Avoid the Fallout: Voice Applications and Agent Productivity
1 Jul, 2004
By: Nathan DavidQuestion: We are about to upgrade our existing contact center voice applications, and I am concerned about the impact on agent productivity. What steps should we take to ensure this new technology helps agents rather than hurting them?
Answer: First, we commend you for thinking ahead. Technology upgrades can be disruptive to agents and customers if not properly managed. The good news is that there are steps you can take to mitigate or eliminate that disruption.
In today’s contact center, many technologies work together to provide seamless interaction with automated voice systems. When voice applications are working efficiently, the external customer and the contact center agent both benefit. Conversely, voice application failures affect both customers and agents. When automated systems fail, for example, agents are usually unable to handle the flood of unanticipated live calls that results. We recently worked with a major bank that had upgraded its IVR application. The new application was not tested prior to rollout, and it crashed the first day. Though the outage lasted only 20 minutes, it created four hours of contact center overload.
During an upgrade, there are three critical steps to ensure that voice applications don’t negatively impact contact center agents. All involve driving virtual customer transactions—simulated callers that navigate voice applications just as real customers would, which is the best way to ferret out potential problems.
Step 1: Baseline current voice applications
Prior to upgrading, it is important to understand how your existing automated voice applications perform, so you can ensure that the new systems are as good or better. Most companies focus on voice application utilization rates as a measure of success. These are important, but it’s just as important to understand why customers exit automated systems for live agents. By placing simulated calls, you can certify a voice application’s availability while tracking the reasons that calls exit the system.
In our experience, the most frequent technology problems affecting customers or agents are telephony failures, application issues, speech recognition failures, host failures and routing issues. Once identified, these issues should be highlighted to IT staff or your voice application vendor for resolution.
Step 2: Validate features of the new application
Before rolling out a new application, ensure that it works correctly by conducting a functional test. It is best to test performance under realistic conditions, again by simulating actual customer transactions, and evaluate how the new application might affect existing applications.
Compare these test results to the results of your baseline test to determine if the new application will introduce any new problems, and to ensure that service levels under the new regime will be the same as or better than they were before. Obviously, any problems or declining service levels need to be addressed prior to rollout. This process should be repeated until you are confident that the new application will increase performance. Don’t be surprised if this requires two or three cycles, and remember that technical problems are much less expensive to fix now than after the application is in production.
Step 3: Load them up
New, more powerful applications tend to require more system resources (such as server power) than the applications they replace. Additionally, newer technologies such as speech recognition and Voice over IP are more widely distributed, which creates more potential points of failure. Though it sounds strange, the best way to ensure these new applications will work in production is to try to break them beforehand by simulating a realistic call load and measuring what happens. Called a load test, it should certify that an application can run at the maximum call rate for an extended period of time. This cycle of test-measure-improve should be continued until you are certain your new application will function well in production, with no negative impact on the customer experience or agent productivity.
Good testing and application management practices can provide contact center managers with a true understanding of how technology impacts agents and customers, as well as provide the data required to ensure that new technology helps rather than hurts productivity. It is essential to evaluate application performance from the customer perspective, rather than just looking at individual silos, because most breakdowns occur within the connections between technology components. Investing a little in testing and application management can ensure that your significant investments in contact center technology upgrades pay off in the form of stronger customer loyalty and happier, more productive agents.
