As efficiency is now the name of the game in the newspaper world, I have seen many publishers take steps to do more for less dollars, or scale back and do less with less expenditure.  No department or facet of a publishers business has been left untouched and that includes the call centre.

To improve profit margins around contact centres, publishers have started to outsource, in-source, and or use ‘at home agents’ (third party or in-house).  All of these methods of gaining efficiency are fine, but the customer and customer satisfaction should never be forgotten as you move down either of  these paths.  Just the other day I called my ISP to upgrade my Internet service package.  When the service rep on the other end picked up, the call sounded hallow and it had a weird echo to it  - the kind you get when there is no furniture in a large space.  Based on the call quality, I immediately asked the rep if he was working at home, and he said “yes”.  I continued on with my call, assuming that my ISP would have done all of the necessary training with this ‘at home’ rep, and as a result, my service should not be impacted.   As the call progressed and I started to ask questions such as; “What packages exist that are better than the one I am currently on?”; “What is the additional cost to me for upgrading?”; “What steps do I need to follow if I need to upgrade?”.   The rep quickly became flustered with my steady stream of questioning and couldn’t find the information he needed to answer appropriately.  The rep instead said things like “I don’t usually take these calls” and “Um… yeah… what you said sounds about right”.  What people fail to realize about most ‘at home’ third party services is that the ‘at home’ reps represent multiple brands and the rep gets to choose which brand they want to represent and at what time.  Anyone who has managed traffic flow, let alone a call centre recognizes that this structure, or lack there of, could lead to mayhem.  A state of mayhem and confusion can be avoided however, but you need to ask the right questions upfront and make the right stipulations.

The must do steps when working with a third party ‘at home’ vendor:

Give them your desired agent profile: if you are at the point of outsourcing your calls, it must mean that you have done them internally at some point.  Think about the agent profile that worked for you.  Think about that agents work experience and background.  Think about their aptitude levels and document all of these things.  This then becomes the agent profile you want your vendor to hire on.

Ask to interview a sampling of reps: after your vendor selects reps for  your campaign, ask to interview some of them to ensure the fit is there. Again, this your brand we’re talking about and you want to ensure that both you and your vendor have interpreted your agent profile, the same way.

Create staffing models based on call volume: either yourself or your proposed vendor should run your call volumes through a workforce management tool.  This will tell  you how many reps you need to have on staff at every measurable interval.

Create thorough SLA’s: create measurable service level agreements that will hold your vendor to task.  Your SLA’s should be based on at least these things: service level, average speed of answer, abandon percentage, average talk time, average handle time, and call quality scores.  If your vendor scores highly on all of these things, that would mean they are executing in the service areas of your business accordingly.  Of course, if your business has an element of sales involved, you will want to include a sales goal for your vendor and occupancy goals if you are not paying on a performance basis.

Ask how the reps are outfitted: because the reps are working from home, you want to ensure their equipment will allow them to represent you in the most professional light possible.  What kind of  headsets are they using?  What are the PC requirements? What is done to minimize surrounding noise and disturbances?

Ghost Call!: you yourself need to call in and use the service as a customer.  Ensure that what you’ve asked for is actually happening.  And hey – there is nothing sneaky about Ghost Calls, it’s just extra insurance that your brand is being represented accordingly at the other end.

The Associated Press has been loudly talked about in our blog, primarily due to their noise around aggregators and search engines leveraging their content, which in most cases gave the credit back to them, and because of their trepidation to working with their newspaper clients on their fee increases.  Both scenarios, to us, felt as though the AP intended to operate independent of the economic issues and changing online user behaviours – a  very protectionist and stagnate business model, and both of these terms we know cannot exist in relevant businesses today.  Well the AP is in the press again as CNN announces that they plan to stop using the service and get aggressive pinning their own wire service against the Associated Press.

If, the previous moves by the AP didn’t occur, the looming competition statement by CNN would potentially have little impact or imply a bit of a strategy change for AP, however this is not the reality.  The AP’s past activity opens up the possibility that others may be open to using another service and why not a nameplate brand such as CNN.

CNN first pitched their wire service to editors in 2008 and since that time have worked on attractive pricing models and a la carte purchase packages.  All to align with the economic struggles newspapers were experiencing.  CNN is obviously at a point where they feel they have paid their dues and are able to provide content, agnostic of AP’s contribution.

The Associated Press has been talking about transforming their business for quite a while, but to date, the changes have been minimal.  It will be interesting to see how this latest competitive announcement from CNN moves things along for AP.

No  - this is not a post about a hip hop song as one may think after reading the title.  It’s a post about business transformation for the point of relevancy, competition and further revenue streams.

Recently, YouTube made known its upcoming project called Leanback, which consists of swaying user viewing habits from short videos of a one bite size to viewing content reminiscent to how television viewers consume television media.

Although it is uncertain how many loyal YouTube viewers will take to the TV’ish solution provided by video site, they’ve been smart to somewhat separate the path to the new and old video viewing solutions.  The Leanback service will be viewable as a personal channel hosted on Google TV, separate to the current point of entry used to view YouTube hosted videos.

So, what does this move by YouTube have to do with the newspaper business you may ask – well… a lot.  YouTube, like newspapers, is finding it difficult to appropriately monetize their product, given the free access mentality of its users, but what they did that many newspapers didn’t, is that they took the time to perfect their product at all costs (negative margins), and  engage users to the point where YouTube is deemed a naturally embedded tool in a web users activity.  People source YouTube for comedic relief, news bits, branding videos, DIY, tips on using different software  and the list goes on and on.  By being a trusted source to so many and to so many different types of users, they’ve created a foundation of fans that will follow their next steps.  Arguably, newspapers could have done the same thing in the early part of the 21st century.  Moves to improve and align both offline and online products with user behaviours, and by users we mean the greater web and not only print readers, would have enabled newspapers to keep a position of leverage today.  Still, depending on the newspaper location and reach, there is room for them to use what recognition and loyalty they have in their markets to follow the Leanback way.  The unfortunate thing though, is that many won’t make attempts to do so, as it would mean making sizable investments into digital properties that won’t show a positive ROI for 18 to 24 months – the minimum time required to gain share, increased level of users, and to ferment a products viability and sustainability in a market place.

YouTube’s Leanback initiative will soon be released to beta and as sentiment to the expected success, the beta release is deemed as much anticipated by mainstream press and bloggers and has picked up a lot of steam on social networking feeds.  It will be interesting to see what this product does for the companies revenue plans.

Publishers have been trying for years to find easy ways to give classified posters easy to use templates  or tips to aid them in selling their classified item faster.  Well it appears that pure play web tool Pretty Posts was thinking the same.

Pretty Posts is a classified template site that renders fully on eBay, Craigslist and Backpages. They’ve also customized their ads to render extremely well on Facebook and provide easy links that can be shared on services such as Twitter.

The templates are designed to ensure the sellers classified ad will stand out amongst the rest and Pretty Posts offers two types of accounts to do so; one is a free service and the other comes at a charge of $5 per month.  In addition to providing templates for a users classified ad, they provide dashboard analytics that get further advanced and richer if you sign up for the fee based package.

The offerings, solutions and support structure for Pretty Posts is not at all finished in our minds.  For example, the pretty ad a user spends time creating, doesn’t render well on other classified sites, instead a classified seller would only be able to post a link to their ad created on Pretty Posts, which defeats the purpose of trying to have your ad stand out amongst the rest. With all that considered, the eight person company out of Los Angeles is on to something. Could this be the look of future online classifieds? As the sites tag line states “We are putting the ‘class’ back in classifieds”.