Seattle at its best - Management

I was a little behind - so I posted twice today - see the earlier post below....

What a great couple of days! I just returned from the Annual Call Center Expo (ACCE) conference in Seattle sponsored by ICMI (recently purchased by CMP media). I had the privilege of presenting with my good friend and co-writer Scott Thomas. We offered a half-day seminar on how to improve the culture of your call center. It was well-attended and the participants were very interactive (thank-you!).

Our basic message was that people are the key to success in the call center business - and for that matter in any business. We shared our perspective on coaching and communication. If you have not had the opportunity to attend one of our sessions, we hope to see you in the future. If you did attend and have any feedback - we would love to hear from you. You can reach me at bfurniss@touchpointassociates.com.

The most fun we had was producing and participating in the conference "live" radio show each morning. It is a shame that we cannot share with you the great music parodies that we played. Scott and I worked with Greg Levine to write, record and produce the music and clips for the show. Greg is the Creative Projects Coordinator at ICMI and the writer of the call center satire in Call Center Magazine. Scott created most of the music - including a great original blues tune called Automation Blues. We are hoping to meet with an entertainment lawyer in the next several months to find out if we can actually create and sell parodies online.

We also created and shared a great Top 10 list (with apologies to David Letterman):

Top 10 Signs You Work in a Call Center

10. You supply your spouse with a daily quality performance report and analysis.

9. You end your date with the question, "is there anything else I can do for you?"

8. After a romantic evening with your spouse, you send him or her a satisfaction survey.

7. Your kids names are acronyms.

6. You find yourself calculating the average talk time after an argument with your spouse.

5. When you watch your son play soccer you keep yelling that the other team is out of adherence.

4. You keep losing bets by insisting that “Shook Me All Night Long” was sung by the mega-rock group "ACD"

3. At Halloween, you answer the door and say: Press 1 for Snickers, Press 2 for Butterfinger, Press 3 for Almond Joy, Press 4 for Kit-Kat, or press 0 to opt out for an apple.

2. When choosing a line at the grocery store, you run a quick intra-day forecast.

1. Your dates always seem to go downhill because you keep bringing up shrinkage.


I will share some of the surprises at the conference in future blogs.