Reprinted with permission of Evergreen Newspapers 

Tomorrow the Sunshine…and Jobs Will Follow

 We hear a great deal of conversation about jobs, or the lack thereof. Our current economic situation won’t be improved until jobs are created and millions of workers who are seeking employment begin to bring home paychecks again.

 We are expecting some politician to come up with a magic formula to oversee the creation of jobs. It’s like believing that we can command the grass to grow. We can put the grass seeds into the ground and water them, but without sunshine the grass won’t grow no matter how much we need or want it.

 The sunshine which will cause jobs to increase is the belief by business owners or managers that demand for their product will be increasing and that it will take additional manpower to capitalize on the increased demand. Whether you are General Motors or a local restaurant you must clearly see that there are more people who want to buy your product before you decide to expand your capacity to supply more of what you sell.  If you were the owner of a restaurant and you were serving 100 meals a day, would you hire more cooks servers or dishwashers without the prospect of being able to serve enough more meals to more than pay the wagers of the new employee? So it’s the sunshine of increased sales that will cause jobs to grow. Nothing else can do it.          

 Consider these clouds which may be blocking the sunshine. First the cloud of personal debt is causing American consumers to watch spending and their debt. The cloud of government spending leaves us wondering when our taxes will go up to pay for the government’s spending spree.  The cloud of healthcare costs which we see increasing to pay for the millions who are being added   The long term forecast sees future clouds of higher gasoline prices because we have stopped drilling.

 So don’t look for jobs to be coming back today. We must clear up the clouds before businesses owners see the sun shining through in the form of increased demand. Take heart…. as Annie sang,

 “The sun will come up tomorrow……So you gotta hang on till tomorrow….Come what may.

Tomorrow….Tomorrow….I love you tomorrow…..You’re only a day away.”

Reprinted with permission of Evergreen Newspapers

Your Call is Important to Us

I’m sure you have heard these words when you called some business for which you had a question or problem to be solved. You would swear that you were hearing an accent from some far away place, but he introduced himself as Joe. Worse, you heard that your call was very important, but they didn’t invest in enough agents to answer it. The message they convey is that there is an unusually high call volume so you should consider checking the company web site. In other words, please hang up we are not staffed well enough to answer your call.

Good news, there’s another model out there. Alpine Access, a local company, and others are promoting another way of doing business. They are promoting something I call “home sourcing” an alternative model that hires American workers who work at home. These workers are better educated than typical call center workers. They tend to have many more customer service skills so companies who really care about customer loyalty are signing up for this level of telephone service.

The call center business focuses on one of two things. Some companies want to minimize expense and that’s their focus. They tend to hire offshore operations to just get through the call as fast as possible. Other companies see the conversation on the phone as a defining experience that provides an opportunity to improve the relationship between the customer and the company.

The secret of the call center business is to hire the very best people possible and empower them to serve the customer’s needs. By hiring top people the company doesn’t have to teach them to relate to the customer. Individuals whose life experiences more closely mirror the customers they are serving understand how to do that.

With their work at home model, such companies have a recruiting edge on traditional bricks and mortar operations, so they choose only the very best people. In the face of millions of lost jobs, Alpine Access is planning on hiring several thousand individuals this year whose commute is no further than to their nearest computer. They will be able to utilize the interpersonal skills they have learned over a lifetime to build better relationships for their company’s clients.

So maybe your call is important to us after all.