Effective communication is the key for a company to be successful. A company’s ability to communicate both oral and written to its employee and customer is paramount. Poor communication skills can lead a company down the road of poor performance and eventual failure. One basic reason an organization fails is because the company was unable to execute its business plan successfully. The doors will close when the organization eventually runs out of cash to operate. How did the company get to that point? In Eric Wagner’s article Five Reasons 8 out of 10 business fail he states. Reason #3: Failure to communicate value propositions in clear, concise and compelling fashion (Wagner 2013). Communication starts with the organization leaders. It is the leader responsibility to clearly and effectively communicate the direction, vision; purpose will help each employee to understand the role they play in the company’s success. If each employee understands their role the will have a better ability to communicate the company’s vision to the customers. In Ron Flavin’s article, he writes good communication skills help leaders to better understand others and enable them to build trust and respect among their followers and peers while fostering environments where creative ideas and problem solving flourish(Flavin 2015). A leader with strong communication skills will help the organization down the road to success. On the other hand, a leader with poor communication skills can destroy an organization. Today the world is just a click or phone call away. The ability for a company to have such a broad reach for customer and employees has created some unique problems. Two areas that have caused companies to address how they do businesses are customer service/sales call centers and the rapid expansion of social media. I am going to discuss some of the problems call centers and social media puts on a business. I am going to use personal experience and outside sources to explain the problem and solutions a company can use to compete in these environments.
Call Center: What do you think of when you hear the term call center? I did a quick image search “Call Center” on google. The results were an image of people wearing headsets looking at a computer screen talking with customers. I am sure that is image most people get when they think of call center. Living in Florida and it being an election year it seems to me the call centers are working overtime. I cannot go a week without 3 or 4 unknown numbers calling my phone. The call center is the butt of many jokes in the United States. I wonder what purpose a call center serves. What is a call center? The business dictionary defines a call center like this.
Telephone service facility set up to handle a large number of (usually) both inbound and outbound calls. Some firms, however, specialize only in calls that are inbound (for assistance, help, or ordering) or outbound (for sales promotion or other messages). Most telephone orders are handled by call centers and not by the manufacturers or suppliers of goods or services (Business Dictionary n.d.)
In today’s connected world a call center is an essential tool to help a business meet the demands of its customers.
The first call center emerged with the introduction of the Public Branch Exchange (PBX) in the 1960’s laid out the basic model of a call center but it was only with the development of Automatic Call Distributors (ACD) that the framework of the modern call center started to emerge (TCN 2015). The call center world has continued to change since its inception. Call Center creates some unique problems for a company. With today’s technology when you make or receive a call from a call center the agent can be anywhere in the world. In the early days, call center got a bad name. The 1980s the word telemarketing fell out of favor. By then, many people had come to view the term telemarketing unfavorably, relating it to the unpleasant experience of being interrupted by the phone during dinner (Bernier 2012). The focus has shifted from the volume of call to the quality experience the customer receives. The biggest problem is how a call center can provide a high level of service on each and every call. I currently work in 250+ seat call center. The center I work in has received the Call Center of Excellence Certification from Benchmark Portal. The certification is one of the highest awards a center can receive. To maintain the certification the center is judge independently in a number of areas. Benchmark Portal (BP) grades a center in a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPI). BP grades the center in effectiveness metrics and efficiency metrics.
Effectiveness Metrics: First Call Resolution, Agent Satisfaction, Top Box Caller Satisfaction in Percent, Bottom Box Caller Satisfaction, Top Box Agent Satisfaction in Percent, Bottom Box Agent Satisfaction in Percent, Calls Closed on First Call in Percent, Average Speed of Answer in Seconds, Calls Transferred in Percent, Average Hold Time in Seconds, Average Time in Queue in Seconds, Average Calls Abandoned in Percent
Efficiency Metrics: Inbound Calls per Agent per Hour, Cost per Call in Dollars, Average After Call Work in Minutes, Turnover of Full-time Agents in Percent, Average Talk Time in Minutes, Agent Utilization in Percent, Agent Occupancy in Percent, Adherence to Schedule in Percent, Average Agent Attendance in Percent, Auxiliary Time in Percent, Agents/Supervisor Ratio (BP n.d.) BP does a great job in providing a call center which areas are of most importance to provide a high level of satisfaction to the customer. The goal is to provide the customer with a solution to their problem and keep the company in a positive light in the mind of the customer. Just being able of know the metrics are not the only problem a call center will have to address. In the call center, I work in one problem we are trying to tackle is the service level of the call. Our goal is to maintain 85% efficiency of answering a call within 2 minutes it gets into the cue. Our center handles close to 18,000 inbounds 10000 outbound calls per day. When a client calls in they start with a Voice responses system that helps route them to right agent to handle the call. The problem that we are facing is we have found that 40% of our calls we consider high priority low skill calls. The top example is bill payment. We have been looking into outsourcing these calls. The main reason is if we can outsource the call volume we can have more agents available for high priority high skill calls. The top examples are applications and claims processing. The main reason we have not pulled the trigger is we are concerned about call quality and loss of control. The call center I work in is based in the United States. In having discussions with various providers we are considering to use to outsource our low skill calls too is the language barrier. We are worried about the perceived customer experience. The average customer we deal with is 60 years old. Many of them have hearing issues and we are concerned a foreign accent will hurt their experience if we outsource overseas. In Aurelie Chazal’s article, she discusses how the customer feels disrespected when their calls are answered by a foreign call center agent. Whenever you send a customer’s call to an offshore call center they feel like their problem isn’t important enough to be dealt with by your company directly. Your customers know that the only reason you offshore customer service is to save money. It’s like saying to them „you are not really worth our well-paid employee’s time, your question is probably not so hard to answer, people with little to no qualifications can do that” (Chazal 2014). I agree with Chazal that perception becomes a concern of companies that have outsourced their call center operations. In Eric Berg’s article, he reports that Purdue University study found that some 65 percent of consumers would change their buying behavior if they learned that a company with which they were doing business used an offshore call center, even if they were satisfied with its customer service (Berg 2015). This a major concern for a company that outsources. The problem is twofold because they want to provide excellent customer experience but they also have the pressure of consumers demanding lower prices and shareholders demanding more profits. There is a number of the path a call center can take to deal with these issues. The number one thing they could do is improved training. By anticipating the needs of the customer a training program can help make the customer experience better. The primary customer we deal with is over 60 years of age and my average call center rep. is 26 years old. The older customer has specific issues that have to be addressed in training prior to allowing a new rep to talk live calls. The issue range from hearing, vision and memory. By training the rep and listening to the feedback from the rep and the customers a call center and increase customer satisfaction regardless of it location. Call centers are here to stay but they are evolving how they interact with customers. The consumer today has multiple ways to connect with a company it is or wants to do business with. The age of the smart device driven by the availability of the Internet especially mobile access has made a call center to move to a multichannel. Today, real time chat on a company’s website is common place. Voice only communication is no longer the sole way a customer want to interact with a company. A company needs to have the flexibility to communicate how and when a customer chooses. Joe Staples, chief marketing officer at Interactive Intelligence says “The call center has evolved to become the contact center, and customers now have an increased choice in how they communicate with vendors, including by voice, e-mail, fax, SMS, web chat/callback, and now social media,” (Bernier 2012). Social Media: Social Media is the new wave of customer interaction. As social media began to grow companies saw social media as a gold mine to interact with the customer. Douglas Holt explains company thinking: Social media would allow your company to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers. If you told them great stories and connected with them in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community of consumers (Holt 2016). eBizMBA ranks continually the most popular social media sites by unique monthly visitors. 1. Facebook 2. Twitter 3. LinkedIn 4. Pinterest 5. Google Plus+ 6. Tumblr 7. Instagram 8. VK 9. Flickr 10. Vine Source eBizMBA (April 2016) One I was surprised not to see in the top ten was YouTube a popular site for video content. The question is how can a company harness this new marketplace and keep a clear consistent message across the globe. How do I build the company brand? On the surface it would seem that social media would be a great platform to build a company brand. It seems to be a brand marketers dream. They can create content that would go directly to the consumer “Personalized Billboards.” Company branding has been a great tool in the past and now with a digital spin why would it not be a hit. Holt explains that for corporations the branding strategies are not working. For example, companies have put their faith in branded content for the past decade; brute empirical evidence is now forcing them to reconsider. In YouTube or Instagram rankings of channels by a number of subscribers, corporate brands barely appear. Only three have cracked the YouTube Top 500 (Holt 2016). This is a problem for corporations trying to expand their business to new markets and customers. There is a number steps company can take to improve their branding effort. One of them is work with social media influencers. Influencers are people that have followings on a various social media site. The use of influencers can drive chatter about a company’s product or service. There is a downside because chatter does not guarantee a response. In Jay Baer’s article, he explains the if you want to get the most out of influencers you have to make the advocates for your brand. Make influencers a part of your movement, even temporarily, and they’ll understand the brand and its worth far greater than if you just invite them on a factory tour or send them free product. That translates to an endorsement from a perspective of greater knowledge, insight, and feeling. The audience stays large, but the advocacy quotient goes way up. The result = influence, not just idle chatter (Baer n.d.)
The social media space is still wide open. It is required you have space. In the meeting I went to last fall one of the topics was how to get my companies field agents more social media savvy. One statement I remember is the majority of the prospective customers we are looking for will search you online. If you do not have an online presence you do not exist.
Late last year I worked on a project to expand our agent LinkedIn and Facebook presence. The goal was to use those social media sites to drive new business. The focus was teaching our agents to look for friends and connections that are sharing big news and life events. I helped agent on how to build your brand, share your story and anticipate life changes. With working with agents on developing their social media presence they are able to anticipate the needs of their clients before the client contacts them. We are turning our agents into proactive relationship salesman vs reactive sellers.

Conclusion:
In conclusion since the first call center was created the world of customer contact is constantly changing. From the calls, disturbing us at dinner, recommending we buy property in Nevada. Now get a personalized email, tweet, message letting us know our favorite wine is going on sale. The consumer is always looking for more. BP gave us the metrics to look for to be a call center of excellence. They are a starting point. Companies have to listen and be ready for the consumer ever changing demands. Companies are still struggling to come up a model that works in the fickle social media world. Holt used the example of Old Spice succeeded not with a Facebook strategy but with a strategy that leveraged the ironic hipster aesthetic. Chipotle succeeded not with a YouTube strategy but with products and communications that spoke to the preindustrial food movement (Holt 2016). Companies can win at the social media game. The one biggest suggestion I would give is to listen to the customer. If they do not like something changes it.

References
Baer, J. (n.d.). Why Online Influencer Outreach is Overrated and How to Fix It. Retrieved from http://www.convinceandconvert.com/
Berg, E. (2015, March 06). Offshoring, Outsourcing, and Consumer Perceptions: American Agents are the Clear Choice | All-Calls. Retrieved from http://www.callcenter-usa.com/offshoring-outsourcing-and-consumer-perceptions-is-homeshoring-the-answer-will-customer-dissatisfaction-with-offshored-centers-coupled-with-rising-costs-bring-the-calls-back-onshore/
Bernier, P. (2012, August 03). The History and Advancement of the Contact Center and the Customer Experience. Retrieved from http://www.tmcnet.com/cis/features/articles/301771-history-advancement-the-contact-center-the-customer-experience.htm
Business Dictionary. (n.d.). What is call center? definition and meaning. Retrieved from http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/call-center.html
Chazal, A. (2014, April 28). Why Do Customers Hate Your Offshore Call Center So Much? Retrieved from http://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/customers-hate-offshore-call-center-much-0855971#aSBIeTQiXQA1CpZp.97
Ebizmba. (2016, April 1). Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites | April 2016. Retrieved from http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites
Flavin, R (2015, January) is poor communication killing your leadership potential? Linkedin Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/poor-communication-killing-your-leadership-potential-ron-flavin
Holt, D. (2016, March 01). Branding in the Age of Social Media. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2016/03/branding-in-the-age-of-social-media
TCN. (2015, March 17). A Brief History of Call Center Agents. Retrieved from https://www.tcnp3.com/home/call-center-solutions/a-brief-history-of-call-center-agents/
Wagner E. (2013, September). Five Reasons 8 Out Of 10 Businesses Fail . Forbes online Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericwagner/2013/09/12/five-reasons-8-out-of-10-businesses-fail/#2715e4857a0b246a57c35e3c