Call Centre Fundamentals Part 1

(This write-up is useful for someone wanting to get a better understanding on how contact centre functions. It came directly out of notes designed to train contact centre leaders in a global contact centre operation.)

All big corporations, especially service companies that have ongoing relationships with customers, e.g. power, telco, banks, are likely to have one thing in common … the existence of a contact centre (or call centre). Contact centres have been around for more than 50 years, with Pan Am (Pan American World Airways) being one of the first 24/7 contact centres; it provided customers a local phone number to ring for every market. With the advent of cheap telecommunication cost, contact centres are even based overseas in places where the staff cost is astronomically lower than the local environment.

Such corporations have quite similar goals for their contact centres and these can best be described below as follows:

• They want a customer’s query to be diagnosed accurately,
• They want a customer’s query to be resolved quickly, and
• They want a customer to finish the call with a positive impression of the Company.

To bring about these goals, I have developed the Contact Centre Service Triangle to better explain the requirements of a contact centre.

The Customer

At the apex is ‘The Customer’. S/He is the most important reason for the existence of the contact centre. Hence, it is at the apex. At the base is the contact centre. It consists of TWO elements – CSR (Customer Service Representative – The human voice and front-facing staff with the customer) and Systems and Technology (The non-human elements that assist and track the performance of the contact centre).Right in the middle is ‘Service Measurements’ which are ‘measurements’ that we use to gauge how the contact centre is responding to the Customer.

For the ‘Customer’, there are THREE critical questions that we need to answer as follows:

• Why do customers ring a company?
• When do they call?, and
• How prepared are they to wait?

Why do customers ring a company?

Customers generally avoid calling a Company unless they have an issue. The best way to guide us to answer these questions is to work out the Product Life Cycle of the Company’s products involved. For example, customers may ring us because of one of these events: 

• Enquire – A Customer rings to make an enquiry,
• Buy – A Customer rings to BUY something,
• Change – A Customer rings to change some details in their accounts,
• Pay & Bill – A Customer rings to pay or enquire about their bills,
• Resolve – A Customer rings us to fix something for them, and
• End – A Customer rings to terminate an account.

Knowing the relevant product life cycle will help the Company to structure its systems but more on that later.

When do Customers call?

Practically, any time but there will be certain patterns even within that ‘randomness’. However, there are THREE factors that we can cover off:

• It is possible to predict when customers generally call. There will be some predictable patterns, e.g. time of the day, and day of the week,
•  Although we can ‘predict’ when calls come in (e.g. a Marketing campaign), they can still come into the centre in an erratic manner, and
• Finally, it is not possible to predict all call scenarios as human behaviour and the unfolding of daily events will impact on call arrivals.

A good contact centre is always using systems to capture the data so that it can analyse the predictable patterns and plan its staffing accordingly.

Next, how prepared are customers to wait?

Contact centres are built across the concept that ‘customers are prepared to wait on the phone’. This is what is termed as ‘Caller Tolerance’. There are possibly SEVEN factors that will impact on the way we plan staff resourcing and these are as follows:

• Degree of Motivation – If a Customer is experiencing severe inconvenience, e.g. power outage, they will most likely wait longer to reach their utility company than those with questions relating to their bills. If it is a case of medical emergency, you can assume that they will want an answer immediately.
• Availability of Substitutes – If the Customer is severely inconvenienced AND the telephone is THE ONLY mean of solving the problem, then they will stay on the line or keep calling
• Competition’s Service Level – The Competitor(s) will have an impact on the way that Customers view our resources,
• 0800 Line – Who is paying? For a 0800 line, customers may be encouraged to keep hanging on,
• Human Behaviour – The weather, a caller’s mood, the time of the day. Would you believe that there are more calls coming in when the moon is full?
• Level of Expectations – Customers in big metropolitan cities used to speed and convenience maybe less tolerable to wait, and finally
• Time Availability – Retirees would react quite differently from, say, stockbrokers.

Service Measurements

Remember, at the start, we said that the Customer is the most important reason for the presence of the contact centre. Having said that, ‘Service Measurements’ becomes the most important ‘next’ element. ‘Service Measurements’ are measurements designed to gauge the level of ‘quality services’ delivered by our staff to all customers. They represent the glue between the Customer and the Contact Centre.

‘Targeted scores’ are set, based on the Company’s understanding of customer and their needs as seen above. Any abnormalities will then be reported as they could represent issues. There are TWO types of targets:

• Service Level – It represents the level of tolerance set for calls; it is quantitative. In a one-sentence definition, it may be seen as follows - ‘Service Level’ is defined as the ‘X% of calls to be answered within Y seconds’. Here, we articulate that it is not just about answering the calls but answering them within an acceptable range as pre-defined by Management. Service Level should be tracked on a ½-hourly basis. (More on ‘Service Level’ in another write-up.)

Service Standards – These are the subjective ‘softer’ elements of service. They are behavioural – e.g. how are the CSRs performing in terms of ‘Call Opening’, ‘Establishment of Customer Needs’, ‘Hold/ Wait Protocol, and ‘Enthusiasm and Professionalism through the voice’? 

Now, look out for Part 2 to conclude this write-up.

Problem Sensitivity

At 73, Shirley was still a buzz in the office. Once I asked her for some A3 paper to put into the photocopier and she wanted to know the precise number of sheets that I required.

One day, she exclaimed how it was a pity that some internal mails continued to have a P O Box number on them. These mails were inadvertently considered as external, got franked and came back into our mail box. "If only the department replaced the P O Box with an internal address, we would save money, time and indeed effort."

Peter, a Training Consultant, was approached to run a negotiation training workshop for a sales call centre. Senior Management had observed that call centre staff were compensating customers at an alarmingly high rate. In fact, the estimation was that if nothing was done, the compensation level could hit an all time high of $24 million for the year. The Director of the Call Centre’s response was to do more training around negotiation skills.

Instead of agreeing with the Director, Peter asked permission to investigate the problem further. He started by analysing the compensation data; fortunately, these were captured by the computer system. He, then, broke them into logical categories of time, team and staff member. The Goal? To see whether any pattern could be observed.

He next spoke to team members at the call centre in order to get their perspective; people at the frontline often have the ‘best’ solutions as they knew the root cause(s) more than anyone else. In Kaizen terminology, Peter went to ‘gemba’ (the place where the ‘problem’ took place or, simply, the place of action).

He next studied the available documents including the ‘Compensation Policy’. The policy read as follows:

“The Company does not compensate unless the error is definitely made by the Company and ONLY IF the customer asks for it. And if they are adamant, then the limit given to each call centre team member is up to $200 per incident per customer. If the amount asked is higher than that, then the team member can escalate it to their team manager.”

At first glance, the limit of $200 per incident per customer seemed rather ‘generous’ to Peter. In fact, further discussion showed that a customer might be compensated far higher than the $200 limit as s/he might have more than one incident per complaint. When he probed some of the longer serving staff, he was told that the limit was set up at a time when the Company was promoting the value of ‘empowerment’. To make it simple for ‘empowered’ staff, Management encouraged them to treat the Company as their own and they were given the ‘flexibility’ to compensate based on their empowered judgment.

Problems are generally caused by either a Policy, Process, System or People issue. If it was a ‘People’ issue, then training is potentially a good solution. Together with the more insightful front-liners, Peter drew up a Cause & Effect diagram to identify the ‘root cause’. The conclusion of the group was that ‘Policy’ misalignment seemed to be the root cause. In addition, the group could also see how the Policy statement created more downstream problems as the statement ‘ONLY IF the customer asks for it’ meant that different customers could end up with different experience although the incident might well be similar. It potentially could create a ‘suspicious customer-public’ as the Company did not consider the impact of customer chatter (talk among customers).

Peter’s recommendation to the Director was to alter the ‘Compensation Policy’ by reducing the limit of each centre’s team member to $50 per call and to involve team leaders to decide on anything up to $200. He also added that there was a need to provide clarity around what could be compensated and by how much. That way, frontline staff would be more consistent in administering compensation to customers depending on the type of issues.

Shirley offered a ‘simple’ solution. Peter’s was a bit more complex. However, both were applying the trait of ‘problem sensitivity’, ‘Problem Sensitivity’ being the ability of a person to recognise that a problem exists or to be able to cut through misunderstanding, misconception, lack of facts, or other obscuring handicaps to recognise the real problem, and hence, devise the real solution.

‘Problem Sensitivity’ is a critical trait of a creative person, a trait that is often ignored by people who talk about creativity. Most people would think that ‘Imagination’ or ‘Originality’ represent creativity. That is true but there are other equally critical ones.

Research shows that other than ‘Imagination’, ‘Originality’ and ‘Problem Sensitivity’, the other key traits are ‘Curiosity’ (this one is obvious), ‘Fluency of Ideas (the ability to generate many solutions), and ‘Flexibility of Thoughts (or the willingness to consider a wide variety of approaches to a problem).

The good news in Shirley and Peter’s case was that both had a good ending. Shirley’s idea was adopted; all internal mails had since had their PO Boxes removed. Peter’s idea was handed over to another team to complete the task. The savings? A mouth-watering estimated figure of $7.9 million.

Good ideas are everywhere and they do offer payback, some bigger than others. But, like Forrest Gump said infamously, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.” The moral of the story is to keep fishing.

More important than financial payback is the element of motivation for its staff, that their ideas matter and do make a difference. Because fundamental to our human need is the element of feeling valued.

The crux is still how do we unleash ideas to flow within the organisation. That tends to be more difficult than we think and it will be for another time that I follow up on this issue.

Happy reading.

You are firstly a Performance Consultant and not a Training Consultant

A request was sent by the Sales Centre Business Team (incoming telephone centre) to Training to conduct a refresher training programme for its Small Business Power Plan, a set of business telecommunication services. The brief that I was given by Susan Mockford, the Manager, was simple:
“Reps (or staff members of the Sales Centre) were not confident in selling these ‘Power Plans’. They were uncomfortable with answering queries from customers.”
That was about it. Now go and develop a training programme that meets the needs of the Team.
Now, if you have read my earlier article on ‘Training: A Panacea of Organisational Pain?”, you will have realised that ‘Go and See’ is a big part of what I advocate. Because as much as Management likes to believe what they want to believe, the issues are deeper than what appears on the surface.
In addition, when a manager gets too close to the action, it is sometime difficult to see the forest from the trees and s/he may be seduced by what s/he wants to hear. It is always good to have a 3rd party to give a second opinion.
I avoided defining my role as a “Training Consultant” but took on that of a “Performance Consultant” – a helicopter view. These were what I found:

• The critical Power Plans had many concepts that nobody really know. Over time, the Business Team developed sub-products, e.g. Nominated Number, Frequently Called Number, Calling circle, and then Calling Group. None of these had written definitions and resided in the heads of team leaders; some ‘older’ leaders remembered but no one had a reserve of all information,

• In some plans, there was no clear expectation as to the number of allocated phones under Nominated Numbers. As the creator of the services moved on, the rules were non-existent,

• Some plans, e.g. the Extension Calling Plan, were hardly used and not documented. Hence, when a customer rang, no one, including the back office, knew what to do,

• The processes were unclear and confusing. Reps could choose whatever code they felt were appropriate to put into the system,

• When a rep forgets to input tandem numbers into the plan, a requirement for the Power Zero Plan, customers were charged the full rate when a different rate should apply. Net of it? Angry customers,

• Frontline procedural documents were not owned by anyone. Hence, documents were never updated.

To go ahead and train based on the information that we had would have been a disaster. There was a need to do more preparation work before training. This was not really a ‘People’ issue; this was a process and knowledge bank issue.
Hence, we completely overhaul the procedures and knowledge bank.

• Marketing provided clarity across the terms for the various Power Plans. Where things were unsure, we kept digging,

• The knowledge bank was then cleaned and tidied with the new information in it, including very clear definitions and business rules,

• Some plans had to be removed and others streamlined. The greater the complexities of Power Plans, the more problems we anticipated.

With these steps, we were ready for training. But this was more of a ‘Knowledge’ training and main job of the training designer was to make it simple through conceptualisation, that is, arranging all the concepts in a simple manner for all to understand. A skilled training designer must possess this ability.
Training took place in September. When we did a ‘Before’ and ‘After’ measurement of the plans, we were able to attain Kirkpatrick’s Level 4 challenge on ‘Return on Investment’. We collated the numbers and ensured that they were not skewed by marketing events. Thankfully, there was only one event which we could ‘control’.
Susan was impressed. In fact, with the Farm Plan, a lucrative product, the jump was practically from zero. Although November had a dip as we moved into Christmas, the overall total numbers was up from 96 in August to 204 in Oct. Below is a table showing the true achievements:

There is always more to training than meets the eye if you choose not to be a post-box.

Elevator Speech to Promote Staff Thinking

I was in an elevator going up. A courier runner had just entered the elevator. And then, he hesitated. When I reached my floor, which incidentally was the top level, the courier runner remained inside. Apparently, he had forgotten which floor he was meant to be going to. Although he knew the department, the floor was not indicated.

Every day, I would observe this same behaviour meted out by various people. As an idea, I decided to put in a suggestion into our official Staff Suggestion Scheme; why not include in the name of the department next to the elevator’s button? I thought nothing of it until I received a reply that it could not be done ‘because departments do move’. In my head, I was wondering, how often do departments move floors? Fortunately, my boss was wondering the same thing.

But it took us three whole months before the idea came into fruition. My boss had to take this suggestion to the Productivity Steering Committee chaired by the 3^rd ranking person in the company. The Committee, which consisted of managers in the Executive Team, met once a month. At the meeting, my suggestion was one of the items tabled. The Chairman turned to Michael, General Manager of Properties and basically asked him what the issues were. Michael promised the team that he would report back the following week after talking to his manager.

Guess what? After 3 months from my suggestion, the department name now sits next to the appropriate floor button. Organisations are not naturally structured to listen to their staff members for improvements, especially if these members are front-liners or come from another department.

Organisations consist of people of different personalities and outlook. Some personality types do not favour new ideas because the profile prefers things to be status quo. In addition, when we have a Manager-Staff or a Department to Department interaction, the element of power comes into play because most managers (or departmental experts) see themselves as being the sole custodians of ideas. It is always easier to say ‘no’ to an idea then to agree because two things happen:

• It shows that the manager/ experts knows better, and
• It reduces the need for the manager to ‘think’ because ‘thinking’ is an intense activity. Routine work is more ‘predictable’ and is ‘lazy on the brain’. ‘Change’ is too tough.

Most people gravitate toward a problem being more complex than it can possibly be. The problem with us is the more we think, the more complex it gets.

Consider the case of the elevator sitting outside of a building. A group of architects and engineers was trying to figure out how to put an elevator inside a building. Even as an engineer was viewing the El Cortez from outside to figure out how to resolve the problem, a bellboy suggested simply, “Why not put the elevator outside?”. And the world's first outside hydraulic glass elevator was created in 1956.

Hence, organisations build structures to get people to contribute their thinking. And good organisations see thinking as an essential culture. Consider the time when I was with the newspaper group again. Can you imagine the 3^rd ranked person and the executive managers of the leadership team meeting once a month just to review ideas submitted by staff members? Or consider the influence of the CEO of Marriott Hotel Group who reads all the complaint and complimentary letters coming in from their customers? Surely they have better things to do than that. Or do they? At senior level, their action has a telling effect on shaping the culture. They are role models. It tells you how serious they are at what they do.

When I was a manager having staff members reporting to me, one of the things that I am always mindful is that as staff, we should never suffer from organisational incest. We must look out. So, twice a month, I expect my staff to visit another company and learn one or two things new that they can use in our organisation. I arranged for the organisation to pay for their visits. And I ask them for a one-pager report. That way, I kept staff members fresh and enthusiastic and always looking for new and creative way to improve.

So, if our organisation really wants to believe in its people, it starts with senior management role-modeling and an organisation structure that builds new ideas and promotes managers who do.

Food for thought even as you are in an elevator.

Training - The Panacea to Organisation Pain? Part 1

“Members in the Communications Team write poorly. We are getting many angry customers ringing us to complain about the emails they are receiving from us. Can you organise a training session for the Communications Team?”

“We are giving far too much money away as compensation. Can you put a training programme to teach our staff how to negotiate better over the phone with customers?”

“Our customer service level has gone from back to worse. I think we need a training session to get our guys back on track.”

Most people think training is the panacea to all organisational problems. Of course, this is never the furthest from the truth.

The above comments were requests that I received when I was doing training. The easiest, and probably, the most painless and least heartache way to accept the diagnosis of issues by the line managers and design the training programmes. But that would effectively reduce the training professional into a ‘post-box’ function; very scary. Years ago, when I was attending a workshop at the American Society of Training & Development’s annual conference, a couple, Dana and James Robinson, challenged me to move beyond merely being a Training Professional to that of a Performance Consultant. They articulated convincingly that most perceived training problems were actually performance issues that needed attention. 

There is never a single cause to a problem. It is always easy to blame the people doing the job. Or attribute it to their lack of training. In the first instance involving a bunch of communication staff members, I took some time to visit the team and understand their issues. This was what I found. The staff members were originally working in the frontline answering phones. However, because they were turning customers off through their rude replies, Management, for good measure, decided to move them to some backend job, in this case, answering letters from customers. The only problem was that while, in theory, the staff members were now not talking to customers, they were still interacting with them. And they were writing how they were answering over the phones. 

The big issue lied in the fact that when a customer wrote, s/he was likely to be extremely upset. Now you can well imagine the explosive combination of customer’s frustration and staff member’s rudeness! It was not funny.

What if we have gone down the communication route and train the staff to reply politely? Would that have worked?

Whenever there is a problem, there are many possible causes. ‘People’ is but one of the elements. Ishikawa-san, the creator of the Root Cause Analysis diagram, simplified possible causes to four main elements, all beginning with the letter ‘M’; that of Man, Method, Material, and Machine.

Only when we satisfy ourselves that ‘Man’ or ‘People’ is the root cause, should we consider ‘training’ as a real option. The next challenge is to understand what exactly is ‘wrong’ with our people. Here is where we tap a doyen of educational psychology, B S Bloom.

When looking at a ‘People’ issue, Bloom further sub-categorised that into the elements of Knowledge, Attitude, and Skill as seen below:

• Knowledge can either be cognitive or mental;
• Attitude is generally considered the emotional element;
• Skill is generally the psychomotor or physical elements.

For example, why are our staff members having a problem? Is it a ‘Knowledge’ issue? An ‘Attitude’ challenge? Or a ‘Skill’ gap?

To illustrate, let me demonstrate with a real case. The problem relates to the Faults’ Department of a telephone company. Just like in my various cases, I was approached to investigate as the Faults Department’s frontline telephonists were perceived to be giving poor services based on the number of complaints going to Management. “We need a training programme,” barked Ron Saxby, the General Manager of the Centre. 

As usual, the first action I took was to visit the place, observe, and talk to the staff. Here is what I gathered in terms of my observations based on ‘needs’:

• The Faults’ Department had 150 staff consisting of both new and ‘old’; the ‘older’ ones had been around for a long time,

• Over time, the staff members had been given many different forms of training. Business rules and processes had changed but adoption had not been streamlined,
• Staff tended to keep their notes after induction,
• There were inconsistent practices across the department since different batches of staff members were trained differently (regarding rules and processes),
• Some staff members were unfamiliar with how to read an NTS chart (NTS chart is a tool to help staff members to know whether there is a problem on the telephone line. For example, staff members were unfamiliar in reading ohms, kilo-ohms and mega ohms. These were critical concepts,
• Some staff members did not know what key diagnostic questions to ask when conversing with the customer (What noise do you hear when making calls? When receiving incoming calls?),
• There were different NTS reading guidelines given over time. Different staff members have different versions,
• Some staff members were unfamiliar with what and when to tell the customer at the end of the conversation regarding access and technician diagnostic charges (These were important conversations),
• Some staff members did not put in sufficient information into their end notes. As a result, technicians did not understand what they need to do when they received a work ticket.

Now, you might like to pause here for five minutes and try and offer some solutions. When you have done that, please carry on.

Here is what I did next. I distinguished these observations into Bloom’s elements of Knowledge, Skill or Attitude so that I could devise a set of learning objectives for creating our training modules.

Here is my attempt at asking the ‘why’ question and analysing these statements. I have used ‘red’ to represent ‘Knowledge’, ‘green’ to explain ‘Skill’, and ‘blue’ to indicate ‘Attitude’.

1. The Faults’ Department had 150 staff consisting of both new and ‘old’ staff members; the ‘older’ ones had been around for a long time – possibly an ‘Attitude’ issue,
2. Over time, the staff members had been given many different forms of training. Business rules and processes had changed but adoption had not been streamlined,
3. Staff tended to keep their notes after induction,
4. There were inconsistent practices across the department since different batches of staff members were trained differently (regarding rules and processes) – You might like to note that this was a System issue as well. It demonstrated that the Department lacked a single source of truth and people were using whatever information that they were taught,
5. Some staff members were unfamiliar with how to read an NTS chart (NTS chart is a tool to help staff members to know whether there is a problem on the telephone line. For example, staff members were unfamiliar in reading ohms, kilo-ohms and mega ohms. These were critical concepts,
6. Some staff members did not know what key diagnostic questions to ask when conversing with the customer (What noise do you hear when making calls? When receiving incoming calls?),
7. There were different NTS reading guidelines given over time. Different staff members have different versions,
8. Some staff members were unfamiliar with what and when to tell the customer at the end of the conversation regarding access and technician diagnostic charges (These were important conversations),
9. Some staff members did not put in sufficient information into their end notes. As a result, technicians did not understand what they need to do when they received a work ticket.

From a problem-solving perspective, Points #2 to #4, #7 – Multiple Sources of Truth – had to be arrested quickly. So, one of the first solutions immediately agreed by Ron was to create a new up-to-date and accurate knowledge base (Single Source of Truth) in the intranet (how we create the knowledge is another story for different time) while getting rid of all existing ones post-training; the latter was vital as it eliminated confusion, information mistreatment and different versions of truth.

BS Bloom also created a ‘Learning Taxonomy’, affectionately called the ‘Bloom’s Taxonomy’ to help us create learning objectives. He classified them from ‘Basic’ to ‘Complex’. For example, under ‘Knowledge’, the most basic level was ‘Recalling Data’ with the ability to ‘Evaluate Data’ being the most complex level. In effect, it is saying that the greater the ability of a staff member to answer the ‘Why’ question, the greater the achievement in a ‘Knowledge’ learning outcome since to ‘evaluate’ will mean that the learner will have to know why the data is there in the first place.

The BS Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning is found here:

Now we are ready to design a set of learning objectives to meet our observed needs as follows:

By the END of the Training, staff members of Faults should be able to:

•   Understand all critical concepts including ohms, kilo-ohms, and mega-ohms (Knowledge – Comprehension),

•   Apply the relevant physical diagnostic questions to the Customer (Knowledge – Application),

•   Study a NTS’ Parameter Table and evaluate the data before coming to a conclusion with regards to the status of the telephone line (Knowledge – Evaluation),

•   Complete a Ticket with all relevant fields (Knowledge – Application),

•   Internalize the importance of completing a Ticket with all relevant information (Attitude – Internalization),

•   Develop consistent practice to ensure that we have covered the relevant information of Access (Gaining Access into the house), Diagnostic Conversation, and Commit Time (Time when the technician finishes the job) (Skills – Precision).

Most training professionals would be happy to get to this stage as training outcomes get articulated. However, there is yet another level that we can progress further and here is where we have to turn to another well regarded expert, Donald Kirkpatrick. 

Dr. Kirkpatrick came up with a way of evaluating training successes at 4 levels in 1959. The four levels of Kirkpatrick's evaluation model essentially measure:

1. Reaction of student - what they thought and felt about the training, or you may term this as a ‘Happy Sheet’ evaluation,
2. Learning - the resulting increase in knowledge or capability. Most times, a test can determine this element,
3. Behaviour - extent of behaviour and capability improvement and implementation/application
4. Results - the effects on the business or environment resulting from the trainee's performance. Sometimes, you may be able to include ROI (Return of Investment) into the mix, something that accountants love.

If we combined Bloom's approach and Kirkpatrick's targets, then we can truly design a training programme while effectively measuring our results.

Coming back to our example at Faults, we can include in the following goals:

• Reduce rework by xx%

Conceptually, I have provided a way of helping you to understand that training is only a solution if it is a ‘People’ issue. Also, in identifying a training programme, it is critical to understand the issues around Knowledge, Attitude and Skills. Once you have this information, you are ready to design the training programme. Here is a model that you might like to use:

So far, I have only explained the ‘Green’ rectangle as well the ‘Yellow’ triangle. In another article, I will expand on the ‘Blue’ triangle.

For now, let me return to the story of the communication department. How can we help these staff members who could not write politely? It is true that this was a staff issue. However, the solution that we adopted was a very non-staff one. We identified the typical type of letters coming through and we developed company endorsed templates for these staff members to cut and paste, thus removing the need for them to be wordsmith.

From a purist perspective, this looked like an attitude issue relating to the staff that we can perhaps train. But ‘Attitude’ or ‘Mind-set’ is really the toughest thing to train. Hence, for a failed safe solution, templates were considered more predictable and better managed.

Hopefully, you would have by now picked up that training is not a panacea of all pain, including the ones involving the ‘People’ factor. Even if training is favoured, the toughest programmes are those that involved mind-set shift. The next article on ‘Design and Development’ will demonstrate more. Happy reading.

What are Business Rules?

“Rules are guidelines to the wise and obedience to the fools.”

                                                                                                          – Derek Powell

Nobody likes rules, especially so in New Zealand. Not least even me – after all, I left a country that is enchanted with rules (Singapore) and moved to one that detest any. Let me relate two incidents of how ‘business rules’ came into my world.

The Case of Xtra

Many years back, I was with the NZ Telecom Xtra contact centre offering internet support services to the public. At that point in time, Xtra was just starting up its broadband support. The team consisted of a diverse group of individuals who were keen to provide excellent service.

There was an inherent problem with providing services of the computer nature – computer technology was changing at an astronomical speed; people were upgrading from Win 95 to Win 98 and then to Win XP. Some were using Apple computers. However, when Xtra was training the frontline staff, it could not even catch up with the speed of change.

So, the ‘older’ staff members (the longer serving ones) were trained in Win 95 and Win 98. They were brought in to upgrade their knowledge in Win XP. Newer staff members were trained in Win XP as it was the most popular model. Then, we would spend an extra two days to skill people in Apple.

When a customer with a Win 95 problem rang and was dealt with by an ‘older’ member, the person could walk the customer through the entire issue. But if the customer rang and spoke with a ‘newer’ member, s/he was simply flicked away with a “Sorry, we cannot help you. Why don’t you upgrade to a …..” This resulted in inconsistent service level. And customers started to complain.

As a process, they knew how to resolve the problem. But what should they support? Everything? Ever expanding technological systems – Win 95, Win 98, Win XP, Win 2000 …. The list went on.

Here is where rules became critical. And this is where my journey started.

Driving on the Road

Ever been to Waiheke Island (An island off Waiheke where the ‘rich and famous’ resides)? Well, I did although I have to admit that it had been some years since I did.

I was told that Waiheke Island had one traffic light and it was meant to distinguish a JAFA (an uncomplimentary term for an Aucklander) and a Waihekian. You see, that traffic light actually does not work but a JAFA will stop there J

Now, if we are in Auckland, we cannot live without traffic lights. Because it would be an utter chaos as you can well imagine. Why? Because of the sheer size of our population of 1.4 million people.

Think of Business Rules as a set of highway road codes with ‘how to drive’ as the process. That is what it really is.

Xtra - Continued

Xtra was growing bigger. Everyone wanted to provide good customer service. But everyone had their own view of what good service ought to be. The result? A confusing delivery of service.

The issue was not one of ‘good service’ as defined by each person’s definition. It was one of ‘consistent service’ as a company, a Telecom standard; one that Telecom could live with and that the customer would not mind.

We got together and went through some analysis and, using statistics, we knew what percentage of customers had Win XP, 98, and 95. Using that statistics, we decided that as a company, we would only support Win XP and 98 for that point in time and not Win 95. When we studied the stats more intensely, we realised that there was only a small percentage (actually a very, very small percentage of the population) with Apple although these customers were what was termed as ‘early adopters’, people that we might not be able to ‘offend’ as they could influence the larger market.

Hence, we took the following actions:

• Established a business rule for the contact centre only to support Win XP and 98 so that customers could have reliable and consistent service (a Telecom standard),
• Continued to support Win 95 but not via the phone. We directed such customers onto the Telecom website as well as mailing out instructions (if they were ‘stuck’ with no internet support)
• Created a specialised team to deal with Apple issues and stripped the two-day training out from the original induction module.
• Establish a set of business rules to ensure consistency of behaviour across the Department.
• Change-managed the contact centre members to accept the concept of business rules through a fun-and-game storytelling using the concept of highway road code as well as getting them to complete a test online. NOTE: Explaining the ‘why’ was critical as well.
• Quality checked members based on phone conversations (Telecom had a quality control centre and listened in to all phone calls, scored and feedback to all staff during their one-on-one).

The end result was that 200 staff members adopted this stance. The initial response from the customers were some degree of frustration but, over time, customers understood and they were getting consistent responses from every staff on the centre. The customer engagement score went up.

That became the start of business rules across Telecom which is now the established norm.

The Story of the PAC Team

The People Advisory Centre Team of a bank had quite similar issues. The PAC team had to work with the hiring TAT (Talent Acquisition Team) team. There was lack of clarity in regard to what the PAC and TAT teams could support.

For example:  who is an employee – A permanent staff? A contract staff? What about a ‘Forced Rehire’?

Both sides had different views of the same things. It was like two persons looking at an elephant from a different angle. So, they were great misunderstanding. That became a real struggle.

As a result, a document was created to establish clarity in regard to definitions and also when did work start for PAC and end with TAT. We created an initial 11 rules for the latter and here is Rule #3:

All key information found in the RFA (Requisition for Agreement) must be completed correctly by TAT. Emails to PAC to request for inclusion into the incomplete RFA will not be accepted.

Does it sound like a procedure? If we say, “emails to PAC to request for inclusion into the incomplete RFA will not be accepted”, then it becomes a rule. It is to make the obvious even more obvious. Nonetheless, before we implemented, we made sure that there was maximum involvement on both sides to engage the teams so that we could change-managed these without any difficulties.

The best change management is when change occurred without staff members even realising (because it was ‘their’ idea after all). Involvement was the crux in the PAC-TAT success. Now, staff members worked well without even knowing the background to the alignment attempt.

What is Business Rules?

In the classical article, Defining Business Rules – What Are They Really, by the Business Rules Group (this article was created by a diverse group of professionals including a few IBM staff members , rules are divided into four main categories as follows:

• Definitions,
• Facts relating terms to each other,
• Constraints, and
• Derivations.

Definitions would be simple enough because it ensures that both sides talk the same language.

Let us look at a car rental company.

Business Rule “Fact” –

• A rental class is composed of car models.
• A car model (e.g. Honda Civic) is in the Class C category.
• Cars can only be rented out in a legal, roadworthy condition to our customers.

Business Rule “Constraint” –

• “If any lights are not working, the bulbs should be replaced. If tires are worn, they should be replaced.” – constrained by the need to rent out in a ‘legal, roadworthy condition to our customers.”

Business Rule “Derivations” –

• “Rental charge is based on base rental price, optional insurances and refuelling charge.” i.e. Rental charge = Base rental price + Optional insurances + Refuelling charge.

Business Rules and Procedures

Now, business rules are NOT procedures. ‘Procedures’ tells you how to do your work. ‘Business Rules’ tells you what is acceptable while you are doing your work, i.e. what is our standard.

Nobody likes rules but because we are working for a company, we need these “rules” to bring about consistent behaviour so that our customers can enjoy a reliable service, i.e. same service everywhere. For example, can you imagine McDonald serving a different Big Mac in different outlets?

Franchisors are especially stringent on rules and they audit each outlet and their suppliers based on them because they know that these ‘rules’ represented the concept of ‘quality’ to their customers. I know because I worked for a McDonald’s supplier. Believe me, McDonald was not very forgiving when we failed their ‘quality rules’.

Staff members are then trained according to these ‘rules’ because that is the ‘McDonald’s Way’ or the ‘Disney Way’; because that is how we do things around here. Disney is as strict as anyone that I can think of.

OK, we don’t need rules down to the fine detail but we need to tell people what we expect. At the end of the day, it is managing the expectations of our internal customers so that we can manage the expectations of our external customers so that we can have consistent service.

While ‘rules’ are a must for technologists as they put up programmes so that computers know what and how to interpret situations, they should not be ruled out for us too. Even just basic things like ‘definitions’ will shape our ability to communicate better.

Rules are NOT STATIC

“Rules” are, of course, not static. What is ‘the rule’ today can change tomorrow based on the changing needs of customers.

Hence, I can partially agree with Derek Powell’s statement: “Rules are guidelines to the wise and obedience to the fools”.

If they are good guidelines, then the wise must follow. But if they are not good, then the wise must question and make them better. There is a time for everything, “Time to follow and time to question.”

Hope I have clarified why I am so passionate about this simple topic re ‘Business Rules’.