Bid e-Farewell To Dot-Com Mania

By Paul Stockford

We as an industry were pretty lucky last year. We didn’t fall for dot-com mania quite as hard as many other industries did. Generally speaking, contact center people are a pretty down-to-earth lot. Fads that easily sway those in many other industries have to work much harder to get the attention of call center professionals. Even so, we’ve had our share.

I’ve just received confirmation of the demise of hiho.com, an application service provider (ASP) that offered workforce management software services. Although I’m not 100 percent sure of the reasons behind the company’s demise, I will speculate that like so many other rapidly disappearing dot-coms, hiho.com didn’t have a sustainable business plan.

In the heat of dot-com mania, hiho.com seemed like a natural winner. A Web-based, funny name that was supposed to remind people of another company with a funny name – Yahoo!, lots of media attention and a killer marketing program. hiho’s booth at the ICCM Show in Chicago last August drew a crowd, but hiho didn’t have lasting power, a key component to success in the contact center industry.

No Substitute For A Plan
With the exception of hiho.com’s only customer, e-Bay, the rest of the industry didn’t bite. Perhaps hiho.com’s notion of Internet-based communication between managers and agents didn’t catch on in an industry that traditionally values person-to-person communications. Perhaps the industry in general was just too wary of dot-coms, or those responsible for manning and equipping their contact center simply didn’t buy into the dot-com propaganda. As any communications vendor will tell you, call center managers aren’t an easy sell.

While contact center professionals weren’t fooled by dot-com mania, the opposite was true with equipment and software vendors, who latched on to the e-anything fad. I watched in amazement as public relations types and marketing communications managers throughout the industry rushed to put an “e” in front of every name of every product in their companies’ portfolios. Clever terms like “B2B,” which stood for “business-to-business,” and “B2C,” which stood for “business-to-consumer” appeared in print ads, in speeches and on trade show floors with alarming frequency. Contact center vendors fell for the e-hype like a ton of bricks.

Companies smart enough not to get caught up in the wave of dot-com mania quivered like jelly in the wake of e-business hype. Hoping to grab the attention of contact center managers, many vendors made lame attempts to position themselves as players in the “new economy.” I knew the industry was in danger of losing its common sense when the marketing communications director at Aspect told me in early 2000 that they were no longer a call center company, but an e-business company, seemingly leaving hundreds of Aspect orphans in the wake of their rapid reinvention.

New Definitions For A New Year
In January of 2001, many of the popular terms of last year have taken on new meanings. B2C more frequently means “Back to Consulting” for the thousands of former employees of the 117 dot-coms that, according to a recent Boston Consulting Group study, failed between September 1999 and October 2000. In the contact center industry of 2001, B2B will mean “Back to Basics” as contact centers across North America find that the true measure any business’ success is the ability to execute to a plan, attain and keep customers and show a profit for shareholders.

In the new “new economy,” companies serving the contact center industry will have to follow a business model that focuses on a defined market and offers a clear path to profitability. Contact center managers, for the most part, still have their feet planted firmly in reality. Of course e-mail and web chats will become increasingly important in the years to come, but according to my research, nearly 98 percent of call centers in the United States. at the end of 2000 were still exclusively voice-based.

Now that the industry’s dabbling in e-everything is a spectacular letdown, it is important to remember that the call center industry has a firm grasp on practicality and a 20-plus year history of rock-solid service. Trendy companies and fad products don’t stand a chance. 1999 and 2000 are behind us now, along with dot-com mania. For 2001, I say we get back to basics.

Paul Stockford is president and chief analyst at Saddletree Research (saddletreeresearch.com). Readers may send comments to CIrespond@advanstar.com.