One simple cell phone etiquette rule will save us all many hours.

You will recognize the context:

Say you are driving north down Highway 101 from Palo Alto to San Francisco at about 3:00 PM on Friday afternoon. You dial your friend in New York and reach him as he is heading home to rest before going out to dinner. He’s on the E Train.

You are in the midst of an important discussion. And, then, just before he heads into Brooklyn Heights, he says “If I lose you going under the water, I’ll . . .” You hear silence, and, then, silence. . Gone! Lost connection, and who knows exactly what the last words were your friend heard?

You wait for about how long you know it takes for the E Train to resurface on the other side of the East River. Here, then, is the sequence of events that follow:

1. You redial
2. You hear a busy signal, and hang up
3. You see a message waiting on your cell phone screen
4. You are near certain it is from the friend you were just speaking with saying “tag, I’m trying to call you back,” so you redial again
5. You think you are about to connect, but you hear the call waiting signal. You check your screen for the incoming number. Sure enough, it’s your friend calling you back again. You try to click over, but he’s already gone back to voice mail.
6. You hit the red button several times to terminate any call left connected
7. You wait for your friend to dial again, but nothing happens because now your friend is also waiting
8. You are both probably frustrated by now. You hit the green button again to dial, but now all the cells on Highway 101 are clogged with people planning their Friday evenings. Your call takes several minutes to get through and now you can hear that your friend is on the line with someone else.
9. “Forget it,” you think, “I’ll catch him tomorrow.”

Who should call back and who should hold off?

Here’s the etiquette:

Don’t spend time guessing or presuming whose phone or location was responsible for the lost connection. That’s impossible for either party to know.

Whoever initiates the call should dial back, regardless. It’s simple and straightforward. You’ll both always know who that is and you will avoid a lot of confusion and wasted dialing and waiting.

]]> http://blog.prialto.com/2010/06/25/one-phone-rule-will-save-us-all-time/feed/ http://blog.prialto.com/2010/06/21/taking-emotion-out-of-corporate-email/ http://blog.prialto.com/2010/06/21/taking-emotion-out-of-corporate-email/#comments Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:28:46 +0000 Eric Taussig http://blog.prialto.com/?p=487

How about a corporate policy mandating against emotional communication in email? Michael Keck recently informed me that this is the rule for internal communications over at Algentis.

Michael and team want to stay focused on serving their clients. They DO NOT want to waste time parsing email sentences to decipher any hidden meaning behind the written words.

The no subtext rule

Their solution is a no-subtext rule: Don’t write with emotion and don’t waste time looking for it. If a manager wants to know when he will receive an overdue deliverable, he will write, “when will you send that deliverable?” He will not spend time crafting a more tactful, but easily over analyzed, sentence like, “I just wanted to check in on when you’ll be able to get that deliverable to me, as I was under the impression you would send it to me yesterday.”

The policy probably won’t work with customers, and, even internally, it requires colleagues to adhere to the same principles that make a marriage work well: Assumption of goodwill, complete forgiveness for past disputes, etc.

Don’t read between the lines

If a manager writes to a colleague “when will you be arriving today?” the receiver of the message must avoid reading any innuendo into the simple question. The point is for the reader not to waste time thinking “I wonder if he thinks I’m late a lot.” The Algentis policy says such nuanced discussion will be left out of email and transmitted only in verbal communication, a form far less prone to misunderstanding.

Higher personal productivity is the benefit

I’m not sure if the tip is a good one for all teams. Operating among diverse groups may require a commitment to extra communication. But adherence to the no-subtext rule is probably helpful to any individual reaching for higher personal productivity. Imagine unilaterally telling coworkers that you’ll no longer spend time deciphering emails with emotion: The information only, please!

You may miss a bit of the meaning and connection. But spending less time reading between the lines may save enough mental energy to make it worth the tradeoff.

Now I finally found a way to get the mobile web connection I want on my laptop without the high monthly fee. I recently download the Tether app for BlackBerry. For a one-time fee of $49.99 I can connect my BlackBerry to my HP laptop via a USB cable and get the web and email from almost anywhere. There is no additional fee beyond the BlackBerry data plan I already have from Verizon.

Not only do I save a bundle, but also I score a victory for competition with the big carriers.

What: Tether app for BlackBerry
Where: http://tether.com/
Price: Free trial available, full version is $49.95 one-time fee

So I have been eager to test the Vlingo app for BlackBerry, which lets you get more done while driving—and helps keep you safe. Vlingo, also available for Android and iPhone, will read aloud your incoming emails for you—no need to sneak a peek to see your messages.

Speak your emails
You can also reply to emails by speaking. Vlingo’s speech-to-text engine will add your words to the email. Accuracy is pretty good, although it does miss a few words. Vlingo says that the app will learn from your voice as you go, without any active voice coaching on your part.

Voice dialing for safer driving
I also appreciate the advanced voice dialing features, which let you call anyone in your contact list by speaking. (I must admit to driving while looking up contacts, a very dangerous action.)

Vlingo also lets you open applications by voice. For example, I enjoy listening to Slacker Radio while driving. With Vlingo I can say, “Vlingo open Slacker” and the app will open for me.

All in all, I really like this app and find myself using it more and more as I find new features.

What: Vlingo app for BlackBerry
Where: http://vlingo.com/products/blackberry/
Price: Free version available, I tested Vlingo Plus for $19.95

April 17, 2010

A CNN.COM headline recently caught my hopeful attention: “Coming soon: Call centers that don’t suck.”

Wow, I thought to myself, what new innovation might spare me from ever again having the horrific experience I’m now having with Comcast?

My Internet has been intermittently down for more than three weeks due to an unusual wiring issue in my Foster City, California neighborhood, and my out-of-the-ordinary problem will not compute on Comcast’s customer service apparatus. I’ve been shuffled between agents in Guadalajara, Livermore, Sacramento, Walnut Creek, Philadelphia, and Denver. The account notes on my problem now are many pages long . . . and I’ve yelled some of the meanest words I’ve ever uttered at even Comcast’s most earnest helpers.

My frustration does not stem simply from a product or service breakdown. Most consumers, including me, understand that products sometimes break down. Nor is my issue with the ineffectual Comcast CRM software that fails to correctly communicate my issues between the different people (technical and customer service staff members) that are needed to solve my problem.

I expect such failures. If my problem is within the mean, I’ll probably find resolution in the notes on a web site. It is when my problem is unusual that I need to speak with an able generalist empowered to think beyond the script. If the notes don’t address my problem, CRM software in the hands of a narrowly focused person almost certainly is not going to be any more helpful.

My problem is a people issue.

Comcast has not been able to put me in touch with a person who can take ownership of my problem and resolve it. Call centers cannot produce such people. I am now nearly irreconcilable. I am exhausted from having to retell my story over and over, and I’m increasingly impatient with the scripted responses. Every call is more frustrating than the previous one. I now hate the agents before my conversation with them starts . . . and they hate me.

So what is the amazing innovation that inspired the bold CNN headline? It seems that IBM now is offering a “better” software solution to address the perennial call center problem of matching a customer with the right agent. It is called Real-Time Analytics Matching Platform (RAMP), and it is expected to improve upon the channeling of customers who hit the right prompts to an agent who knows a customer’s product. The new software will channel the customer to an agent who “knows” both the product and the customer. An international business person who uses an iPhone, for example, will be channeled differently than the graduate student who uses the same model iPhone. Presumably these two people will get a better experience by connecting with agents who specialize in their very different issues or at least connecting to agents who read from more specialized scripts.

It is, of course, a ridiculous notion that such software will address the systemic issues with the call center experience. Call centers aren’t horrible because customers are channeled to the wrong agents or scripts. They are awful to deal with because the relationship between the caller and the agent is inherently perverse: It is brutally transactional in every sense.

This is true whether the parties are interacting across nearby counties, across different states, or across different continents. It is true whether they share an accent and the same cultural identity or if they find each other’s accents very foreign.

The issue is quite simply that there is no intrinsic satisfaction in helping each other, because there is no lasting relationship. At a really great company, the agent might care about the product and service, but the agent can’t care about the caller. That’s why the call must be recorded. The call might start out polite so long as the caller experiences timely resolution. But, except for a desire for quick resolution on an immediate problem, there is no social incentive to treat the agent well.

No software will solve this problem.

Call centers are not going away, of course. They will always play a role in handling large volumes of similar issues. But the model will always focus on software and increased specialization, the very things that make them frustrating when the problem does not match the algorithm.

At that point, you will always want to hit the eject button. You don’t want to speak with a specialist. You want to speak with a generalist, the kind of person who works at a professional services organization. A high percentage of the individuals who comprise the call center workforce – the same agents who in their current environment may seem like automatons – can thrive in a learning organization where they are allowed to take ownership of customer problems.

An increasing number of firms like Prialto are finding they can tap into the same workforce that call centers recruit from, but for far more meaningful work. The best of these firms deploy a managed service solution. Unlike Online marketplaces like Elance or oDesk that treat global talent as a commodity to be traded, these managed services firms are working to develop that same talent so that individual knowledge workers from around the world may take broad ownership over client issues.

There is great demand for these services among small businesses that need an affordable and flexible workforce to whom they can delegate duties that are critical but not core to their business. The most talented employees within the call centers – those who want to help you, but are not afforded the tools to do so – are leaving the high volume, low margin call center environment for the authentic relationships offered by these new professional service firms.

Deprived of such talent, the call centers will rely ever more on increasingly clever scripts and software to drive customers to solutions, and that’s exactly why they will continue to be an unsatisfying experience for both agent and caller.

My Comcast Internet is still ridiculously unreliable and it has become clear that none of the company’s call center agents will be able to coordinate a resolution.

I’ve finally taken extraordinary measures to get my issue in front of a person who has a social incentive to help. I’ve tracked down and gotten in touch with Comcast’s general counsel and several of the corporation’s senior vice presidents, as I’ve learned that they are fellow alums from my university. These folks will make the same amount of money this year irrespective of whether my broken internet is fixed. My calls to them are not recorded and our email exchanges probably are not monitored.

However, they do have a social motivation to resolve my issue. They presumably care about their reputations among their academic cohorts.

I’ve also chased down Comcast trucks in my neighborhood and gotten to know the repair guys who live in my area. Again, the ongoing relationship – the fact that we might run into each other at the grocery store – is a healthy incentive for us to work together in a reasonable way.

Many believe that the call center experience is bad because of either poor technology or the geographic distance between caller and agent. Neither assumption is correct. Technology can greatly enhance a service, but it will always remain underutilized or ineffective without people thoughtfully driving it. People — regardless of their locale and relative physical distance — can work well with each other so long as they have ongoing relationships and appropriate social contexts and motivations.

I’m not holding my breath for the day outlier issues like my current wiring problem will be better handled by Comcast’s call centers. They never will, even when buttressed by the newest and fanciest RAMP-like software. Issues requiring dynamic follow through are best handled by inspired knowledge workers in a learning organization who have the ability to form a lasting, cooperative relationship with the people they are charged with helping.

There are tremendous numbers of talented individuals around the world ready to join such organizations. And since they are increasingly loathe to work in high-volume call centers, I’m holding on to my Comcast corporate contacts and focusing more on politely forming relationships with the repair men I meet in my neighborhood

I hear these words all the time from prospective Prialto members. They are some of my favorites to hear, because I know they come from the very type of person Prialto can best help.

Prialto has worked with more than 100 members who have successfully delegated thousands of tasks for us to do for them. Through this, we have learned critical best practices for using remote assistant services. This knowledge has become indispensible in guiding our new members to get up and running. A few examples:

1. Communicate often, clearly, and consistently
   Communication is your greatest ally in fostering any working relationship. It is even more critical when working remotely.

   It helps, for example, to set up a daily reminder call either at the beginning or at the end of the day. Just as you might make a daily practice of touching base with an in-office assistant, it is good practice to regularly check in with your Prialto assistant.

   Your assistant should cover your daily to-do list to help you stay focused and on-task. Give your assistant honest and clear feedback on all the activities he or she helped you with in the last 24 hours.

   And make these daily interactions by telephone, not email. Verbal conversation, our highest-bandwidth form of communication, lets you transmit the most amount of information efficiently.

2. Focus first on delegating recurring tasks
   Delegating recurring tasks is a powerful way to use your assistant. Once established, tasks get done with little or no additional effort on your part. Some powerful tasks our members have delegated are:
   • Every two weeks, compile competitor press releases and any changes to pricing/advertising
   • Every third Wednesday, send a list of three restaurants with reviews and price ranges. (Should a member decide on a restaurant, the assistant makes the reservation and arranges the babysitter.)
   • Twice a day, an assistant calls a hotline and retrieves any messages, transcribes the messages, and sends them to the member

   True, software can perform many similar tasks, but our members routinely tell us that the human touch adds far more value. With humans, tasks get done with more nuance and in a way that saves time for our demanding members.

3. Unload small tasks too
   Even small tasks add up. If a task will take you 15 minutes, you may think to just do it yourself. But those small tasks add up. Four of those small tasks would take you an hour to complete, as opposed to four or five minutes spent assigning the task to your assistant. Here are some scenarios:
   • A prospect calls while you are driving. She wants you to send her your address via email immediately. You can call your assistant and have him or her send the information.
   • You are on the phone with a client and realize that you need to invite someone to the sales meeting you just arranged. Call your assistant and have them handle the arrangements.
   • You hear an advertisement on the radio. Call your assistant and ask them to send you the company’s information.

   The relief of getting things done (not halfway done, not noted, or just added to your to-do list) liberates the soul. You fell better about your day, you feel more successful, and you are more relaxed.

4. Build your relationship slowly to gain trust
   Although we have trained our assistants to be ready for your most urgent tasks, you may still hesitate to hand off work. That is natural during the get-to-know-you phase. Take your time to build a working relationship with your assistant; otherwise, those first few tasks may create a lot of anxiety for you. Begin with smaller, easy-to-accomplish assignments and a simple to-do list that you want to do but just can’t seem to make time for.

An assistant may accomplish one-off tasks for you, but can they do so much more. They can completely remove tasks from your routine for good, they provide reassurance, and they remove the stress from life.

Eric Taussig is Prialto’s CEO

Social media—and how to use it. In Part 2 we present five whitepapers that provide more details on what that exactly means.

1. A Primer in Social Media by Eric Karjaluoto (smashLAB, March 2008)
   A strong introduction to social media with examples of successful and unsuccessful uses and suggestions on how to apply them to your own company. Includes an extensive bibliography.
2. The Coming Change in Social Media Business Applications by Josh Gordon (socialmediatoday)
   First social media was used for general business communication. But now uses are shifting towards consumer engagement. Survey data confirms the trend. And applications of Twitter and social networking are outlined later in the article.
3. Social Media: The Case for Online Engagement (dna13 Inc., 2009)
   (Requires free registration) Social media is a powerful tool for reputation management. Case studies of McDonald’s, MasterCard, and JetBlue demonstrate how each has used this tool successfully. Social media lets your company reach a large audience at low costs and a unified company message.
4. Social Networking: An Age Neutral Commodity by Dick Shroud (October 2007)
   Social networking is relevant to all age groups and consumer types . Here you will read about the fundamentals, a history, and why social networking is now so prominent. The author concludes with some speculation on where social networking is going and how marketers should use it.
5. Social Media Marketing Industry Report by Michael A. Stelzner (March 2009)
   A comprehensive study on how marketers are using social media to grow and promote their businesses. It is stuffed with data and graphs to make sense of recent trends and answer questions.

 Peter Pincetl is the Prialto 2009 Social Media Intern.

Social media for business—the greatest thing since sliced bread or just so much hype? Here are six articles to help executives address this question.

1. Social Media: A Business Marketer’s Guide by Dan Morrison (iMedia Connection, March 30, 2007)
   Marketing professionals should ask four key questions to determine whether social media will improve performance: (1) what portion of content is user generated, (2) is user generated content high quality, (3) will existing online campaigns work, and (4) how do sites help target demographics?
2. Smart Social Networking For Your Small Business by Frederic Paul (Forbes, June 5, 2009)
   Here is a handy cheat sheet that shows how to use social networking in a small business. It covers where the networking takes place, different applications of it, some dos and don’ts, and other key points.
3. Four Ways Social Networking Can Build Business by Jake Swearingen (Bnet.com)
   Profiles of four professionals who use social networking in the following ways: (1) unexpected collaborators, (2) a place to start building a global business, (3) finding talent, and (4) cheap viral marketing. Readers’ comments are encouraging and prove that these are viable options.
4. Are Social Networking Sites Useful for Business? by Karen E. Klein (BusinessWeek, August 6, 2008)
   Social networking sites can be useful, but you should tool them to fit your business. Explore the different sites and select the ones that best fit your uses. Several different sites can be use with the effort, such as posting a video on YouTube and then publicizing it on Facebook and Twitter. Another plus side to joining social networks: a higher profile for your company on search engines.
5. Social Networking Goes Professional by Jessica E. Vascellaro (Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2007)
   Professional social networking is growing, especially for information exchange and recruitment. A drawback is the ease with which new members can fraudulently identify themselves. Professional social networking sites are attempting to prevent this through referrals and credentials checks.
6. Social Media Good for Businesses by Richard Pachter (Miami Herald, June 8, 2009)
   Social networking tools have evolved into near essentials in the business world. Three books help better understand the subject: The Social Media Bible: Tactics Tools and Strategies for Business Success by Lon Safko and David Brake; Facebook Me! by David Awl; and The Twitter Book by Sarah Milstein.

Share your ideas
Got ideas for incorporating social media with the Prialto community? Leave a comment; we would love to hear about it.

Peter Pincetl is the Prialto 2009 Social Media Intern.

As I was updating Mr. Allen on his agenda, I mentioned to him that I am sending him a copy of the restaurant’s menu so that he could get an idea of what he wanted to order. He was very pleased about it and mentioned that those are the types of things that he expects from our service.

This was an email from Bert Landa, one of our personal assistants. Bert was given kudos by the member who felt compelled to speak with one of Prialto’s managers to let him know how impressed he was with Bert.

We can’t say it too often: People are at the core of what we do here at Prialto. They are our most important resource. And when every single employee feels empowered, and when they care about what they do and the quality of work they produce, you get service that is, well, pretty great.

Now, how can VoIP save your organization money? Read on to find out more.

Reduce Your Phone Bill
Saving on phone bills is the most obvious benefit of using a VoIP phone system. Typically, the biggest savings can be realized if your organization has many branches or if you have people working from home or on the road. For companies who have employees traveling abroad, the cost savings can be substantial. Prialto can quickly help you analyze how VoIP could benefit your organization by simply looking at your monthly phone bill.

Less Infrastructure to Maintain, Simpler to Administer, and More Scalable
Because VoIP systems run on normal servers, it is typically less expensive to deploy VoIP than POTS equipment, and that’s even true when it comes to a small office of 1-5 people. And if additional offices need to be connected to the same “corporate” phone system, that can be done quickly and easily too, allowing companies to grow without incurring large expenses for infrastructure.

Another benefit is that because there are less specialized systems to maintain, there are fewer things that can go wrong and it reduces the need for system administrators at each site. Additionally, with fewer machines to maintain, the fewer maintenance contracts are needed.
Because VoIP phones run on the same type of network as regular computers, there’s no need for additional wiring for phones. Again, this means less infrastructure components to maintain and troubleshoot. Lastly, most things related to extensions or phones can be administered by the user, which reduces the need for IT staff.

Cut Costs Using Alternative Phones
A VoIP system allows users to make calls from their computers. These so-called “softphones” are cheaper and work just as well as a regular desk phone. However, if a person or organization prefers to use a standard desk phone, a nice VoIP phone is fairly inexpensive, starting around $100. The main difference from a user’s perspective between a VoIP phone and a POTS phone is that VoIP phones offer many more options and more flexibility.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
IVR, or Interactive Voice Response, is a feature built into most modern corporate telephony systems. An IVR allows callers to interact with the system by pressing a number to be taken to a menu or a department. The benefit of an IVR, if properly implemented, is that it can quickly and accurately route calls to the appropriate recipient. However, it is a hotly debated topic. Proponents say that it can cut costs by replacing receptionists; although the impersonal nature of the system can also be a source of irritation and frustration among callers. The ubiquity of IVRs today has made a rare experience of getting an actual human being answering calls. By combining the technology of IVRs and the human element (receptionist/office assistant) though, Prialto has created solutions that is not only efficient, but offers a personal touch as well. With its front-office services - Receptionist+, Time Manager, and Productivity Assistant - it is hard to beat.

Call Routing
An IP PBX can be highly automated. As with call trees that are configurable through the IVR feature on a VoIP system, calls can be automatically sent to a particular group, like sales, or to a particular person. On an individual level, users can set up calls to ring both their office phone and their mobile phone at the same time, or one phone first and then the other. It can be really handy if you’re out on a business trip. You can even set your extension to accept and/or reject calls from certain numbers.

Intangible Benefits
While many of the features and benefits of VoIP aren’t easily quantified in terms of hard cold cash, although there are ways of assessing their value. Companies like Prialto can help analyze business processes to identify cost or time savings. After all, in addition to Front-Office and Prialto Voice services, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) , is another of Prialto’s core services.

Questions? Contact us at 866.910.8440 or visit us at www.prialto.com

For more information on VoIP, click here.