Safer driving with Vlingo for BlackBerry
Quick: Where do you make most of your business phone calls? If you are like me you will answer, “in my car.” For me the car offers the rare opportunity to call my contacts without distractions from my other tasks.
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
Three tactics for scheduling with success
Having a human scheduling appointments on your behalf sets you apart from the crowd more than ever in a world of web-published calendars and do-it-all mobile devises.
Technology-powered tools now available for scheduling are amazing:
- Web apps like Tungle.me and timebridge provide slick functionality for publishing your calendar to the world of people who’d like to select a time to meet with you
- Apple’s Siri takes key scheduling steps on your voice command without you even having to click or swipe
But simply saying “I’ll have my smart phone call your smart phone,” has some key limitations.
Relying entirely on these tools naively implies a business environment in which all parties have an equal interest in meeting. Your most important contacts will appreciate a more personal touch, and human input is critical to navigating the art of back-and-forth “scheduling Ping-Pong,”
So how do you empower your remote admin in the complex and subtle game of business etiquette that starts when two busy people decide to meet and then need to lock down time and place?
It’s not “Just” scheduling
Prospective Prialto members will sometimes say they “only” need help with scheduling, as if to imply this is a simple, commodity task.
They are right when the playing field is level and the parties looking to meet have plenty of time. In that rare situation the task is just finding the next mutually open spot on the calendar. The algorithm is indeed simple, and technology alone may get it done.
Those experienced in leveraging a professional scheduler will more often understand how much time gets consumed. They also know that there is an art to navigating through the complexity of how to time reminders, decide on where to meet and at what time.
Three tactics for getting it right
So how does one best leverage their assistant to track down targets and get you the right meetings in the right place and at the right time?
1) Start slow in the beginning to go fast later:
Many tech-equipped, near-autonomous knowledge workers have forgotten this basic management need, but there is always a tradeoff between the ease of getting something done yourself today verses taking the time to enable someone else to take it off your hands later. One should never offload key tasks to a new employee without great care. But micro managing your new scheduler in the beginning is totally appropriate. Take the time to:
- Explain the etiquette of your business and client base
- Download the places you like to meet for which kinds of meetings
- Download the names of your VIPs, the key clients and/or personal contacts that get the highest priority
- Sensitize your assistant on how to discern in your email exchanges the importance of a contact and how that should translate into how a meeting is scheduled
To do all this, you ought to initially watch every email your assistant sends out and then set times to go over and give feedback on how they can be improved. Doing this for just a few days, will quickly yield great time-savings and peace-of-mind.
2) Surface key information to the top of long email threads:
A couple of simple specifics as you CC your assistant will save lots of time and energy. While it is true that a good assistant can successfully disentangle long and complex email threads to decipher what you want done even if you simply copy him in with no instruction. But it may require a lot of unnecessary energy and time.
Here’s an email that works well:
Here is an email that does NOT work well:
3) Develop a scheduling vernacular with your assistant
Picture this scene: You need to reply to a contact’s email request for a meeting, but the meeting is low priority. How do you convey to your assistant that information while not offending the contact?
One way is to beforehand agree to a tactful language with your assistant so he or she knows your intention while also keeping your contact happy.
Develop special words that you can place in the kind of email copy above to help your PA prioritize on your behalf. For example:
- To indicate that you indeed want to meet while tactfully letting your assistant know that this meeting is not the highest priority, say things like “please schedule a coffee” or “please schedule for this month”
- To indicate that a contact, Charlie, is a high priority client who you want to defer to, say something like “please schedule at place and time that works well for Charlie”
Oh, and one more thing
See Andy Mowat’s article on how to leverage your assistant to do CRM right. If you are looking to have an assistant help you schedule, you probably are tracking lots of contacts. A CRM and a good CRM process can be amazing tools with which to collaborate with your assistant and track key interactions. But if you’re a relationship person, you probably don’t want to spend too much time meticulously inputting data. Configure your CRM to work with your assistant.
Why Call Centers Will ALWAYS be horrible to deal with
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 know I should be delegating to save me time, but I am just too busy to figure it out.”
by Eric Taussig
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
How social media can work for business, part 2
by Peter Pincetl
Social media—and how to use it. In Part 2 we present five whitepapers that provide more details on what that exactly means.
- 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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.