Service Enterprise Excellence - the genesis

Baumin Lee PhD is the 'godfather' of the China Call Center Industry. He went to China in 1998 at the invitation of the CPT - the China Post and Telecom State-owned enterprise and helped in the set up of the massive contact centers for China Telecom, China Netcom, Ping An Insurance and more. We met in 2005 in Beijing when I had the opportunity to speak at the Peoples Congress Hall. When I was first invited to Shanghai in 2004, it was to give a keynote talk at the Greater China CRM Awards superbly organized by Sampson Lee who is the pioneer in Customer Experience Management Certification.

Sampson organized a seminar on my specialty, Customer Lifetime Value for September and I returned in September 2004 and met the most wonderful woman, Dana Wu - at that time assistant General Manager for Zhuhai software industrial park. She had studied in Germany and was fluent in German and English. It was she who brought me into the Beijing Contact Center Industry circles and introduced me to Baumin in March 2005.

With my background starting in Operations Research at Shell in Australia, followed by the great experience I had on new customer-enabling technologies and distribution channels and his PhD in Industrial Engineering and subsequent ATT Bell Lab's work on performance monitoring for the 1-800 services, we quickly began collaborating on Capability Maturity Models for Contact Centers, the topic of my speech at the Contact Center World conference organized by Zhaoxi.

Since then, Contact Center Capability maturity as a concept, has taken hold in China and Zhaoxi and Simon Kriss have been moving it forward. Baumin and I have worked together for the past 4 years on the two complementary pieces: individual competency development and service excellence capability maturity, implementing and trying out the concepts at the 1000 seat outsource contact center www.95teleweb.com

There is nothing like a real project to work on, in order to improve understanding of China - which is truly a world unto itself. I'm glad to have had the opportunity to visit, teach and conduct workshops in Shanghai and Beijing over the past few years.

Over the next few days, I will provide links to the joint articles that Baumin and I have published about our research in both Engish and Chinese on the web and in CCMWorld, a Chinese magazine publication by Zhaoxi's group.