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.