NACC Blog

The Human Capital Management Conundrum

I was chatting with a longtime friend of mine last week and the subject turned to human resources, or human capital management, in the contact center.  Kevin Hegebarth is the vice president of marketing at GMT Corporation in Atlanta and has spent most of his career in the contact center business.  So I often get into business-related topics with Kevin even when we chat informally.

Kevin’s position is that the proper selection and hiring of employees in the contact center is a key, and often overlooked, aspect of a successful workforce optimization strategy.  He argues that unless a contact center ensures that the right people are coming through the door, and provides those people with an ongoing workforce development program designed to keep those key people in the organization, other workforce improvement or optimization strategies will suffer.  Sound logic.  I can’t argue with it.

Recruitment, selection and hiring in the contact center has always been, in my mind, something of a conundrum.  Agent turnover has always been the bane of the industry, yet the industry at large seems unwilling to address the problem.  A few years ago a company that was highly successful in helping companies in other industries with recruiting and hiring strategies started a division that focused on the contact center.  I worked with this company for a year trying to get the attention of contact center human resources professionals.  This company had excellent software that had been tested, honed, refined and used successfully in other industries for years.  It was a proven product based upon sound human resources and psychological principles. 

Within a year the company was out of the contact center business.  In fact, the two principals of the division threw up their hands in frustration and, I kid you not, moved to the Turks and Caicos Islands never to see the contact center industry again.  The industry simply would not buy into the need to carefully screen potential employees to ensure a proper fit in the organization.  Instead the overriding strategy seems to be to keep a steady stream of warm bodies coming through the door so there is an ample stockpile of available agents to replace the average 40 percent of the workforce that turns over each year.

I think Kevin’s heart is in the right place and I like GMT’s position on the importance of human capital management.  I wonder, though, if their efforts to spotlight recruitment and selection in the contact center will fall on deaf ears as other efforts have in the past, or if in the evolution of the customer service industry the contact center is finally ready to address the issue of agent turnover and embrace a solution.

I’m still at a loss to understand how the industry in general has become so complacent when it comes to personnel turnover rates.  Is high turnover so deeply ingrained in the contact center industry that it is considered unavoidable?  Is it a unique aspect of the customer service industry that considered a necessary cost of doing business?  Is it a simple fact of business life that is too much trouble to try to change?

We welcome your comments on the issue of human resources practices and agent turnover rates in the contact center industry.  Just click the link below and tell us what you think. 

The Human Factor in Customer Service

The consumer scorn for automated telephone call answering and routing systems, often referred to by consumers as “voice mail jail,” is hardly a new phenomenon.  Back in 1989, when I was the analyst covering the voice messaging industry at research firm Dataquest, dislike for interactive voice response (IVR) systems among the calling public was already an issue.  It’s hard to believe that it took nearly two decades for a movement like gethuman (www.gethuman.com) to appear.

When gethuman did appear in 2005, it appeared with a vengeance and the media loved it.  Newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times covered the gethuman movement.  Katie Couric interviewed gethuman founder Paul English on the Today show and news programs on television networks ABC, CNN and Fox followed suit.  Paul English became a media sensation and a champion of the people almost overnight.  The gethuman movement, it seemed, was destined for greatness.

Capitalizing on its fame the gethuman website published a set of specifications for what it hoped would become standards for customer service phone systems and support.  This, I think, is where the gethuman movement began to falter.  In order for the gethuman standards to succeed in the contact center industry, two things would have to happen: 1) a company would have to admit it had a problem; and 2) the company would have to be willing to do something about it.  In our industry, that’s a pretty tall order.

I think there was an expectation among the founders of the gethuman movement that a consumer revolution was at hand – a show of consumer power so great that companies would have to comply with gethuman’s caller-friendly standards or risk losing their customers.  What actually happened was what usually happens after media frenzy dies down.  Nothing.

Oh sure, there were some companies that made an honest effort to better their IVR systems but they were in the minority.  The truth is that most consumers will complain and moan about an unfriendly IVR system but their relationship with a company, or the uniqueness of a company’s product or service, usually means that they probably won’t take their business elsewhere when they’re done complaining.  Kind of like rush hour traffic – we dislike it and complain about it but when all is said and done, we soldier on with it anyway.

While the gethuman movement seems to have slowed over the last year, there is new movement afoot.  The website was recently acquired by communications and contact center industry veteran Walt Tetschner of Tern Systems, Acton, MA.  Walt understands how things move in the contact center industry and has a vision for gethuman that is making www.gethuman.com a compelling destination for both consumers and businesses.

The first improvement at the gethuman website is the increase in consumer input.  Companies are now rated by consumers based upon the user friendliness and efficiency of their phone system.  Walt’s belief is that the more consumer input there is, the more useful the site will be to both consumers and to the businesses that serve them.

There will also be new categories for users to rate, which includes my own pet peeve – how easy was the agent to understand and how was his or her command of the English language.  Visitors to the site will also be able to tell their own tales of exemplary or horrible telephone-based customer service. 

Walt likens a poor telephone customer service strategy to a poor dog training strategy.  If you call your dog and he comes to you but you hit him on the head when he arrives, you may be able to get away with that once or twice.  By the third time your dog might still come to you, but he’ll come with his teeth bared.  Customers will do the same thing.  They may stick it out with poor telephone customer service a couple of times, then they get mad. 

Today there is a vision for the gethuman movement that makes sense and is achievable.  Walt Tetschner’s vision is simple:  improve customer service through better use of the telephone system and appropriate use of agent resources.  Providing high quality telephone service will invariably yield a measurable return on investment (ROI).  Beyond that, becoming gethuman compliant simply makes good business sense.

Before your customers get mad, it’s better to get human.  Check out the new information at www.gethuman.com and see if you don’t agree.

Learned Optimism or Positive by Nature?

If you’re going to make a career of customer service, whether in the agent seat of a contact center or at the teller station of a bank branch, I think you have to be positive by nature. Not a lot of people are which probably has a lot to do with why turnover is so high in contact centers and retail banks.

I think you can also learn to be optimistic but that’s usually based on experience rather than nature. Contact center professionals who make the career commitment to customer service probably have a pretty high quotient of positive nature combined with a degree of learned optimism that comes with their customer service experience.

As readers of this blog know, we launched a survey of NACC In Queue newsletter readers in February to gauge their attitude toward current economic conditions and how the economy might affect their business in 2008. If you want to catch up on the details of the survey, please read the previous postings of this blog.

What all this is leading to is my surprise at the degree of optimism that the contact center professionals who participated in the survey displayed. I don’t mean to imply that the respondents were blind to current economic conditions and indeed, almost 65 percent of respondents believe that the economy will have some degree of negative impact on their business this year. On the other hand, many of these respondents don’t intend to cower in the corner waiting for the economy to improve before getting on with the business of business. 

If you’d like to review the questions we asked in our survey, or if you’d still like to donate three minutes of your time and participate, you can find the survey at the address below. Your input would still be welcomed. 

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Ao5IAuJge5nJmE39L1mznw_3d_3d

When reviewing the technologies that the respondents intended to evaluate for purchase in 2008, four solutions seem to be of great interest.  Those solutions and the percentage of respondents who intend to evaluate them for purchase in 2008 are as follows:

·        E-Learning  21.7%

·        Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)  21.3%

·        Speech Analytics  20%

·        Performance Management/Analytics 19.1%

Notice that three of the four technology solutions typically have a direct impact on internal performance while the fourth, VoIP, typically has a direct impact on operational infrastructure costs. So, while it appears that money will still be spent in 2008, it will be spent on solutions that have a clearly demonstrable return on investment and a direct impact on performance.

I can’t figure out whether this next response is a positive or negative indicator but 64.3 percent of respondents indicated that they anticipated hiring additional agents in 2008. Now, some respondents may have translated this question to include replacement agents for those who voluntarily leave the organization but I specifically worded the question to indicate the hiring of additional agents, above and beyond those in seats at the end of 2007.  This result may have a direct relationship to those contact centers I wrote about in my last blog that believe the economy will positively impact their business. Then again, it could just be the positive attitude of the respondents coming through again.

Do your hiring plans and/or system purchase plans for 2008 correspond to those of our respondents?  Are the respondents an overly-optimistic minority or representative of the industry as a whole? Feel free to leave your comments to this posting, or any previous postings, by clicking on the “Comments” link at the bottom of this page.

Smarter Than the Average Manager

On the first of February we posted a link to our first readership survey in the In Queue newsletter.  The purpose of the survey was to quickly gauge the attitude of contact center professionals regarding economic conditions and to measure at a very high level how those attitudes might affect the industry as a whole in 2008.  The survey was designed to be completed in well under five minutes while still providing what we thought would be interesting information for the readership.

I have to admit I was a little disappointed in the participation rate.  There are about 35,000 subscribers to the In Queue newsletter but we received only 96 completed surveys.  Perhaps people are just tired of surveys, but this wasn't one of those surveys where you get a dollar bill in an envelope and never see the results of your input.  It wasn't one of those surveys where sales reps start calling you based on your survey response.  This was a survey intended to be of direct benefit to the participants since I intend to report the results over time in either this blog or in future issues of In Queue.

So, to those of you who carved out the 3.5 minutes it took to complete this survey, thank you.  Although there are only 96 of you out there, I have to believe you represent the cream of the crop in terms of contact center professionals.  This belief was confirmed by an article I read in the February 12th issue of the Financial Times newspaper.  In the article, business leaders from around the world were asked for their opinion about how the American economy as well as the global economic picture would affect their businesses in 2008.  Their answers tracked surprisingly close to the answers provided by the respondents to our survey.  If it's any consolation, those of you who responded to the survey appear to have a great deal in common with high-profile business leaders from major corporations across the globe.

Here is some of the detail behind our first survey results.  Respondents to the survey were nearly all in management although at different levels.  The breakout is as follows:

• Analyst           7.8%
• Manager       36.7%
• Director        27.8%
• Executive     27.8%

The respondents came from companies in the following industries:

• Financial Services   18.6%
• Retail                     33.9%
• Insurance                 6.8%
• Health Care            16.9%
• Outsourcer             28.8%
• Other                       5.0%

The respondents were asked how they saw the 2008 U.S. economy affecting their business and their answers were as follows:

• Very Positive               3.2%
• Somewhat Positive     11.7%
• No Effect                   20.2%
• Somewhat Negative    55.3%
• Very Negative              9.6%

If you compare these answers to the breakout of industries from which the respondents came, it makes a lot of sense.  The sub-prime mortgage crisis in the U.S. will undoubtedly have its most devestating initial effect on the financial services industry as well as the housing/building industry, which wasn't specifically tracked in this survey.  The trickle down will also affect the retail industry as we are already beginning to see.  With 52.5 percent of respondents coming from the financial services and retail industries, and 55.3 percent of respondents expecting the 2008 economy to have a somewhat negative impact on their business, this makes a lot of sense.

This is also surprisingly close to how global business leaders in these industries expected the economy to impact their business according to the Financial Times.  What's that saying about great minds thinking alike?

I think those expecting the economy to have little or no impact on their business are probably in such recession-resistant industries as health care, which probably spills over into the outsourcer category as well.  No matter how bad things get economically, it's likely that when people get sick they will still seek medical attention.

Although the majority of respondents believe that their businesses will be impacted somewhat or very negatively by economic conditions, I thought it was interesting to compare that fact with the percentage of respondents who still intend to evaluate new technology in 2008.  Despite expectations of difficulties ahead there is still quite a strong feeling of optimism among the respondents.  Again this tracked well with global business leaders.

I'm going to save my report on the respondents purchase intentions for the next posting.  In the meantime, how do the survey results compare to your own expectations of how the economy will affect your business this year?  As always, your comments are welcome.  Just click on the link below.

UC: Unified Communications or Unwelcome Chaos?

I recently came across the conference program for the upcoming VoiceCon show in Orlando.  Most of these trade shows tend to have a theme and this one had its theme all over it -- UC.

For all of you innocents who have yet to be pummeled by this acronym like you were with CRM a few years back and CTI before that, UC stands for Unified Communications.  Like its predecessors, UC seems destined to be something we're going to hear about ad nauseum for the next couple of years at least.

My knowledge of UC is somewhat limited as I tend to focus my research efforts on the contact center and the long arm of UC has yet to reach the contact center in more than just theory and "what if" stuff. I'll talk more about how UC will extend to the contact center in a minute but in order to get a better understanding of what UC means to the enterprise, I logged into a webinar last week that was supposed to get me up to speed on this exciting new communications breakthrough.

Remember when webinars used to be full of useful information?  Remember when websites would provide you with the depth of knowledge you were seeking?  Remember when you could fill up your gas tank for twenty bucks?  Anyway, this webinar, like just about all webinars today, was a thinly veiled sales pitch but it did give me an idea of how this particluar company saw the role of UC in the enterprise.

The presenter began the pitch by reminding all of us attendees of the myriad of communications devices we use today, not to mention new communications solutions that allow us to stay in constant contact.  He proudly told us that he uses instant messaging (IM) 50 or 60 times a day to stay in touch with colleagues.  PowerPoint diagrams in the presentation had a dizzying array of lines connecting the various communications devices and systems that we all supposedly have courtesy of the unlimited budget for gadgets that our respective companies provide us.

Personal Disclaimer:  I don't have IM on my desktop, don't own a Blackberry and don't text message on my cellphone.  As far as I have been able to determine, these devices/applications are best used to distract or amuse oneself when trapped in unpleasant surroundings such as meetings.  I can't tell you how many analyst briefings I've sat through over the past couple of years in which I'd estimate that 80 percent or more of the analysts seated around me are surfing the Internet, checking e-mail or IM'ing someone during a presentation and paying no attention to the speaker.  I believe there may be a direct correlation between the availability of communications devices and courtesy.  As one goes up, the other seems to go down. 

Back to the point I was going to make -- when I looked at all the ways someone could get hold of you in a UC scenario, and heard the presenter proudly crowing about how many of these devices he personally used, I started to wonder how or when he got any work done.  Perhaps this is just a problem that applies to me personally because as a writer, I prefer not to work in a constant interrupt mode.  On the other hand, I may be totally out of touch with today's worklife norms.

I've been self-employed for nine years.  Back in the day, when I had to endure annual reviews and meet work objectives, most of the objectives I had to meet were task oriented with specific results expected.  Is it possible that process will soon replace achievement in today's business?

Manager: "What do you feel was your greatest accomplishment was this past quarter?"

Employee: "I responded to 25,000 IMs, answered 5,000 e-mails on my Blackberry and sent 10,000 text messages."

Manager: "Stellar performance.  Wish everyone in this department could UC the way you do."

In the contact center, UC will probably first be deployed in the form of a solution called Presence.  For those not familiar with Presence it is essentially a means of determining, on your desktop and in real time, what resources may be immediately available to you to help you with a customer service matter.  These resources will typically be subject matter experts; i.e., people, in your business who will drop everything in order to help you complete your task; i.e., customer service, in a timely manner. In this perfect UC world, resources will indicate whether or not they are available and all you do is click on the icon on your desktop to be immediately connected and get the help you need.  In this UC world, all of these resources will be relieved of their regular tasks in order to free up the time that will be required for them to provide the help that the contact center needs.  In this UC world you'll also find lots of rainbows, clouds and unicorns.

Here's what I think will really happen -- Not a lot of people will take kindly to being constantly interrupted and unless corporate life has drastically changed since I was chained to it, there will be no relief of everyday tasks in order to respond to additional work requests from the contact center.  Workloads will double or worse and the most popular Presence option will be the "Do Not Disturb" sign that prevents calls from being transferred to an individual's desk.  Real world versus UC world.

The bottom line is, UC will require colossal management skills in order to pull it off and make it work as advertised unless, of course, your job performance actually is measured by the number of IMs you answer and the number of text messages you send.  Right now the communications industry, including the contact center, is infatuated with UC.  No one's noticed the warts yet. 

If you're currently using or evaluating UC, or if your experience or perception is different than mine, I invite you to add your comments to this post.  The link is right at the bottom of this page.

Posers and Pretenders

I guess it's back to business as usual after the holidays.  I can tell it's business as usual by the volume of daily e-mails I get from all the industry "experts" out there who are hawking their latest white papers, motivational seminars, webinars, conference speeches, workshops, etc. etc.

Is it just me or does anyone else get a little suspicious about the number of people there are out there who can tell you how to improve customer satisfaction, increase first call resolution, reduce turnover, improve communications, increase efficiency and generally just make your professional life better?  I always wonder how many of these "experts" have actually worked in a call center.

As I've said before in this blog, and as I'll say again, I've never worked in a call center.  I came to the industry working in telecommunications before I became an analyst.  I look at markets and technologies, the trends and issues that I think might be important to you as a user of these products and a member of the call center industry community.  You'll never hear me tell you or anyone else how to run a customer contact center.  That doesn't mean somebody else won't, though.

Call me a cynic, but I get the feeling that l lot of the people posing as experts came by their expertise in ways other than on-the-job training.  Some of the credentials are, in my mind, questionable but the interesting thing is that these people persist -- they're still around year after year with their seminars, workshops and White Papers.  That means more than a few people out there believe them, or believe in them, enough to spend money on their offerings.

The longevity of many of the industry posers and pretenders continues to astonish me.  Am I missing something -- perhaps an opportunity to jump in and get my piece of the pie -- or do these people really have something of value to offer the industry even though it isn't based upon real world experience?

There's a link for your comments at the bottom of this page.  I'd appreciate hearing how you sort through the large number of offerings for seminars, workshops, conferences, speeches, webinars, etc. that must cross your desktop each day and decide what's worthwhile and what's not.  Perhaps I don't give enough credit to all these experts and they know more than I think they do.  What do you think?

Anyone Remember 2007?

I believe that blur that flashed before me a couple of days ago was the year 2007.  Although my father has often told me that time goes by faster the older you get, I honestly can't remember a year going by faster in my life than this last one.

In the contact center industry, 2007 wasn't really much of a year to remember.  Industry consolidation continued at an unprecedented pace as familiar industry names such as Witness Systems were swallowed up and morphed into names reflective of the new parent company (Verint Witness Actionable Systems).  Even the little guys -- like the traditional start-up company -- were acquired by bigger companies before they got a chance to spread their wings.  Case in point:  Latigent LLC, which was basically a couple of guys working out of a garage in Chicago who came up with a brilliant performance management/business intelligence platform for the contact center.  Both company founders came from the contact center industry and had pretty good ideas regarding what they thought the industry really wanted and needed.  Before they could get their party started, they were acquired by Cisco. Lots of industry names, both familiar and unfamiliar, disappeared in 2007.

One of the biggest disappointments of the year, from my perspective, was the disappearance of Call Center magazine.  I first began writing a column in an industry magazine back in 1993 when I wrote for Voice Processing magazine.  Like Call Center, Voice Processing was driven by editorial content rather than by advertising dollars spent.  Voice Processing eventually morphed into Enterprise Communications, which was a magazine that was way ahead of its time.  Published in 1995, it only survived a few issues.  If it were published today, it would be right on the money.

Anyway, I wrote a column in Call Center for the past two years and was proud of my association with that magazine.  Call Center championed the customer service industry and provided an objective and reputable voice for those in the customer care business.  I suppose it was that commitment to integrity that ultimately proved to be the magazine's downfall.  Over the past few years, most of the companies that traditionally advertised in contact center trade magazines and supported trade shows began withdrawing their commitment to these traditional marketing channels.  As the advertising dollars dried up, the magazine began getting smaller and had to operate on a steadily shrinking budget.  Some other contact center trade magazines turned to a strategy of trading editorial pages for advertising dollars in order to stay afloat, but Call Center stuck with its commitment to objective trade journalism.  Unfortunately the advertising spending trend continued downward in 2007 and with its July issue, Call Center magazine ceased publication.  I for one will miss that monthly journal.

I'm told by many vendors that they spent their 2007 advertising dollars on the web, but I can't see where.  I remember a few years ago many websites were filled with useful information and companies seemed to be very forthright in their desire to provide web surfers the data they desired.  Today most of the contact center vendor websites I visit contain only very high level information and a form to fill in so a sales rep can contact me if I want more information.  Maybe advertising dollars are being spent on those annoying banner ads that seem to pop up everywhere on the web.

There were no significant technology innovations or breakthroughs in 2007 although I did notice an increase in the number of products out there that I can only describe as "gimmicks."  I have reviewed or have been briefed on a few of these products and they usually left me with the feeling that someone figured out a way to make something and now they are trying to figure out how to sell it.  In other words, there are quite a few products out there that, as far as I can see, are not based upon any sort of demand from the contact center industry.

That leads me to wonder if 2008 will be a throwback to the old computer-telephony integration (CTI) days of the mid-1990s where engineers built lots of cool applications that had virtually no place in the communications industry, but they built them anyway because they could.  Lots of people looked at those applications and agreed on the cool factor but didn't open the corporate wallet.  I think this will be the topic of a future essay in the NACC newsletter.

Overall, 2007 was a year that was rung out with a shrug of the shoulders.  I won't miss it.  I am optimistic that 2008 will be a little more exciting and I'm already hearing about new applications developments for 2008 that sound pretty interesting.  I'm ready to ring in the new and I hope the contact center industry is too.

By Way of Introduction....

Welcome to the National Association of Call Centers' (NACC) first blog, and first blog posting.  For this first post I thought it would be appropriate to introduce myself and talk a little bit about what I hope to accomplish with this blog over the next year and beyond.

I am the Chief Analyst at Saddletree Research (www.saddletreeresearch.com) in Scottsdale, AZ and for the past year I have also been a member of the NACC's advisory board.  I began my career as an analyst in 1989 with Dataquest, now Gartner Dataquest, in San Jose, CA, and have been at it ever since.  My career in communications actually began with GTE California and GTE Telemessenger in the mid-1980s.  I joined Dataquest as the voice messaging analyst and established Dataquest's Interactive Voice Response (IVR) research practice in 1991.  That's when I found myself entering the mysterious world of call centers and I've been there ever since.

I have always been a bit of a maverick and often thought that I'd do things differently if I were running the company.  I decided to test that theory by going out on my own and founding Saddletree Research on November 1, 1999.  Over the past eight years my focus has been exclusively on the contact center, especially on market segments like workforce optimization, speech technologies and other market segments with high growth potential.

I first crossed paths with David Butler, executive director of the NACC, a couple of years ago via an introduction by a mutual colleague and I immediately got the sense that the NACC was different.  Over the years I've seen lots of so-called industry associations, forums or labs come and go so I don't usually pay much attention to them.  Most of them are not the benevolent industry entities they want you to believe they are.  Most of them are thinly veiled attempts to fool the industry while raking in the bucks for the principals until the motor runs out of gas or the industry catches on to them, whichever comes first.

As far as I'm concerned, the NACC ranks up there with organizations such as the American Teleservices Association (ATA) as being among the few truly legitimate industry associations.  These groups are true non-profits with no ulterior motives driving the organization's activities.  While there are other groups out there supposedly associated with universities or other educational institutions, the NACC is, as far as I know, the only one whose executive director is a legitimate, tenured university proffessor.  There is no profit motivation and improving the contact center industry is the association's true and only mission.  David Butler and the NACC reek of honesty.  That's why I'm am happy to be associated with them.

In the interest of honesty and full disclosure, I should also tell you that I've never worked in a call center.  I've always covered the industry from the vendor/technology/market perspectives.  I'll never presume to tell you how to manage your operation or your people as so many other people out there with similar qualifications as mine will.  When I need to learn about the operational or human resources aspects of the contact center I turn to my friend and colleague, Fred Stevens, who is the principal at Call Lab (www.call-lab.net).  Fred has a deep contact center pedigree and now consults as an independent.  Fred and I work together in the Contact Center Consortium (www.customercontactweb.com) to bring a 360 degree perspective of the contact center to our clients.  Fred covers operational and management aspects, I cover equipment, technologies and vendors.  Between the two of us we manage to cover just about anything the client needs to know or do.

When it comes to vendors and technologies in the contact center industry, I have some pretty strong opinions.  Like any industry, the contact center has it's share of honest, decent vendors with a true interest in the customer.  It also has more than its fair share of jerks -- industry gunslingers who are in it for the money and don't care what they have to do or say to get it.  I've seen 'em both and I'm sorry to say that the good guys don't always win.  If you're an NACC member and would like to talk with me about any vendors or technologies you're considering in 2008, feel free to give me a call or contact me through the NACC.  I may be able to provide you with some fun facts to help with your decision making.

In this blog I hope to cover industry trends, issues, opportunities, threats, etc. with you.  Granted this will not be of interest to everyone in the contact center industry but I think industry professionals will find useful tidbits of information here and there.  I also hope those who have read my monthly columns in trade magazines such as Call Center, CRM, Customer Interface, TeleProfessional, Voice Processing and Voice Plus (Europe) for the past 15 years will also join me here once again and will share your opinions as you have done so well for so many years!

Best wishes for a very Happy New Year and here's to many more to come.