Wishing You A Great Holiday Season!

We decided to spread some giggles this shortened holiday week - without putting an eye out - and thought we’d poke a little fun at ourselves in the process. Check out these videos that include many of the folks at IQ Services you deal with every day – anyone correctly identifying all of the IQ Services celebs in these vignettes wins an IQ Services coffee mug!

Here’s wishing everyone out there the very best for the Holiday Season and for all of 2010.

May you travel safely and not get stuck on a tarmac, and may all your dreams of virtualized implementations come true.

Twitter is like howling at the moon

So you probably tweet, right? I’ve got a couple of accounts so I can be myself (@bznbdad) & then also put forth the corporate persona (@mfrburke). But I’m a geezer and it’s just weird, that’s all there is to it. I’ve lived most of my life trying to fly under the radar, and now I’m supposed to let my peops know every time I buy a Powerball ticket, enjoy a walk in the sunshine or sip a Summit EPA? Blogging’s bad enough. Coming up with a stream of consciousness post on a topic never seems that hard when I write the first sentence or have that flash of brilliance & jot down a phrase or topic on the corner of a napkin and jam it in my pocket. But telling the world that I just had the most awesome cup of coffee at Caribou or was grimaced at by the butcher when I asked how long to cook a well-done steak – does anyone really care?

I follow a few tweeters – I guess that makes me their peops – so I guess I should be able to answer the question myself. I guess I do care. I just don’t want my cell phone going off every 3 seconds, so it’s all on my computer. And I do like to scream every once in a while and think someone heard me. And then said under their breath “Yeah brother. You and me both.”

So maybe tweeting is the human equivalent of howling at the moon? Looking for a friend or a pack-mate? A hopeful contribution to social dialog that affirms I’m not alone. Or perhaps a form of cultural evolution? Wolves howl at the moon, right? They seem to enjoy it. I’ve heard variously that they howl so their pack-mates know where they are, whose territory is whose, or that maybe they’re just singing. Why not, I guess? At least when you tweet you don’t have to be able to carry a tune.

SIDE NOTE: If you have a minute, come follow our company howls @IQServices. We look forward the conversation and howling.

Mike Burke
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

So what if IT won!

So what if IT won…it still has to work, right?

Remember Datamation’s voice & data are like oil & water cover from Spring of ‘86? What a difference a quarter of a century makes. Just ask Nortel or AT&T or even Cisco! Where am I going with this? Technological schizophrenia.

Datacomm and data networks are truly wonderful things. They remind me of the analog computers of my misspent youth in the subbasement of Tech - all those wires (think patch cords) going all over the place. But I digress.

By telecom standards, data networks win ugly. Stuff goes bad by design and the network simply fills in around it, no problem. But telecom always had a different approach. Telecom was all about 2 hours of downtime over 40 years (http://www.greatachievements.org/?id=3639), i.e., the telecom network always had to work. None of this fall down & get up & fix itself stuff. Hence the arrogance of all us telecom types over the last few decades. We looked at IT encroaching on our domain, shook our heads & rolled our eyes and said customers just won’t put up with that kind of performance. Voice communications must be inherently reliable, but data networks are built to fail and recover. Dial tone comes from God. They’re just plain incompatible. Period.

So what happened? Cell phones. They weren’t a big deal 20 years ago when they weighed 3 pounds, you needed a bag to haul them around, they had an antenna that stuck up 6 inches, and they cost $3 a minute to use when you could find coverage under you carrier or plan. But cell phones softened everyone up over time…changed everyone’s expectations. In exchange for convenience, customers accommodated what was, by classic telecom standards, unacceptably lousy performance. And now everyone has one.

So what’s that mean to us in the contact center industry? Can we slacken our standards to meet the lowered expectations of cell phone customers familiar with networks that go up & down like yoyos and conversations that periodically turn to hash & evaporate?

I don’t think so. In fact, we have to take it up a notch!

Why? Customer expectations about the reliability and integrity of “stuff” on our end really haven’t changed. With their end so unreliable, we in the voice world have to compensate on the contact center end of the call.

Just thinking about voice apps on an IT-managed infrastructure using IP gives me chills. But that is of course where we come in. IQ Services represents the conscience of telecom professionals past. We’re the “2-hours of downtime over 40 years” people looking over the CIOs’ shoulders and helping them deliver networks that live up to customer expectations of what voice – and web – self-service should be. That is…solutions that are always available and work well 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

Just like Ma Bell always said it should be – no matter who’s minding the store.

Telecom’s still telecom, even if it has been homogenized. It still has to work. Period. Even if there’s no such thing as dial tone any more.

For those of you who didn’t mind the earlier digression, take a peak at these:

http://www.sys-bio.org/sbwWiki/_media/sysbio/labmembers/hsauro/vs-heathkit-ec-1-analog-computer.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdu/94291699/

Mike Burke
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423
http://www.iq-services.com/

Thanksgiving Day

It may be a bit cliché, but we can't help ourselves. It is Thanksgiving week. And despite everything we all seem to be worrying about these days, there is still so much to be thankful for. As you've probably heard one of us say before, everyone at IQ Services is thankful for our great customers and for the company environment that encourages us to do the best job we can for those customers. But we thought it would be fun to ask our colleagues what they are personally thankful for this year. Here's what we heard:

Kristy - I am thankful it's a 3 day work week! And for people who open their hearts and homes to abandoned and abused animals.

Mike2 – I'm thankful this year for good health throughout the whole family.Gary – I am thankful for the soldiers who are spending this time away from their families. May God bless them and their families and keep them safe and at peace.

Mike B – Mostly, I’m happy just to be here, and that the kids & families are in good shape

Cheryl – I am thankful for my wonderful family. They are caring, loving and most of all supportive. Not too mention, they haven't kicked me out of the house for taking up playing the drums!

Matt – I am thankful for family and friends. Evan – I am thankful for life, love, and happiness.

Shan – I am thankful for the fact that even though my son is 6 going on 12, he still calls me “Daddy.”

Jim J – I am thankful for my family and the opportunities I have had because of the country we live in.

Marla – I am thankful for husbands who do housework, 6-year old daughters who love the Vikes & birthdays that fall on Thanksgiving. Happy 19th David!

Mike3 – I'm thankful for the good health of my parents and my brother and his family.

Steve - I'm thankful that I have loving family and friends to share my time with.

And since two of our best natured colleagues weren't available for comment, we thought it would be fun to create fake statements of gratitude for them – comments in line with their character (hopefully they will be thankful that we were thinking of them):

Suzanne – I am thankful for the chance to visit my daughter in Chicago so her chef boyfriend can treat me to 4 days of great food.

John – I am thankful for fast cars, tire gauges, turtle wax and a dog named Tobey.We hope you have a lot to be thankful for this year too. Happy Thanksgiving!

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Groundhog Day

For me, one of the more interesting aspects of a typical performance and load testing engagement is how much bad news we deliver and how often we hear in response “OMG – that was horrible. Thank you! When can we do it again?”

As I think of it, the “can we do it again” sentiment describes the big picture when it comes to performance and load testing of a new contact center or communications solution. Proactive performance testing shouldn’t be thought of as a one-off activity. When most effectively applied it’s a process that allows you to try things out until you get them right. Kind of like Groundhog Day, but with you playing Phil Connor.

Something always turns up and most of the time it’s a big deal, which means you really do have to stop and think about what to do to get it right. Often, you need more than 5 or 10 minutes. Most often, you need a few days or even a week to get it right. Experience tells us that things aren’t usually right the 2nd time either, so you have to plan to do it more than twice too…sometimes more than three times.

The advice I give early in every project is to budget enough resources (your team, internal & vendors & suppliers) and plan enough time to test and re-test at least three to four times over a two to three week period.

Yes. Multiple sessions, two to three weeks, time in between.

If your team is prepared for the do-overs and you include the time and resources in your schedule and budget, the Groundhog Day type experience can have a positive effect on your project, your team and eventually your customers.

Mike Burke

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

So what do you learn?

In my last blog, I talked about test setup and the value of collaborating during the early stages of test planning – even when you’re just talking about who needs to do what and when.

Clearly the setup process has a lot to do with success. But the next question – the one I actually seem to get asked the most – is “So what am I going to learn? Why should we put ourselves through this when we’ve managed the living daylights out of the project, held everyone’s feet to the fire, and the budget’s already tight – running out of time & money (and patience) due to bumps in the road along the way? What’s in it for me? And don’t be vague & give me more of that value prop stuff, give me some real examples!”

Ok. We’ve got a long list of examples to help answer that question. (Check out this webinar to learn more).

But I’m going to suggest something you might not have considered. Not the obvious stuff like un-provisioned trunks, incomplete translations & routing, under-capacity servers, incompatible standards between components from different vendors, misconfigured or under capacity VLANs, etc.

Instead…think licenses. Yep. Licenses.

I hear that more and more, especially in the BC/DR context.

It’s a tight economy and nobody wants to buy more than they need, not that they ever did. But now more than ever it matters. And with IP plus virtualization & cloud computing in the mix, it’s not just about counting trunks or ports anymore. It’s not even CPU cycles or memory. Moore’s Law’s taken care of that one.

It’s about licenses.

“If everyone’s not logged in over here, can I use their licenses over there? If I lose power in Omaha, or the pipe to Chennai, will the licenses be re-distributed & usable in the back-up location?”

Well of course you thought so when you set it up. But what I’m hearing from the folks in our test facility, issues with license configurations almost always show up – often early on – and again in the BC/DR phase of our StressTest™ performance and load testing engagements for new systems.

Don’t overlook or make assumptions about something as simple as licenses – test it & see what really happens.

Mike Burke

The Unexpected Benefits of Contact Center Load Testing Setup

Launching a new contact center? Preparing to load test it to make sure it works? It isn’t just about throwing 100 or 1,000 or even 10,000 calls at a solution to see what happens. That’s taking the “let’s see if this breaks it!” approach, and like I’ve mentioned before, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Many of our customers have been surprised to find that preparing for “the dreaded load testing event” can actually help everyone – employees and vendors alike – work more effectively as a team. Everyone benefits (including end-user customers) when you approach testing as a team effort instead of a series of isolated exercises to generate reports, which can be used to beat up vendors & colleagues later.

(Warning … necessary plug approaching) IQ Services pioneered the team testing approach for contact center load testing over 13 years ago. So we know from experience that a successful contact center launch starts with common objectives and widespread, shared understanding. This doesn’t happen by fiat – it takes effort & guidance (and the earlier you start the better). It is still exciting for us to see how the techniques we use to prepare for a load test also encourage everyone on our customer’s team to invest some skin in the game. Talking through what’s supposed to happen – from the end-user customer’s perspective – really helps the team get their collective head screwed on straight. It’s all about the customer experience, not just the CPU consumption or the routing plan or the VLAN partitions. If it doesn’t all work together when hundreds or thousands of customers each try to do their own thing, it really doesn’t matter if the web services building block works in isolation or under twice the load as expected. You can’t imagine how many times we’ve been in the early stages of a test engagement and heard astonished customer team members say to each other “You expect it to do what?!?”

No, really.

But that’s great news! Because it happens during a test planning session, not at 10:30 AM on the morning the system goes live.

One of the key items we review (which seems so obvious to the team after the fact) is the list of who’s responsible for everything – internal and vendor – and making sure each person is plugged into their piece of the action when we start to light up the test. For example, routing and hunting are huge, whether you’re doing it yourself or counting on a toll-free network services provider. You want those resources online & participating during the test activity – not just available by pager or cell phone. Because if there’s an issue and Theo isn’t available to (1) dump the logs before they roll over, (2) interpret the results, and then (3) fix the translations right now, you might have to bring down the curtain. Then you’ll be making plans to do it all over again tomorrow night or next week or probably when you’ve promised to chaperone your kid’s traveling soccer tournament over in Fargo.

By preparing for contact center load testing early in the process, you start considering critical questions that can impact everyone on the team but that might not otherwise be discussed. Which applications are the riskiest, which data feeds the most tenuous? How are the various sites supposed to function, individually and collectively? Caching? Record locking? How do we find out if the SIP trunks really can handle the same burst rates that PRIs dealt with? Early contact center load test discussions seem to help everyone:

• Stay focused on the real business objectives
• Have a keen understanding of their role/their component’s role in meeting those objectives
• Clearly see where responsibility for any issues lie
• Pitch in where possible to get things resolved and working so testing can continue
• Have a shared understanding of what a successful launch will look like
  

Go through the load test planning and setup process in a methodical fashion. It gets your team onboard, you’re prepared to handle just about everything and you’ve probably addressed a myriad of issues before you’ve even launched the first test call.

Mike Burke
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

The Canoe Approach…Priceless

Over the past four decades, I’ve worked with customers who purchase products and services from communication companies. One of the most important things I’ve learned from working with these companies and customers is what I call the “canoe approach” to customer service. It isn’t just a cute saying. It is a solid approach that takes the customer relationship to a deeper level. It works well when followed by a single employee. But the real value of this approach hits home when any entire company lives by it. The canoe approach gives everyone in the vendor company – even sales and marketing – a way to put some muscle behind the hype. It presumes that to have a really good customer relationship, your customers need to know you’re there with them when they’re working on tough problems and trying to resolve their company issues. You are really in the canoe with them.

The work I do at IQ Services gives me an opportunity to apply the canoe approach quite often. As you know, we offer load testing services. Because the systems we test are often already in production, we must test late at night or early in the morning to reduce impact on real end-user callers. This means that a test might be running from midnight to 5AM. The canoe approach means that IQ Services is there with the customer throughout all those hours of testing and tuning and retesting. It means my colleagues (often times a Project Manager and Test Engineer) are there to look out for our customer’s best interests and to help them address whatever problems might arise. It also means that as a salesperson, I should be there sometimes for the test as well even though our project implementation experts can handle it without me. The value of my presence isn’t necessarily realized during the wee hours of the night, but rather the next morning when I have chance to talk to the customer. They know I was there and understand what happened and that I’m there again in the morning to continue helping them solve their issues.

As a salesperson, I’ve always found that customers respect you and depend on you much more when you are in the canoe with them during difficult times. But when a customer feels like an entire vendor company is in the canoe with them…well that’s priceless.

Gregg Williams

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

It is Customer Service Week!

So IQ Services would like to take a moment to honor and thank our clients who care as much about their customers as we care about ours. As experts in the contact center and communications solutions industries, customer service is at the very core of our clients' businesses and careers. It may sound sappy, but their efforts to improve the business practices, technologies, methodologies and services surrounding customer communications make the world a little better every day.

Is there someone you think deserves special recognition for their customer service efforts? If so, send us a quick email this month (October, 2009) telling us who deserves a small token of thanks and why. We'll pick two winners, send them coffee mugs and post their names on this blog.

Thank you for all you do to deliver the best possible customer service to your customers.

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Would you deliberately redline a Porsche?

It’s easy to break stuff. Just ask the parent of any 3-year old and they’ll confirm it for you. Fortunately, a child’s toys are relatively inexpensive compared to, say, a Porsche. The hottest fastest cars in the world have a redline on the tachometer. It’s there for a reason. It says “Sure, you can act like a 3-year old & wind this baby up. But if you overdo it, you’ll have junk on your hands.”

Which is why it mystifies me when I hear from test clients that set out to break their contact center systems; or maybe they say it a little softer like “See where it breaks…”

Our experience has been that this attitude gets things off on the wrong foot. Building anything is about building something that works. Testing its operation by intending to break it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The problem is that it is so easy to break stuff that if you focus on breaking you’re likely to overlook what should be the objective of any test endeavor – demonstrating that it works doing what you designed it to do.

At IQ Services, we like to talk about our StressTest™ load & performance testing as a demonstration of performance, i.e., let’s figure out what the system’s supposed do and how it’s supposed to do it before we think about how to break it. If the usual load on the infrastructure that supports claim status inquiry is only 10% of all calls received, it may be interesting to run 100% of the test calls against that application, but is it useful? Why not set out to try it in the context of where it’s expected to be – with 4 other applications contributing 90% of the traffic and consuming the bulk of the resources? Does it still work? Or does the load eligibility put on back-end web services crowd out claim status when eligibility hits its target of 50% of all traffic? Wouldn’t that be more meaningful?

Demonstrating the performance of your contact center solution starts with knowing its performance objectives. Whenever we enter a StressTest™ engagement, we start out by asking a whole bunch of questions about intentions and expectations, about the business rules that influence handling customer transactions, and about the channels through which you intend to handle those transactions. This helps us focus our efforts so you efficiently & effectively use the budget you’ve allocated for testing.

Now don’t get me wrong – you don’t want to have blinders on and never push up against design margins. In fact you should. It’s just that you don’t want to approach testing with the attitude of a 3-year old – banging away at stuff until it breaks. Focus on the normal operating range & demonstrate to yourself and to the businesses that the solutions you’ve built work given the rules they’ve imposed. And then give it a little nudge.

Stay focused on what makes sense - demonstrate the performance of your contact center solution the way you intend & expect it to be used. You’ll uncover all sorts of meaningful issues and challenges, and you won’t be hammering away like a 3-year old.


Mike Burke

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

HeartBeat™ by the numbers

I was fortunate enough to have an idea for a webinar accepted by the Contact Center Performance Forum (CCPF) a couple of months ago & the event came off without a hitch on August 6th. The topic was “Great Customer Experiences Start with Consistently High Performing Technology,” the expected audience call center managers – the people managers, not the IT wonks. I’m used to talking more about the performance of the machines in the contact center than the impact on the agents, but the hook for this webinar was you’re not going to have even half a chance at a positive experience if the technology required to handle & deliver the calls to agents falls down on the job. When callers finally do get through they’ve already been preconditioned with a lousy experience, and who will they take it out on? The CSRs of course! The moderator worked me over a bit and kept saying “Mike, you’ve got to make this real for people. Give us some real numbers. And don’t forget, agents are people too!”

So I did some digging and I was more than a little surprised.

One of the services we offer is surveillance for self-service solutions in production, the ones you often deal with before 0-ing out to get to an agent. This is our HeartBeat™ service. HeartBeat™ generates test calls one-at-a-time around the clock to access systems via the PSTN to ensure they are available & working as intended; if not, an automated notification is generated.

During a typical month we generate anywhere from half a million to 600,000 HeartBeat interactions. Would you believe that month after month, anywhere from 4% to upwards of 6% of those interactions encounter some kind of availability or performance issue? I know the HeartBeat value prop really well, but even I was surprised… 5% issues on average? Really??

Yes, really. Who knew?

Shan did. Shan manages our HeartBeat team. He lives this every day, along with Mike2 & Evan. They make up the team that defines the test cases, configures the servers, figures out what’s ok and not ok, who the system should call when there’s a ring-no-answer vs. a host down. It’s a whole lot more than just making a phone call and checking for answer.

So I asked Shan to tell me how things break down - literally – here’s what he told me:

Correcting for repeat issues (ones that last for a while and are therefore detected over & over again), here’s the distribution:

40% - Issue with answer – busy, ring-no-answer, silence or click
40% - Caller-requested information unavailable – host issue
20% - Caller disconnected prematurely

So out of 600,000 test calls in a typical month, 12,000 are answered incorrectly, or not at all. Another 12,000 are customers being led on a wild goose chase all the way to the point of finally being able to retrieve the info they need only to find out it wasn’t actually available. And another 6,000 callers are just getting cut off – they get to start from scratch.

But back to the webinar for a minute…

So here you are a call center manager working hard to keep your people and your customers and your business units all happy. You’re up-selling and cross-selling while cutting costs & keeping attendance high & training agents to deliver the best possible customer experience. And all the while you don’t know if the technology you’re counting on to take care of your customers & offload your agents is doing its job or not. A batting average of 350 gets you noticed in the majors and 94% is probably an A when grading on a curve. But how does that rate in the contact center?! Can you really afford 5% of your customer interactions going sideways?


Mike Burke


http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Positive customer experiences

One of the things that’s really cool about working for IQ Services is the customer experience we get.

Because we test systems remotely – from the outside in, just like your customers use them – we very rarely go on-site. Not that we haven’t. But the vast majority of the time we just don’t do it because we don’t have to. The upside to this methodology is our customers don’t have to do anything to their systems for us to be able to test or monitor. They don’t have to get us security credentials to be onsite. And because travel & shipping aren’t required, it’s all very cost-effective.

The downside is we don’t meet our customers face-to-face. Not that that’s required in today’s virtual world. But it’s just friendlier when you can look someone in the eye, read their body language, and get to know them on a more personal level. Especially when you go through the wringer with them like we often do during performance testing engagements at 3am on a Saturday.

Now the exception to all this is trade shows. IQ Services exhibits at something like 14 or 15 trade shows each year. It’s our chance to find out what’s on customers’ minds, the new trends in the industry and of course generate new leads. But then there’s this other thing that happens almost all the time – I’ll be going through my pitch with a new prospect and somebody will stroll up, badge flipped so you can’t read the name, the way they always are. And as I get to the punch line or value prop, the “stranger” pipes in with something like “You should use these guys – they really help out a lot. Let me tell you what I learned…”

And then they go into their story, and start selling for us.

Like I said, it’s really cool! This happens at almost every trade show, sometimes more than once. Let’s face it…we have a very narrow niche and a really obscure service. When someone comes over to meet us & gets rolling with our sales pitch, it’s really neat. One year a very grateful customer wandered over, dropped to his knees & bowed down in front of our booth. That got some real attention! We had no idea who he was until he spoke - now that’s a customer experience worth savoring!


Mike Burke

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Where does customer experience start and end?

The folks here at IQ Services live in a world of contact centers, communications technologies and business solutions. When we think about customer experience, our brains jump to images of the good but harried people who install contact center solutions and our desire to make them more successful. Visions of IVR performance spreadsheets, speech analytics dashboards, agent training programs and more dance in our heads. We don't often think about marketing. It isn't natural for this Midwest company to think that anything beyond hard work and good customer service matters much. Many of us were raised to believe that you don't talk about your good work...you just do it...you just make the customer happy. We forget or don't recognize that good customer service and good customer experiences start with the trust a company's brand holds. We forget that a brand is a promise and that a good customer experience means our customers liked the promise and we delivered on it.

So where does this lead me today? It leads me to a silo a few miles south of Le Sueur, MN on Highway 169. Since at least the 1970s, this silo has been painted to look like a pop can...most recently, a 7-UP can. Whenever you make the 5 hour trek to see grandma and grandpa in Iowa, the 7-UP can serves as an exciting milestone filled with shouts of "I saw it first" or "we're getting closer" or "we're almost home." It adds a glimmer of fun to a boring, routine car trip---even for the kids. We often grab 7-UP at the grocery store just because we'll be passing the silo/can. Last week, on a trip to see the folks in Iowa, we found out the 7-UP can had been commandeered by a kitchen countertop manufacturer!! WHAT?! It was painted black with the gold name of the company--CAMBRIA. Now granted the company is located in Le Sueur, but come on! That 7-UP can made life just a little better for generations of kids traveling 169 to go to Valley Fair, the Mall of America or grandma's house. How could they take it away? Will the 7-UP or Cambria brands suffer from this decision? I know I'll be a little less eager to buy from Cambria. My experience with them has been tainted before I've even considered a purchase (an easy decision since I don't need new countertops.) And 7-UP is in the dog house as far as I'm concerned. They broke an unwritten promise (one they probably didn't know they'd made with me) and now my experience has been tainted even though my last bottle of 7-UP tasted just fine. We'll be buying Sprite for at least a few months. So I guess you never know when the customer experience starts and ends for each unique customer.

Marla Geary

http://www.iq-services.com/
span >6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Telecom is in my blood

When it comes to telecom, I’m more than a little abnormal – it’s in my blood. My dad retired from AT&T Long Lines after 42 years (he had one of those “Ma Bell is a Cheap Mother!” shirts during one of the CWA strikes), and my mother was one of those ladies on roller skates working the cordboards back in the 40s. My first real job was Co-Op Engineer for GTE AE Labs in beautiful Northlake IL – when I told my dad he said something like “Haven’t you been paying attention? All the nights & weekends I had to work? Knowing how to answer the phone at night? I thought you were smarter than that – and not only do you go to work for a phone company, you go to work for THAT phone company!?!?!?!”

He was shattered. I was hooked.

I still don’t have Caller ID on my home phone – partially because I’m too cheap to pay for it & partially because I genuinely enjoy answering the phone completely unawares, sometimes hoping it’s a telemarketer so I can turn the call around, find out where they’re calling from, whose gear they use, whether or not they’re on the payroll or contracted, and then I pitch them. I always volunteer to answer the phone when visiting my family & the display says something like “out of area – undisclosed caller” – but they don’t let me.

I like calling customer service toll-free numbers & playing with the speech reco lady just to see what she can do. Zeroing out just to see if the screenpop worked, and whether or not I actually get connected to *Krissy*. Firing up a chat session while I’m on hold on the speakerphone just to see which one comes up in queue first.

Which brings me around to Get Human . If you run a contact center and you don’t know about Get Human you should. Because chances are if you don’t know about the Get Human standard for customer service, your customers probably feel like Joe Thompson…

It doesn’t have to be this way of course, and your customers won’t get anywhere near the thrill I do from a visit to telecom hell. They might just strap on their skates and disappear. Check out the Get Human standard – like dear old dad said “Haven’t you been paying attention?”

Mike Burke










http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Adios my friends…

Forgot to mention…I attended INNUA - the annual Nortel User Group meeting in Pittsburgh last month. Bad enough Nortel’s on the edge of mortality, but then you throw in the economy in general and it got really weird. We were exhibiting, and it was amazing how happy and grateful they were to have us there. Thank you from the committee! Thank you from Nortel! Thank you from Pittsburgh!

But it was Nortel’s swansong and everyone knew it. Mike Z. was up there saying things like “Thank you all for your loyalty through the years. I know you want to know what’s next and I really want to tell you, but I just can’t yet. We’re going to try to keep it together as best we can...” So a week later Nokia-Siemens picked up the network piece for a song. But now what about enterprise? Siemens again? Avaya? Who can tell? When will we know? A surprise perhaps? Maybe Nortel could come back as Rolm? What do you think?

You know it’s not all just going to go up in smoke. Those DMSes out there aren’t going to disappear overnight by any stretch of the imagination. Wouldn’t it be weird if Avaya, the remnant of AT&T Business Telecom, actually ended up buddied up with its old nemesis? I guess stranger things have happened.

I spent a lot of time in the company of Nortel folks, all moving forward but in an altered state. It was clear they cared about their company, their innovative technology and their brand, but they’re still in shock that their time in the sun has come and gone. I was reminded of that web bit that made the rounds during the telecomm crash in 2001 – the one about the 2 Nortel guys who each got a bonus; one decided to invest in Nortel stock, the other bought beer in returnable bottles. (http://oclug.on.ca/archives/oclug/2001-September/009408.html) After the crash, the returnable beer bottles were worth more than the stock. Who knew it would actually turn into liquidation? What a world, what a world…

Mike Burke










http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Telephony vs. Cacophony

In my last post, I wrote about overhearing some folks talking about how voice telecom has become passé. Their basic point…why bother to dial someone in your company when you can IM them? So I started thinking about how much of a pain in the neck IM and SMS really are when I have contacts scattered about on Yahoo, Skype, AIM, Windows Live, etc. I run IM IDs on my box almost all the time to accommodate my friends, colleagues and customers. I’ve managed to keep some of them the same across networks, and Trillian certainly helps. But we have “standards” at work and I have a “persona” I maintain outside the office. So in the heat of the moment and the rush of the day, things can get very interesting when you accidentally click on the wrong contact, type something a little too quickly or that email auto-fills the incorrect address. And who isn’t thrilled to get that IM or Tweet to remind you to check a recently deposited voicemail or email?

I’ve been in telecom a long, long time. This train of thought led to memories of those ads in Telephony Magazine circa 1975 that showed the masses of phone lines & wires that appeared a couple of decades after Alexander made that first call to Mr. Watson. As you old timers will no doubt remember, there were separate dial-tone providers and networks and no mechanism to go between them. So they each strung their own wires, and if you really wanted to speak with your Aunt Bertha, on Scott Rice Telecom, and you had already installed Frontier, you had to put in a second phone and a new connection to your home!

So here we are again – multiple networks, multiple IDs, multiple devices, multiple personalities. Something of a zoo methinks. Better? Sure! But I have to believe that what happened 100 years ago is bound to repeat. Google’s on the path with its Google Voice service. Perhaps SIP is the mechanism that will make it all possible. What can be done for chat? Who knows.

Mike Burke



http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

#1 - Dial tone came from God…

Heard at an InAAU session in Orlando a couple of weeks ago (that’s the Avaya User Group meeting)…

An Avaya distributor was talking about a client he’d been courting for a few years – a big one – 4,500 to 5,000 desktops. They’d done the Y2K thing last round, so they’re ripe for a new switch, right? All that new technology out there, IP’s mature now, lots of new features, UC, OCS, etc. Guess again! What they heard was “Why bother? No one calls anyone internally anymore. We’re all IM now & we’ve got what we need. That old box will be fine.”

Whoa! Can you imagine how that hit the Account Exec? How many other clients are thinking the same thing these days?

Clearly the industry’s changing, but would you have thought it could go that way? Why bother with voice? A client you thought you knew? Wow!

So what’s ahead for voice?

During a discussion with a voice veteran about communication modalities the other day we took the standard trip down memory lane – he’d learned, just like I did, that dial tone came from God. But, he pointed out, those days are long gone & we just better get over it. Thirty years ago there were no other options for real-time communications. You could send a letter or a telegram, but if you had a real-time need, it was telecom. So it had to work.

Today there’s IM, email, mobile phones, web conferencing – a whole host of new modalities, all with real-time components. And with everyone trying to do 3 things at once (if you still have a job), email is often more real-time than a voice call because you can answer an email while you’re in a conference call. Same goes for IM of course.

So voice telecom now has backup, which means it doesn’t have to always work because there are so many other ways to communicate right now -- even if us fogies haven’t caught on yet. Telecom really is just another app. Make that a modality.

Get the message?

How ‘bout I IM you the next time we need to chat... I’m on yahoo, AOL, MSN, skype… hmmmm.

Mike Burke

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Starbucks and Network Security

Mike Burke likes to share the spotlight with his co-workers so Tom Ring - IQ Services' Information Security Manager - is stepping in to let you know what he is thinking about these days.

You’re in your local coffee shop, and they are nice enough to provide free WiFi for the use of their patrons. You fire up the laptop and see that there are multiple access points available there. You pick one and connect. You just connected to a poisoned hotspot being run from a parked car. You’ve got network access through their cell provider, and they are sniffing every packet. Just because an access point says it is Joe’s Coffee Shop doesn’t mean that it really is.

You’re in another coffee shop that uses authentication and encryption and you only see one access point to connect to, which you then do. Everything is just fine and you get down to work. The problem is that within just a few minutes every packet you send and receive is being logged by the guy 2 tables down. Your company email account is now wide open to him. What happened? The encryption that the shop uses is just a little out of date. In fact, current wireless encryption methods have probably all been cracked. WEP was cracked in 2005 and currently takes less than 60 seconds, WPA v1 can be broken using aircrack-ng, WPA TKIP (currently the best method commonly available) was demonstrated in November of 2008 to be crackable in as little as 12 minutes regardless of the password or key length. Current WiFi encryption is not to be trusted.

So what are you to do? There is a solution, and your IT department probably already provides it – it’s a VPN tunnel. A VPN tunnel is a virtual private network connection back to your network at work. This is an authenticated encrypted tunnel that securely transports data to and from the internal network at your office. It can be used regardless of how insecure the coffee shop is, and it has another advantage – it gives you access to all the resources that you have when in the office. Files servers, wikis, chat server, everything, assuming that no limitations have been put into place by IT for VPN users.

Please note that you still need to have your laptop protected against incoming attacks. So no open shares, have a firewall in place, no services available on any ports, etc. Again, look to your IT department for assistance in making sure that everything else, as well as your VPN, is ready for the road.

Tom Ring

IQ Services
6601 Lyndale Ave South Suite 330
Minneapolis MN 55423
612-243-5114
http://www.iq-services.com/

Red River keeps on rolling…

Red River keeps on rolling…

There’s a lot going on around the world this week – wars, tourists in space, North Korean rockets, Bear Market bounces, greed grief, and, of course, weather.

But here in the Upper Midwest there’s really only one story – the Red River of the North.

The Red’s unconventional in that it flows north, ultimately to Hudson Bay, which means it’s melting & wants to flow out before there’s anywhere for it all to go. This flood’s unprecedented – more water earlier in the year than there’s ever been before. You can prepare but you can’t really practice for a flood of these proportions. Disaster recovery planning is essential, but for an incident like this it is really hard to dry run – pun intended.

(Warning…bad segue approaching)

Fortunately, when it comes to testing your communication and contact center solutions, there really is a way to practice or to dry run that disaster or business disruption response. Around good ol’ IQ Services, business continuity and disaster recovery testing is an every day event. It is what we do. We make sure communication and contact center solutions work the way they are supposed to despite routine maintenance, accidentally pulled plugs and -- worse yet -- lightning strikes and hurricanes.

This week one of the newest members of our IQ Services family is “up nort” helping his family and others weather the storm. He is busy making sandwiches and moving special belongings to higher ground. He says things have calmed down a bit for the moment. Blizzard like weather is still in the forecast. Even when the threat is over this year, there is still next year. There will be more floods, blizzards, and tornadoes; more pulled plugs and bad cards. We’ll just keep doing our thing. The people of the Dakotas and Minnesota will keep moving, keep helping each other. The Red River will keep rolling…

Mike Burke
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

What you don’t know you don’t know WILL hurt you!!

Why do contact center managers test their systems?

• So they don’t get fired when it all goes sideways 23 minutes into peak busy hour?
• So their customers won’t be inconvenienced when they use that new self-service, speech reco- enabled, web services-fed hosted IP voice portal
• So their customers won’t be frustrated when they opt-out and get CTI-MPLS-transferred to Krissy in Bangalore or dropped?
• Maybe all of the above?…

Everyone knows a well-crafted contact center solution is a thing of beauty. But it is also complex -- a best-in-class hybrid implementation. Kind of like Monster Trucks – designed to perform spectacular feats in a really cool way but most importantly to get the crowd to say “WOW! That was awesome! Let’s do it again!” Making sure the “Wow!” is really there is a big part of contact center planning these days.

Everyone knows they don’t know if the “Wow!” really is there. They know they won’t know whether or not their systems have been properly implemented end-to-end until they turn them on and take them out for a run. And they certainly would prefer the maiden voyage not be with live customers whose first use becomes their last use when the "Wow!" turns to "Whoa!" Those customers decide quickly that from now on they might as well 0-out & talk to Krissy in the first place.

But no one knows what they don’t know.

And that’s the real reason they test. The smart ones know there are things they don’t know they don’t know. But they know they want to know.

You wouldn’t believe the stuff we expose – stubbed out IVR apps that make it sound like you really did make a payment on your car loan (but didn’t), systems that go catatonic waiting for a recognizer to kick in (but only after 77% load is achieved), spans that are connected and look like they’re on, (but aren’t and apparently never were), servers that go bump in the night the first time they really spin up, and more.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve personally heard “If I hadn’t heard it I wouldn’t believe it – I had no idea!”

But how would you know? It all looked good on paper. You hired the best team possible.

It’s the stuff they didn’t know they didn’t know that keeps them coming back - especially the smart ones.

And Krissy is happier too.

Mike Burke





http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

The Experience Matters

Don't you love it when something that seems like it should be intuitively obvious to the casual observer turns out to be right on the money? Literally?

13 years ago, IQ Services was started by a couple of guys that had a really cool idea - if you could only figure out how good the user experience was going to be before you put a new contact center into production you could tune it before it went into production instead of 3 days later after it dropped to its knees the first time it was hit with full load.

Customer experience - make sure you've got it right before it's too late.

Sounds like a natural, doesn't it? 13 years ago they already knew it was all about the experience, what happens when someone actually uses your system, not just how it looks on paper when you list the components, comb the ACD metrics or plot the standard deviation of AHT or some such thing.

So what's this got to do with Interactions? This past week in Orlando, Intervoice formally introduced its new personna - Convergys (http://www.convergys.com/) - to its base of longtime loyal users at Interactions. Ravi Narayanan, VP, Market & Product Strategy, making the point about the importance of customer experience, cited a study by The ACSI (The American Customer Satisfaction Index - http://www.theacsi.org/) that documents this importance in no uncertain terms:

those companies with a high ACSI rating outperform the S&P 500.

Of course outperforming the S&P500 doesn't seem to be too hard to dothese days , but it's affirming to know that when your customers like you - and are willing to say they like you - it's not just their lips flapping. They're voting with their wallets too.

Makes cents, not just sense. And there's proof!

Now that's cool.

Mike Burke

www.iq-services.com
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423