The New York Times today has a story, “A New Capital of Call Centers,” which focuses on the fact that many  companies with US customers are moving their call centers to the Phillipines or back to the U.S. because personnel in the new locations speak better English than, say, their counterparts in India.

Evidently, these companies believe that customers’ primary concern is the quality of the language used by the call center agents.  My primary concern, however, is whether or not the call center agent is actually able to answer my questions, solve my problem, and/or take my order accurately.  Overall,  I’ve had much better luck with the hard-to-understand foreign agents who seem to know what they are talking about than with US-based agents who are poorly trained and/or work in call centers in which no system is in place to help callers actually get their questions answered.

In brief, I wish companies would pay more attention to this Renee’s Rule™: Make my life easy.

What do you wish?

When I won a Turnaround of the Year Award from the Turnaround Management Association (TMA)  in 1997, I was thrilled.  In addition to the thrill of being recognized for my achievements, during the award ceremony, I had the opportunity and the pleasure to deliver a thank you and give credit to Ron Torland, the CEO who brought me into the company, gave me full operating authority, worked with me side-by-side, and supported my decisions, some of which were extremely unpopular.  The turnaround would not have been possible without his participation.

When I attended the TMA awards presentation at the conference this year, it struck me that things have really changed.  There were so many awards given to so many people that there were no speeches–just lots of people marching across the stage.

Think about it:  How many announcements about awards events or awards being bestowed do you receive every week?  Clearly, these awards bring people into each organization and its events, and they are are certainly great marketing tools for both the organizations and the winners, but I can’t help feeling that the significance of these awards has been diminished.

During the annual conference of the Turnaround Management Association (TMA) which was held the last week in October, I attended two sessions about “turnarounds” and was truly taken aback by what I heard.

An underlying theme, articulated by panelists in both sessions was, “We’ve been focusing on fixing the balance sheet.  Now we need to learn how to fix the income statement.”  Really?  What have these people been doing?  And does this explain why TMA sessions and publications in recent years have focused on “restructuring” instead of “turnarounds?”  (My article which was attached to my last blog post explores this topic.)

Fixing the balance sheet is relatively easy:  collecting receivables, reducing inventory, selling unneeded assets, renegotiating debt.  Fixing operations is generally more difficult and, in many respects, requires a different skill set.  For companies to survive over the longer term,  they need to have carefully conceived plans, the right people in place, and effective management control systems.  In addition, they must deliver their products and services in ways that are both cost-effective and customer-centric.   To me, ensuring that those pieces are in place is a vital role of the turnaround expert.  Evidently, not everyone agrees with my view.

To me, the word “turnaround” means fixing the balance sheet AND fixing operations.  What does it mean to you?

In July, I was invited to write an article for the conference issue of The Journal of Corporate Renewal, the publication of the Turnaround Management Association (TMA). The topic I selected was “Ethical Issues in Turnaround Engagements.”

Although TMA  declined to print the article in the conference issue because they found it to be too controversial, Jack Butler, an internationally recognized partner at Skadden’s corporate restructuring and governance practice,  invited me to participate in the Advance Education Panel he is moderating at the TMA Conference in San Diego next week  and to include the article in the materials distributed to session attendees.  The title for the panel is “Ethical Challenges in Large, Mid and Small Companies.”

I intended the article to be a call to action by TMA, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out.  It is my understanding that the article will be shared with TMA’s Strategic Planning Committee as well as the Certification Oversight Committee for the Certified Turnaround Professional program.  I have been invited to submit it again for the March issue, which will be devoted to ethical issues, but I certainly hope that the content will be out-of-date by then!

Although I have made some revisions to the original (suggestions for refinements made by several people I interviewed), all of the basic points remain unchanged.  Here is a link to the article:  Deconstructing the Code.

In May 2010, The Deal Pipeline quoted me saying that Borders could use its customer list as a springboard to increased sales of digital books.  To see how Borders was actually using its list,  I signed up as a Borders customer and for Google alerts about Borders.  I watched and waited for Borders to focus on sales of digital books through its frequent marketing emails.  It didn’t happen.

Clearly, however,  Barnes & Noble also saw value in the list.  B&N acquired the 45,000-member list during Borders’ bankruptcy proceedings.  As a result, as a “subscriber,” I received an email from B&N notifying me of the  acquisition and offering me an an opportunity to opt-out of receiving marketing emails.

I hope that Barnes & Noble will make better use of the names than Borders did.

There have been many analyses written about what made Steve Jobs great, but the articles I have read have missed the key ingredient:  Steve was able to make things easy for his customers.  He knew instinctively that people would be more likely to use products that were intuitively easy to use, and his genius was that he was able to turn the idea of easy into the reality of easy.

My sons have saved my Apple IIe and the floppy disks with the  games they played.  We all love our iPhones, iPads, and Macs…..

I’ve been thinking about the  issue of “easy” because I had two “high-end” ovens installed in my kitchen this week.  Really, I just want to be able to put something into the oven and cook it, but the display is so complicated and the instruction book so inadequate that what should be intuitively easy, will take hours.  Will I love my ovens when I finally figure them out?  Of course, but the manufacturer has missed the boat by failing to provide the “customer delight” that results when something is actually easy to use.

Today, most of us feel that it has become increasingly difficult to get things done, so “easy” is now more important than ever.

As you may recall, one of  Renee’s Rules™ is:  Make my life easy.  This was one of Steve Job’s Rules long before it was mine.