownership and Discover Potential.
2. Partners – We Focus on Transparency, Flexibility and Performance.
3. Community – We have responsibility to Mankind and Work to Improve their lives.
Focus Services does not only offer job advancement and training for its employees but also scholarship and tuition reimbursement for those who want to continue and finish their studies or take up other courses.
I’m very proud to be a part of the culture here, said Liljenquist. We hope we fit in nicely, we think we do, and we really appreciate the hospitality that everyone has shown us, he said. Focus Direct customer service agents are very diverse, talented multi-taskers and are very equipped in handling different accounts at the same time. We take pride in that, said Liljenquist.
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