Winning the First Impression: Application Performance Monitoring Ensures Customer Quality
1 Jan, 2006
By: Nathan DavidWhen the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) said, “It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us,” he clearly wasn’t talking about today’s contact center, yet the significance of the “first encounter” is as important today as it was 150 years ago.
A customer’s initial interaction, or first impression, of your contact center extends well beyond the result of a particular call; a bad first impression can tarnish your company’s brand, drive up costs and drive away customers—just as an excellent customer experience can win your customer’s loyalty.
In fact, increasing customer loyalty is one of the benefits that can be realized by improving your customer’s quality of experience. For example, an increase in customer loyalty of only 5 percent can lift lifetime profits per customer by as much as 95 percent. An increase in loyalty of just 2 percent can be the equivalent of a 10 percent reduction in costs (Enterprise Management Associates, March 2004). Given these numbers, it’s no surprise that improving the customer’s quality of experience is a high priority for businesses and their contact centers.
It is common for organizations to rely on live call monitoring to ensure agent performance or network monitoring to ensure the performance of the infrastructure and systems, but these approaches, while important, cannot provide an organization with information or insight from the customer perspective. All too often, when it comes to quality assurance efforts in the contact center, the critical elements that help make up a customer’s “first impression” of an organization—and the level of service it provides—are typically ignored.
Costly Application Quality Problems
According to the same study by Enterprise Integration Group, up to 70 percent of calls that come into the typical contact center are handled completely within self-service channels, without any involvement from a human agent, so the effective operation of a contact center’s automated systems and self-service applications can make or break the goals and objectives of the contact center. Simply put, ensuring the performance of automated systems and self-service applications requires an effective quality assurance strategy. When they work properly, interactive voice response (IVR) systems, speech recognition and call routing, for example, can increase customer loyalty, improve live agent productivity and dramatically reduce costs. In fact, research firm Gartner estimates that the average cost of a single agent-based transaction ranges from $5.50 to $7.00, while the same transaction using a self-service IVR application costs just 45 cents.
When application quality is poor, however, the results can be costly.
Automated systems and self-service applications can only deliver results if customers use them, and performance problems such as slow database responses, incorrect call routings, and failed transactions can frustrate customers, causing them to “zero out” to an agent and taking a heavy toll in agent productivity, line charges and customer satisfaction. For far too many companies, the expected operating savings from these self-service applications and automated systems fail to materialize when many customers choose to opt out to agents due to performance problems.
Unnoticed Technology Problems
The issue is compounded by the fact that serious performance problems with self-service and automated applications may go unnoticed by anyone but the impacted customer and agent. In a recent Empirix survey of contact center managers, nine out of 10 respondents learned of serious end-user problems only when customers or agents reported them; only 4 percent of respondents used proactive quality assurance to ensure the performance of contact center technology, while 6 percent of respondents relied on manual testing by information technology (IT) staff.
And even in cases when agents are made aware of the problem, there’s no easy way to learn if the problem is a minor, isolated incident in a single application or a symptom of something greater that threatens to bring down the entire contact center if it goes unchecked.
Customer Experience from End to End
Using only traditional enterprise systems management tools or the diagnostics typically included with private branch exchange (PBX), automatic call distributor (ACD), IVR or other contact center components may offer information about system performance or operational statistics, but they are not enough to monitor the customer experience—making for a disconnect between the tools typically used by IT departments and the ability of contact center managers to understand the end-user experience. System management or diagnostic tools are simply not designed to monitor the performance of today’s voice applications because managing the performance of voice applications requires real-time monitoring of specific voice metrics such as port utilization, average talk time, total calls taken, abandoned calls, and opt-out codes.
To really understand the customer experience, an organization must identify performance problems proactively, addressing emerging issues before customers or agents are affected. Voice application performance monitoring (APM) products and services, for example, can monitor what a customer experiences from the time the call is connected until a customer speaks with a live agent or completes their transaction in the automated system.
To do this, Voice APM solutions automatically generate live calls that emulate real customer behavior, dialing into contact centers to help immediately identify performance issues such as extended answer times, prompt delays, busy signals and dropped calls. Once the call is on premise, monitoring can identify and alert on issues in the IVR such as misrouted calls, garbled prompts or incorrect prompt responses. Additionally, when a caller opts out of the IVR, monitoring provides visibility into what agents experience when they receive calls. Was the call routed to the right agent, with the right data, in the right period of time? Did the screen pop work? Proactive monitoring is by far the best way to ensure customer quality and proactively track the customer experience.
What is Superior Performance?
Today, to ensure superior performance from the customer’s perspective, contact centers are monitoring more than just their networks; they are also deploying tools such as Voice APM to monitor the customer experience within their automated systems and to help them understand exactly how their systems are functioning from end to end.
This comprehensive approach to contact center monitoring incorporates traditional network and call monitoring with application and system management tools designed specifically to monitor the customer experience in the voice environment. It is capable of monitoring the infrastructure from the ACD, through the IVR and computer-telephony integration (CTI) systems, across back-end databases and middleware to the customer relationship management (CRM)-enabled desktop and the speech servers that make up a contact center’s automated systems.
Importantly, with this level of comprehensive monitoring, organizations can correlate customer-facing problems with underlying system metrics, to drill down to determine the root cause and fix it quickly and easily.
Decreased Outages
Consider the case of a large wireless service provider that was having trouble identifying and preventing self-service technology outages across more than 20 contact centers. Like most firms, it relied primarily on customers or agents to report problems. When an application or device failed in a particular location, the provider was able to divert calls to other centers—but unable to quickly or easily identify the original problem to fix it and bring that location back online. The problem was costly, as the provider estimates that downtime costs up to $1 million per minute for a single contact center.
The provider implemented an powerful proactive monitoring and reported an immediate impact on uptime and a marked decrease in system outages. “When I compare the before and after reports, the difference in downtime is striking,” says the service provider’s IT manager. “We are now able to identify and fix issues before they lead to major outages.”
When organizations implement proactive monitoring of their voice applications, they can begin to understand the customer experience and increase customer loyalty, prevent agent impact and improve agent productivity, and contain more calls to their automated systems to preserve ROI and protect against unnecessary and high-cost call volumes.
