Contact Center Intelligence
1 Mar, 2007
By: Brett WilliamsDuring the past decade or so, successful executives have begun to drastically change the way they conduct business. They are responding to a monumental shift – one that is being largely driven by the widespread use of the Internet, and is making vast amounts of information available to the public. These executives are seeing and addressing the ramifications of a seemingly perpetual increase in global competition that is occurring as consumers gain the ability to access, compare and purchase products and services from a never-ending number of companies via the Internet, devoid of physical boundaries. And they are beginning to consider their contact centers to be competitive differentiators, rather than viewing them as compulsory cost centers as they did in the past.
This shift in executive perception, coupled with an increase in customer demands, is putting a significant amount of pressure on contact center managers to maximize their agents’ performance and to improve their operations. To meet these elevated expectations, contact center managers must begin to optimize their contact center resources and enhance the quality of the service their centers are providing.
But how is this accomplished?
By synchronizing people, applications and processes, contact center managers can reduce labor costs, enhance service levels and build customer loyalty, but, most important, they can align their operations with their company’s overall objectives. Contact centers that are successful in these efforts will be able to meet executive and customer mandates and drastically increase the overall value of their corporate contributions.
Cascading Objectives
All too frequently, companies implement call routing solutions, outbound dialers and performance optimization products, such as campaign management or quality monitoring, in their contact centers with no real strategy or thought for making the most of the wealth of information these products can provide. Deploying the right tools is only part of the first aspect of the equation. Businesses then need to use these tools to analyze and evaluate the right metrics, properly train their agents, improve business processes and enhance customer interactions.
Call Out: Developing successful strategies requires business process managers to truly understand their contact center metrics in the context of overall business and financial goals.
Developing successful strategies requires business process managers to truly understand their contact center metrics in the context of overall business and financial goals. These same managers must then determine what information will best help them identify whether or not their contact center is contributing to corporate objectives. For example, an organization that wants to increase profitability by 20 percent, decrease operating costs by 10 percent and improve customer retention rates by 8 percent should translate these high-level objectives into operational metrics such as revenue per call, schedule compliance, service level or agent quality scores to drive strategic success across sales, collections and customer service processes. They can then use operational metrics to develop long-term benchmarks and identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will enable them to create alignment and accountability within the contact center and provide comprehensive views of both agent and overall performance.
KPIs, which could include talk time, average handle time, contacts handled, shrinkage and schedule adherence, among other items, are essential to measuring and optimizing the day-to-day performance in the contact center. Because various organizations have different business objectives, KPIs will vary by company. However, long-term benchmarks and KPIs should always be clearly communicated to frontline employees, such as agents, supervisors and business analysts. And, if possible, KPIs should be linked directly to compensation to ensure a higher likelihood of achieving contact center and corporate goals.
Preparing for the Customer Experience
Once the overarching and cascading objectives, strategies and tactics have been determined, it is time to define and execute well-thought-out business rules. These rules govern how contacts are handled, priorities are followed, agents are assigned and key actions are managed. Establishing business rules takes time and once they are active, they must be regularly monitored and adjusted as business conditions and customer demands change.
Business rules should be consistently input and maintained across all channels to optimize performance in a contact center that offers customers multiple interaction channels. For example, when an airline customer moves from gold to platinum status, the change should be reflected in how that customer is treated when he or she calls, e-mails or engages in a Web chat with an agent. Similarly, when an agent is certified for a new skill and becomes capable of handling an additional set of customer issues, that agent’s new skill should be identified in all systems that could route a customer to that agent. This capability is essential to intelligent routing of customer contacts.
Performing Up to Par
After customers have been connected to the right agent with the skills to help them with their specific needs, the remainder of each customer’s experience is completely dependent on the agent’s ability to resolve the customer’s issue in a professional and articulate manner. How can managers be sure their agents are delivering the best-possible service?
To provide stellar service, agents must have thorough knowledge of company goals, policies and products, in addition to understanding their performance in customer interactions. The information gathered by contact center intelligence applications and tools can be used to train agents, measure their performance, then provide that information back to the individual agents in a prompt and effective manner. If the center missed its performance targets, managers must figure out why. Are the right agents scheduled to work at the right times? Do agents require more training? Was schedule compliance too low?
Companies must make sure they have sufficient staffing levels, good schedule compliance, sufficient agent training and low agent turnover. Managers can help ensure that their agents are performing up to par by securing random samples of interactions to identify gaps or areas of improvement in processes. They can also use random samples to help create best-practices for agent behavior and responses to customer inquiries. Contact centers can ensure a random sampling by analyzing approximately five calls per week, per collector to evaluate the customer experience, agent performance and customer response to payment plans. This call sampling and recording method is truly effective if it is followed up with prompt coaching that focuses on skills reinforcement and refinement.
There are a number of specialized applications that can be used to improve performance, develop a plan and measure the impact of that plan on operational and overall business performance. They include the following:
• Workforce management actively balances agents vs. service or campaign goals in an effort to meet overall contact center objectives at a minimum cost. It helps centers deliver consistent, optimal customer service across inbound and outbound operations through efficient schedule creation and adherence. Increases in customer satisfaction and campaign efficiencies translate into increased revenues by reducing abandoned, permanently lost or wrong-party contacts and converting them to up-sell opportunities.
• Quality management establishes agent qualitative performance targets that are difficult to obtain through other purely quantitative sources. It provides the capabilities for full-time or rules-based recording, reviewing and reporting on customer interactions, which can be used to help improve agent performance and job satisfaction, increase customer satisfaction and revenue generation, and to better manage overall costs.
• Performance-management tools can unite all of the data from the many different sources across the contact center to provide a truly unified view of performance, while aligning operational performance to strategic goals. It gives users the ability to analyze root causes and take corrective actions. Companies can define their corporate objectives, such as customer satisfaction improvement, then translate these objectives into supporting operational key performance indicators, and use performance-management tools to share the goals with everyone in the organization. The tools also allow employees, from executives to agents, to monitor actual to targeted performance to ensure that the organization and individuals are on track. Finally, performance-management tools provide agent and employee coaching capabilities to drive continuous improvement.
• ACDs, dialers, voice portals and other telephony platforms provide critical agent and queue-level data that can be used to gauge the performance of the entire contact center on a real-time and historical basis.
The tools identified below can be used by contact center managers to help them boost revenue numbers and customer satisfaction.
• Business-process scorecards consolidate data from different contact center products. These scorecards can provide a complete diagnosis of how agents spend their time to schedule adherence data and can also pinpoint specific areas for productivity improvement and cost savings.
• Enterprise-wide reporting and performance analysis enables the consolidation of information from one or more multichannel contact center sites and other data sources and delivers an enterprise-level view of contact center operations. It allows for disparate centers and communications channels to be viewed as one virtual contact center, helping companies increase operating efficiency and personalize customer interactions and increase profitability.
• Outbound workforce management offers streamlined views of contact center performance and allows agents to analyze their performance and draw accurate conclusions. It also lets supervisors and managers adjust targets and objectives in ways that make the entire business more effective.
• Campaign development software is critical for improving efficiency. Westlake Financial Services, a sub-prime automotive financial company, relies on campaign management tools to identify patterns in customer behavior. Based on these patterns, Westlake can tailor outbound campaigns to target certain customers at specific times, resulting in higher right-party contact rates.
• Best-time-to-call capabilities are used to track call results to develop successful outbound campaign strategies. These capabilities help companies increase right-party contact rates and maximize contacts with their most important collections, telemarketing and proactive service customers. BB&T, a multi-bank holding company, uses best-time-to-call in its collections operations to track call result history over a period of time, providing the ability to predict the best time of day to reach each customer. The software then builds a campaign optimized and prioritized by previously specified criteria supplied by the contact center manager. This process is completely automated and managers aren’t required to sift through dialer data to modify calling strategy.
• Real-time statistics software displays real-time statistics on supervisor and agent desktops using standard Web browsers. It gives companies easy, continual access to real-time statistics, such as the number of calls in queue and the number of calls an agent has handled in a specified time period.
Making the Grade
When contact centers create the alignment between the strategic business objectives of the organization and the goals of the frontline employees, it creates a higher likelihood that their businesses will achieve its goals. Setting expectations in advance ensures that employees can be praised for meeting corporate goals or held accountable for not meeting those objectives.
Looking at the intelligence created in the contact center from a strategic perspective provides greater opportunity for engaging customers, maximizing the performance of agents, optimizing resources and improving quality of interactions. The right tools won’t make a difference in a contact center that isn’t analyzing and evaluating the right metrics and/or has not properly trained its agents. The real mark of a successful contact center is what happens after the agent is connected to the customer, and this is entirely dependent on the customer’s ability to reach a knowledgeable and empathetic agent who can provide fast and efficient service.
Using the right data for the right reasons can help contact centers drastically improve their performances, meet the soaring expectations of senior executives and make greater contributions to the bottom line.
