Driving Strategic Business Outcomes with Agent Performance Management

There are hundreds of metrics a contact center can focus on, but how do you determine which are the most important? Well, before deciding on that, you need to identify – as an organization – what you’re looking to improve; what’s impacting the strategic direction of your company?

Say it’s decided that customer satisfaction is the key focus. While every facet of the company will play an important role in the end customer’s satisfaction, each function or employee will have different responsibilities. Let’s break this down even further – specifically to the agents within the call center. How are you going to make sure they perform effectively?

Automated performance management solutions can draw on data from different sources across the contact center to provide a unified view of performance, while aligning the results with goals and other targeted business outcomes. These tools allow executives to set the strategic agenda using key performance indicators (KPIs), which they can align with the business strategy.  For example, if the goal is to improve customer satisfaction, it might be advisable to have front line agents focus on customer empathy scores, following the script, and customer survey scores.  If agents meet these operational goals, the organization will accomplish its customer satisfaction objectives. Agents can also view personalized feedback that helps them track performance, and when needed, participate in automatically triggered coaching. The contact center is able to evaluate and improve individual agent performance, while guiding employees to work together to achieve broader objectives.

Here are some best practices for managing and maximizing your agents’ performance:

• Ensure that agents fully understand goals prior to the performance period. This ensures they focus on these metrics and are more likely to accomplish them.

• When choosing KPIs, make sure the KPIs drive the behavior you want to see. Choose KPIs that front-line agents and supervisors will understand and that are in support of your strategy.

• Set up your performance management system to automatically alert you when agent performance falls below target, which frees supervisors from having to sift through reports.

• When conducting performance reviews and coaching sessions, be sure the sessions are fully documented, so staff can go back and see the problem and plan for the resolution.

While many organizations realize the importance of optimizing performance of their contact center agents to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs and manage the extended workforce, fewer organizations employ performance management to align resources to strategy and improve the effectiveness of agent performance. In fact, a 2009 report from Ventana Research indicates that agent performance management is still an untapped strategic tool in many companies.

Performance management tools ensure that everyone is working towards the same strategic goals. A comprehensive application provides complete visibility and accountability at every level of the organization, while diagnosing and correcting problem areas. Businesses that embrace performance management as both a process and tool are more likely to consistently achieve their strategic goals.

What is your organization doing to assess and improve agent performance? What best practices have you implemented?

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Global Communications Leaders Join Forces to Clear UC Interoperability Hurdles

The movement to respond assertively to an industry challenge that has hindered widespread unified communications adoption recently took a bold step forward. The newly formed Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) alliance of key technology leaders represents an organized, intensified focus on enabling standards-based, inter-vendor unified communications interoperability. With an expanding roster of supporting member companies, the potential for change is reaching critical mass.

Corporate IT leaders and others responsible for new technology investments have had many reasons to put new infrastructure expenditures on hold. Budget dollars have simply been too scarce in the lean economy of the past two years to overlook interoperability concerns. But just as companies’ interest in unified communications’ potential to improve productivity and efficiencies has grown, so has their restlessness for access to the business value of the technology’s capabilities.

The UCIF promises to help the industry break free of lingering restraints. The alliance is pursuing an agenda that will benefit both customers and vendors. By identifying common customer scenarios and leveraging existing industry standards, they’ll be able to resolve interoperability issues that have slowed the momentum of adoption and deployment of unified communications. UCIF members will also benefit from simpler, more cost-effective multi-lateral testing capabilities that replace ad hoc interoperability testing.

As a company that holds a long-standing position that strongly favors developing solutions using standards-based technology, Aspect welcomed the opportunity to join UCIF. Actively working with other like-minded members, we expect to play a continuing role in helping customers fully leverage unified communications through application integration. Our ultimate goal is to help focus our customers’ efforts on deploying new technology that will deliver the greatest benefits, without investing valuable budget and resources in making technology interoperate. With the collective efforts of UCIF members, the market will benefit from faster availability of interoperable UC solutions.

How can your organization benefit from UCIF efforts?

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Technology Considerations for the Avaya Roadmap

Author: Mike Ely, Director of System Architecture

Since Avaya/Nortel announced their product roadmap, it has given both key stakeholders and the market the opportunity to step back and examine what this means for their businesses. While there are myriad technological implications now and in the future, following is the Aspect perspective on a few of the issues that seem of greatest interest based on market feedback.

SIP – Businesses have long known the importance of session initiation protocol (SIP), which Avaya now is embracing, too. SIP brings dynamic capabilities that Aspect has long recognized as essential to elevating the customer experience.  SIP reduces complexities across your contact center by delivering a common protocol that connects all the people, processes, systems, and applications that support the communications infrastructure.  In doing so, it increases flexibility, interoperability, and scalability, and opens the gate to a whole host of new applications that can help to enhance agent productivity and improve customer service, while at the same time allowing retention of existing infrastructure investments.

The issue, however, is that focusing on SIP is relatively new to the Avaya roadmap. Customers and prospects should look for a SIP interoperability policy from Avaya in order to fully understand the implications of leveraging proprietary SIP applications. Contact centers should carefully vet the levels of additional charges could be required to SIP-enable existing switches to work directly with the Aura environment. The alternative is that they will continue with their TSAPI computer telephony integration (CTI) solution – which should be displaced by IP-based integration – without fully leveraging a SIP backbone. Thus, Avaya-Nortel customers may not be able to standardize their contact center applications on a multi-vendor hardware infrastructure. Aspect has long recognized the importance of standards-based solutions in that they do not lock organizations in to proprietary applications or hardware as they look to enhance and upgrade as needed to address business objectives.  

Unified Communications and Collaboration – Avaya has not yet outlined a specific strategy related to bringing unified communications and collaboration capabilities to their Aura platform. This has implications for Nortel customers who’ve developed strategies around Microsoft technology, and should raise some questions from those who are still forming their unified communications plans. Customers who’ve planned around Microsoft technologies should ask whether the Aura communications backbone will enable them to leverage Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) as a unified communications infrastructure – or will they have to start over with a new unified communications platform?  In addition, companies should compare the number of components and communications infrastructure complexities of an Aura and if it will provide the key unified communications functionality and office integration that Microsoft OCS provides.  They need to examine if it will be a redundant component complicating management and if it will increase the cost compared to a rich OCS deployment.

What are your thoughts about the future of the Avaya roadmap?  Are there other important technology considerations?

Mike Ely is the director of system architecture at Aspect. Aspect is a global software and IT services firm specializing in applying Microsoft unified communications and collaboration to help customers achieve optimal results through enhanced business processes across the enterprise and in the contact center.  For more information, visit www.aspect.com.

Follow Aspect on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/AspectUC. 

Other opinions on the Avaya/Nortel roadmap can be found:

• Phone Plus – http://www.phoneplusmag.com/hotnews/avaya-nortel-integration-reaction-mixed.html
• DestinationCRM – http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/news/2240016122/Avaya-Nortel-roadmap-shows-no-clear-path-to-UC-in-the-contact-center

UC Strategies – http://www.ucstrategies.com/in-the-spotlight/our-views-on-the-avaya-nortel-roadmap.aspx

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Taking UC to the Next Level by Streamlining Business Processes

Author: Kevin Schwartz

In my last two blogs, I talked about Personal unified communications (UC) and Collaborative UC. Both are essential building blocks for an important concept that extends well beyond the individual or the workgroup – Enterprise UC. The third stop along the UC journey, Enterprise UC, or communications enabled business processes (CEBP), involves embedding unified communications capabilities into business processes that extend across functional groups within your enterprise.

Why would you want to do this?

Just think about how much more efficient your organization would be if you improved your communication-intensive business processes, your business processes that are prone to latency when people get involved, or both. What if, for instance, rather than having to hang up the phone, research an issue, then call a customer back, your contact center agents could use instant messaging (IM) and presence to connect with knowledge workers outside your center in real time? Your agents could quickly get the information they need to resolve your customers’ inquiries, your customers could get on with their day instead of sitting by the phone waiting to be called back, and your business could reap big rewards resulting from increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

You could also use UC capabilities to further eliminate latency and accelerate problem resolution by removing people from processes where they aren’t essential. A good example relates to product inventory.  If you embedded presence, conferencing and IM into your systems and applications, you could address issues based on pre-defined conditions.  When your product inventory fell below a certain level, your ERP system could look at the presence of the people who can automatically resolve the issue.  It could initiate a telephone or online notification, and then inform the appropriate sales manager to contact the customer with the change in status.

In addition, you can use UC to accelerate processes that require multiple steps and/or approval levels.  For example, a typical sales process requires many steps, from capturing customer requirements, creating a proposal or quote, establishing pricing/discounting, to confirming production and delivery timeframes.  Each of these steps requires the participation, expertise, and approvals from multiple individuals.  In many organizations, precious time is wasted during and between these steps and approvals during which a more nimble competitor may close the deal.  Embedding UC directly into each step in the process can improve quality, remove latency, and ultimately result in competitive advantage that impacts sales.

There is no doubt in my mind that Enterprise UC is an exciting stop on the UC journey.  But, it is also one that requires significant planning, a certain level of maturity in the use of presence and other tools, and an emphasis on employee training and cultural preparedness.

What processes do you think you can streamline with Enterprise UC?

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