How many traffic wardens does it take to write a ticket

Back in Blighty and normal blogging service is resumed. Can recommend Virgin Upper Class - lovely, but why oh why do air hostesses have to talk to each otherall night at 50 paces!

Of course one of the nice things about being back in London is to see the passion of the traffic wardens. How many traffic wardens does it take to book a van overstaying a parking bay. Well it seems it must be 3. One to watch the car, one to watch for anyone returning and one to write the ticket......

Someone in resource planning at Westminster Council must not have caught up with recent changes in demand for parking places. It costs so much and takes so long to drive around London that fewer people bother anymore. So a car in a space outside our office has become a rarity. Traffic wardens however are 3 a penny. Net result, 3 wardens to a ticket.

Change sometimes occurs slowly like London traffic patterns, so we dont see it, and resources dont get moved to more useful things. One great technique to address this which I saw recently was to get the resource planning team to manage the ROI of projects going through board approval. When approved, the headcount is removed in the call centre forecast at the time it was planned to occur in the project. It sure keeps project people on their toes to deliver. And it keeps ops people very interested in projects.

Talking of resource planning, this week sees the Professional Planning Forum Innovation Awards presented in Dublin. There are some fab case studies to be presented from both the private and public sector, about major transformations in contactcentres and business more generally. As judges we're all sworn to secrecy...... But what is not a secret is that these are the hardest awards to win as they are judged very thoroughly on the practical evidence and interviews at site. Congrats to all who are shortlisted: AA, Abtrans, Alliance & Leicester, Barclaycard, Carnival, EDF, Fexco, Ingenico, Logica, Royal & Sun Alliance; Kent County Council, Salford City Council, Sandwell Borough Council and Southwark Council. And the winner is.....

It's raining down under !

I can see from the great Google in the sky that you're sunning yourselves in the UK whilst its raining cats and dogs here in Sydney. That wasn't in the plan!

One nice new idea came up down here in discussions, for using homeworking technology. A concrete company uses it to the mobile devices of order staff on site so that all calls are centrally recorded. For 2 reasons:

If you end up with 100 tons when you asked for 10;

If anything goes wrong much later with quality, the batch that was ordered is clearly traceable.

Food for thought on what you can do with homeworking technologies.....

At the end of April, we're publishing a white paper on homeworking business and operational practices in the UK - get in touch if you want to talk about it - peter.massey@budd.uk.com

From China with love....

I'm sat here in Hong Kong with LimeBridge colleague Tony Bruno looking at what's new since last year in China, whilst scoffing dim sum of course....

1 Most sizeable call centres have moved out of Hong Kong into mainland China, the Philippines or Malaysia.
2 Singapore is offering tax breaks and grants to attract regional centres. Employing the right quality of people to work in them remains a challenge, however.
3 The offshore market in China remains focused on BPO rather than voice. Despite this we have one client now with English speaking tech support in Beijing. This is being supported by Philippines workers living in Beijing. Apparently the wealthy class brings in domestic servants from the Philippines providing a limited English speaking workforce

One issue in common with the previous blog from the UK is how do you really justify investment in service. The prevailing attitude in China is one of "it isn't necessary" or its really about "product, price and distribution". Like all things, its not that simple...You cant just say they're wrong. If you believe in the importance of word of mouth then the drivers of vsat (very satisfied) behaviour and dissat (dissatisfied) behaviour will be top of mind. These will include service, but certainly not exclusively. We all need to work out the proportion of each due to product, price, brand and availability as well as the service elements. The more mature and competitive the market, the more that service becomes the differentiatior. But even then service might only be a quarter of the weighting. In less mature markets, it can matter less.

On to Australia tomorrow and then New Zealand to see what they think - watch for the latest posts over the next few days