Welcome to the Womenterprise: How One Billion Women Will Impact Business

The enterprise has seen many cultural and technological shifts over the past decade. And while women still make seventy cents to every dollar, there are forces at work that may challenge traditional concepts of the business world. Welcome to the Womenterprise!

More Women, More Opportunities

According to the American Enterprise Institute, women earned a majority of doctoral degrees in 2011 for third straight year, and outnumbered men in graduate school 141 to 100. And regardless of what the latest political campaign ad tells you, the Department of Labor reports that women continue to have a lower unemployment rate than men and are less likely to experience long-term unemployment. The impact of these stats has the potential to lead to more women in the workplace — one billion to be precise.

What does more women mean? According to Booz and Co., who launched its The Third Billion campaign earlier this year, “if women's economical potential can be successfully harnessed and leveraged, it would be the equivalent of having an additional one billion individuals in the work force, contributing to the global economy: often referred to as the 'third billion.'"

Elements of Global Change

There isn’t just one reason why women are more ready than ever to participate fully in a global economy, but there are several elements that have empowered women around the world in developing, emerging and industrialized nations.

• Education: more access means empowerment. The United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) reports that more girls and women are in education than ever before, from primary through to tertiary education. However, there is still work to be done. Two thirds of the world’s illiterate adults — of which there are just under 800 million — are women, and less than 40 percent of countries provide equal access to education to both sexes.

• Technology: According to a recent report from the Wireless Association, mobile technology has helped many under-served populations, from migrant and overseas worker communities to groups of women around the world engage, empower, and create communities.

  Not only have more companies begun to develop women-focused apps that promote better education, health and access to agricultural information, but access to mobile technology has increased exponentially. The World Bank announced last week that three out of every four human beings worldwide now have access to a mobile phone. In developing countries, citizens are increasingly using mobile phones to create new livelihoods and enhance their lifestyles, while governments are using them to improve service delivery and citizen feedback mechanisms.

• Knowledge Sharing: As we know, having a company culture that supports and facilitates knowledge sharing can be instrumental to innovating, so you can only imagine the impact that sharing information can have on helping communities identify sustainable opportunities and development solutions.

   

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

How Support.com Turns Data into Actions -- and Results

A customer represents two things: an immediate dollars-and-cents sales opportunity, and a store of valuable data, including buying habits, behaviors and opinions. Technical support company Support.com has some ideas on how to use this data to improve the way your employees influence customer experience.

When a Stranger Calls, Data Answers

We thought it was fitting to take a closer look to see how a tech support company uses data to improve the way their personal technology experts turn data into actions and the impact these actions have on customer experience and satisfaction. We spoke with Paul Vaillancourt, senior vice president of Contact Center Operations at Support.com to learn more.

Support.com provides remote technology services to consumers and small businesses directly via an online portal and channel partners (which include retailers and anti-virus companies). Personal Technology Experts must pass rigorous testing and training before helping customers.

Unlike other companies, everything at Support.com is analyzed. From the moment a call is answered to the moment the case is resolved, calls are recorded, scrutinized and archived on-site. Additionally, because one single system is used, data is instantly available, eliminating time it may take to transfer data from one CRM into another.

Influencing the Behaviors of Others

How tech experts are trained can determine whether companies meet their overall goals and whether customers’ problems get solved. As a result, when Support.com noticed a higher than normal attrition rate, they focused their attention on the training process to better understand how they can improve the effectiveness of tech experts.

First, they listened. Before tech experts get to answer actual customer calls, they undergo rigorous training and then a nesting period, during which they role-play. They listened to what those who decided to leave said in their exit interviews, as well as to feedback they received from others. They learned that experts were overwhelmed by the complexity of their tool set. As a result, Support.com changed how they introduced experts to calls, having them listen more to actual customer calls before they role-played (which they did more of as well).

Then they created a goal. Goals were actual behaviors, rather than a metric. Instead of saying that they wanted to decrease the length of the call by two minutes, they said: we want experts to solve problems quicker. In order to solve problems quicker, it was important to understand how experts could glean better information from callers. They determined that not enough probing questions were being asked. Sure, experts were active listeners, but they weren’t necessarily asking questions that could uncover useful information in a timely matter. Once experts were properly trained to listen for keywords and specific prompts, call times were shortened.

Finally, they give constant feedback. PTE’s are given score cards which contain six weeks' worth of data, including average call length, call disposition, contacts per hour, attendance and a quality score. The score card also compares an expert’s results to other experts as well as company goals, so individuals can see how their behaviors impact overall goals.

Creating a Culture of Intentional Actions (and Outcomes)

What Support.com’s process for listening, analyzing and producing actionable insights really highlights is the impact that a company culture built around data can have on customer experience. Every company says that they are dedicated to ROI — but not every company invests in the actions of their employees to really understand how behaviors translates into outcomes.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com