Customer Service Week 2010

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As a call center manager, Customer Service Week is a lot of fun! Celebrated every year during the first full week of October, this is a chance to show my appreciation to the people that take calls and, often, get closer to our customers than anywhere else in the business. Call center representatives are often the lifeblood of an organization. I enjoy being part of the festivities during Customer Service Week and hearing what other call center leaders do in their centers. I do my best to show my appreciation to my staff the other 51 weeks every year but find this week a special time.

Even if you don’t have money to spend, there are simple things you can do during Customer Service Week.

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How about clearing your calendar (or much of it) and spend time talking with your call center team members. Schedule time to be out on the floor, with your people. If you don’t do this very often you may even find that you’ll pick up some great ideas on how to improve service. Time is a precious commodity for leaders. Want your staff to know you value them? Spend time with them. Listen to them.

 

 

 

 

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Thank you cards never go out of style. Hand write thank you cards to everyone in your organization. This year I wrote out over 100 personalized thank you cards. Hand written thank you cards mean something. Well, to me they do. Hopefully my employees won’t throw them all in a bonfire.

Happy Customer Service Week.

 

 

 

Outsourced

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My first call center job was 16 years ago, as a 411 operator for Pacific Bell (before they were acquired by SBC and then bought, and re-branded itself as, AT&T). Through the years, I’ve always thought that a call center would make for entertaining TV. So, I was pretty excited when I first saw the preview for Outsourced on NBC. The pilot episode was funny. Although I’ve never travelled overseas for work, I have been involved with vendors in India, Philippines, Costa Rica and Panama. The “cultural immersion” aspect of the show brought back memories of stories my team members would share when they returned to the US after opening a call center abroad.

Running a call center, in any country, is a delicate balance between art and science (to steal a phrase from a very smart colleague of mine). It continues to be very challenging and rewarding work. I am looking forward to seeing if this show gains mass appeal. I know all of my call center friends are watching.

Links: Outsourced trailer on Hulu

Why I Like Ping

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Last week, Apple announced Ping, calling it “a social network for music”. Like a lot of comments I read online, I thought, “great, do I really need another social network?”. After downloading iTunes 10 and setting up my Ping, I realized I do need (or should I say, want) another social network.

I like Ping. Here’s why.

  • It lives within iTunes. I care most about what music my friends are buying, listening to, recommending, when I am in iTunes
  • It’s focus is narrow. Very narrow. I am interested in music and learning about other styles of music. I can see Ping helping me discover music I would’ve not otherwise discovered
  • I actually enjoy reading reviews, they may not sway me, but I like them nonetheless. When the reviewer is also a friend of mine it helps put the review in better context for me. Being able to easily read friends’ reviews is a big plus

As a first generation social network, Ping has promise. Some improvements I hope Apple makes are:

  • Greater delineation of genres. This goes for iTunes as a whole. Rock and Pop are pretty wide. And there is no category for Bluegrass. I don’t consider Sam Bush country
  • Should have custom URL that will forward to iTunes app (rather than telling people to go to iTunes and search for... )
  • The ability to “Like” and “Post” about podcasts and audio books
  • Re-activate the Facebook friend finder. I saw it there when I first signed up but it seems it might’ve since been removed
  • Allow me to change my user name to be different than my billing name; “Matthew” is too formal for me

Interested in what music I am buying or recommending? Look for me on Ping, as Matthew Beckwith.

 

Color The Skies

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This morning, very early for a Sunday morning I might add, we went out to Ripon for Color the Skies, a hot air balloon festival to raise money for the Children’s Hospital Central California. IMG_6175b We got out there a little after 6. Lucky for us, they were behind schedule and were in the midst of having all of the ballooners move from one side of the park to the other. One by one, the colossal balloons inflated to enormous heights. I can’t ever remember seeing giant hot air balloons up close before and was amazed at their size.

Sadly, the festival organizers announced that weather would prevent them from taking flight. Although it would’ve been cool to see them launch, having them on the ground was still cool. Plus, made for some good photo opportunities.

Speaking of photos, I learned a valuable lesson. Or should I say, a lesson I already learned was reinforced. Since the sun was rising right behind us the lighting was tricky. I started shooting in aperture priority mode, with my shutter speed on auto. A lot of my shots were too bright though so I switched to manual mode and increased the shutter speed. My shots in the 1/125 - 1/640 range in AE mode were greatly improved by shooting 1/1250 - 1/3200 in manual.

125v1250 (first: AE, 1/125, f/4.0 ISO 100; second: man, 1/1250, f/4.5, ISO 400)

See the rest of the pictures here.

It's Been A While

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My “place” on the web has been pretty quiet lately. Not surprisingly, visits to the site have gone down by quite a bit (except the everyday searches for Blackie Lawless’s daughter). The lack of posts here, one of the longest gaps in all the years I’ve kept the blog alive, is due to the software I use.

Years ago, after using FrontPage to manually update my site, I moved to RapidWeaver for Mac. I loved the software and recommended it to anyone that would listen to me.

After many problems with my RapidWeaver on this site, our daughter’s and our family podcast, it just became too much work to update the site. Then, the comment system used in the application, Haloscan, went out of business. The comments were moved to Echo but that service leaves a lot to be desired. It mixed up comments between this site and Makenzy’s and made it difficult to find out on what post comments were made.

I would prefer to use WordPress, a platform I have become much more comfortable. Being able to update via my iPhone and from any computer is very appealing. With 1000s of themes available and tons of custimization options, WordPress is my favorite blogging service.

Sadly, though, moving to WordPress will take a considerable amount of time and effort. I wish there was a magic wand to move this site to WP but there are some obstacles:

- mattbeckwith.com is hosted on a Windows machine (my host’s, not mine) that won’t support WP - with my current hosting service, I have to move this domain to a Linux box (and boy, I’d love to) - I have more than 75,000 files / 300GB+ of data to pull down before moving - there is no utility to convert my blog posts to a format that I can import into WordPress

So, I’m not sure when, if ever, I’ll move this site over to WordPress, but I am going to start writing more.

Stockton Stingrays Golf Tournament

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This year, we brought 2 foursomes to the annual Stockton Stingrays golf tournament. With the Lyons closure, this year the tourney was held at Oakmoore Golf Course. The players

The Stingrays don't play golf, but they do drive the carts :-)

We took last and second-to-last place. But, with best-ball, we still did very well!

More pictures.

 

Beep Baseball

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Today, we took the field again to challenge the Stockton Stingrays in a game of beep baseball (also known as blind baseball).

The game is similar to America's favorite pastime. All players,except the pitcher and catcher, wear blindfolds. Also, the pitcher and catcher are offensive, not defensive, players. The pitcher counts down the underhand pitch and tries to time, and place, the pitch based on the batter.

The batter gets 4 strikes and 1 ball (a non swing). If the ball is hit, they must run to toward first or third base, depending on which one starts to buzz. The batter must run and touch the base before a defensive player grabs the ball, maintaining control, and holds it away from their body.

We lost again this year. And we even hit without blindfolds during our last at-bat.

Playing against these blind athletes is amazing. Being sighted, I can't help but overly rely on my vision, so playing with blindfolds is challenging to say the least.

More pictures here.

Next time, Stingrays, next time!

The iPad has landed!

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Just as promised, the fine folks at UPS delivered my iPad yesterday. I had been a little worried the last few days since the UPS site still showed my iPad in China as late as yesterday.

 

After a couple of Google searches (and a few Topeka searches) over the last few days I realized there were many other iPads "stuck in China". A quick search on Twitter led me to @ThomasAtUPS who must've been the hardest working person on Twitter! He responded to tons of questions from soon-to-be iPad owners. @ThomasAtUPS assured me my iPad would be delivered today. Well, actually, he Tweeted it to everyone.

I had the iPad shipped to my mailing address, which just happens to be a friendly local UPS store. On an unrelated note, we have done business with Jason and his crew for 15 years, back when it was Mail Boxes Etc. - we love these guys, they really understand customer service! Ok, now back to the iPad story.

First I went to Best Buy and met Arvin who gave us a great demo of the device. We also ran into friend of the show, Tom Moccia from BuyMeAniPhone.com who was there picking up a couple of iPads.

A couple of hours later the iPad was in hand.

First let me say; physically, the iPad truly is like nothing else I've ever held. It was heavier than I imagined it would be, which I was happy about. No one wants light and wimpy tech toys! Now, I know I'm a fan boy, but seriously, it just feels right (extra cheese points if you read that in Johnny Ive's voice... even more extra cheese points if you know who Johnny Ive is).

The first thing I did was open Photos. Nice UI! Then I went to Safari. I wanted to know what it felt like to touch the internet. It felt amazing. This unique way of browser interaction transcends the iPhone experience. It just makes sense.

I could go on and one. If you're still here, though, it might be easier to just watch the video.

After only using it for a few minutes, I can say that it is awesome!

Originally, I said I would have preferred something more like desktop Mac OS X, with Finder, but, I wanted this just for casual surfing and e-mail... a tasks that it performs incredibly well! So far, the only thing I don't love is the presentation of Mail while in portrait mode. I would prefer to not have an individual message shown when I open the application.

Crappy first-generation? No way! While I'm sure the next version of the iPad will be amazing, I am glad I bought the first. The web surfing is awesome. The iPad apps (like ABC, Twitteriffic, Words with Friends HD) are all great. Games from the iPhone (Tetris, Traffic Rush, Demonless) are a lot more fun on the large screen! And the speed. This thing screams from app to app. I don't care about it's lack of true multi-tasking, apps nearly all open where you last left them.

Happy Easter!