New Phrases

From here on out, a public bathroom in which all stalls are occupied shall be known as "Murderer's Row."

You're welcome.

Google

Everyone knows Google is a genius. Here's one way I use it when my girlfriend isn't there to dress me in the morning:

I learned that dark brown is in fact a neutral color and that the only thing you can't wear with it is black. A year ago I would have thought that black was the only color acceptable to wear with dark brown. Thank God for Google.

Call Center Science

As a lad I worked as a trashman for two consecutive summers for the township I lived in. It was decent summer work because the hours were defined by your work ethic and there was never work on weekends. It was there that I learned the consequence holidays can sometimes have on certain jobs. For example, the Fourth of July causes an irregular amount of trash such that us trashmen had to work overtime on July 5th to make sure our route was finished. Thus, nobody ever really looked forward to holidays.

In call centers like the one I work at a similar dynamic is felt. The financial markets are closed on weekends and holidays so we don't take calls on those days. Clients who wish they could have called on that holiday will call the next available day and so will those people who were already going to call that same day anyway. You get call overload as a result and phone associates are inundated with work. There's a lot that goes into combatting this and other familiar call center issues. Website functionality and automated calling systems certainly take a great deal of pressure off of the typical phone jockey, but common sense tells us that some customers will always feel more comfortable when speaking to an actual person. What's the best way to balance costs and call center efficiency? How do you handle an emergency such as a market recession without keeping callers on hold or sitting in qeues for hours? Should your center route calls based on the skill of its associates? What will all of this cost? It's a science, actually, and one that has been studied in depth. Though it may seem to you as it does to me that call volumes are impossible to forecast, millions of dollars are spent each year working on formulas to attempt this impossible feat.

I realize it might only fascinate someone who is stuck in a call center for 40 hours each week, but one of the more interesting fascets of call center studies is called Queueing Theory, which permits a calculation to calculate or forecast the average amount of time customers will wait on a telephone queue before hanging up. This is part of a statistic appropriately called "abandon rate." To date it seems the best, most up to date work on queueing theory as it relates to call centers has been done at the University of Pennsylvania. Maybe this explains why our techniques here at Company X in suburban PA are so efficient. I'm attaching links mainly for my own organization, but if you're in a call center, reading these documents can certainly help pass time off the phone and perhaps might even help you move your way up the ranks.

Statistical Analysis of a Telephone Call Center: A Queueing-Science Perspective

Anaylsis of Call Center Data

A Brand New Cube

Today I had the privilege of answering several arbitrary "behavioral related questions" before a panel of 3 somewhat-more-powerful-than-me-but-not-too-much-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things suits. My answers were required to be in the form of STAR, meaning I had to carefully separate the Situation/Task, Action, and Result of exactly 6 of my life's events which may or may not have actually happened. I did so with a smile on my face, very happy to indulge the suits in the wonderful round of BS I had rehearsed for just 10 minutes prior to the meeting. Yes, I was on an interview. If all goes well I will pack up my modest belongings in the south end of the building and have a crew of people (whose only job is apparently to carry boxes) carry my junk over to a substantially larger cubicle in the northeast corner of the building where I will do a similar job for a modest increase in yearly salary.

I hope to one day work in a cube with a door and perhaps a window or two.

funkyfreshballa@snax.com

When you work as a customer service representative you look for ways to make each call just a little less boring. Unfortunately, at a conservative company like mine a call can only be as interesting as the person calling in. So, I've found one surefire way for a client to make me laugh on the phone every time: a hilarious e-mail address.

In some cases these can be purposefully funny, and the client will laugh along with me when they spout it off. I remember one example: talldarkngreesy@xxxx.com. That guy at least acknowledged how uncomfortable it was that I had to have him confirm how it was spelled. But my favorite example of this always comes from people who are caught off guard by my asking them for it. Embarassed, they will eventually work up the courage to give it to me, but they won't talk about it and 9 times out of 10 they rush through it and avoid my reading it back to them. Usually these are aol or yahoo addresses like spoonylove@aol or xxhottchickxx123@yahoo, but I've noticed most google users have the good sense to make their e-mail address a bit more professional.