SWPP Announces Finalists: 2012 Workforce Management Professional of the Year
by Jane Hendricks on March 5th, 2012
In just a few days, several Aspect colleagues and I will be heading to Nashville for the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP) Annual Conference. Excitement is in the air! In addition to the usual buzz about meeting up with workforce professional colleagues, we’ve just learned that three Aspect Customers are among the five finalists for the 2012 Workforce Management Professional of the Year award.
Finalists were selected by the SWPP Board of Advisors from nominations received on the SWPP website, submitted by call center employees and business partners over the past 12 months. The recipient of this annual award, according to SWPP, is someone who not only understands the importance of contact center staffing, but also sees that workforce management is as much an “art” as it is a “science.”
Congratulations to these three Aspect® Workforce Management® customers, who have been named finalists by the SWPP Board: Michael Ellis of Suddenlink Communications; Kristin Goldman of Ameriprise Financial; and Cynthia Stevenson of Citi.
It gives us a great deal of pride to be affiliated with these three stand-out individuals. It’s exciting to see the kind of positive impact they’ve brought to their organizations, and knowing our solutions had a role to play in their success is especially gratifying. We are thrilled to see their accomplishments recognized, particularly by such a respected institution as SWPP.
The other two finalists are: Chad Andree of CenterPoint Energy; and Robert Dobson of InterContinental Hotels Group.
Winner to be Announced at SWPP Annual Conference
As I mentioned, my bags are packed for Nashville and I’m looking forward to representing Aspect at the SWPP Conference, where we expect to hear the official announcement of the 2012 winner. My fingers are crossed for all of our nominees!
If you plan to be on site with us as well, I hope you’ll take the time to stop by the Aspect booth and attend our sessions. My colleague Eric Hagaman, Product Strategist for Workforce Management, will be offering valuable tips during the 60 Ideas in 60 Minutes. And I’ll also be presenting:
Managing Your Front and Back Office Workforce with Quality in Mind
March 7, 10:45 AM – 12:00 PM
Plus, don’t miss the session by Aspect customer Brighthouse Networks:
Getting the Most Out of Your Workforce Management Investments
March 9, 10:15 AM – 11:00 AM
We’re looking forward to seeing you!
Want Deeper Customer Engagement? Let’s Talk Speech Analytics
by Jane Hendricks on January 19th, 2012
What you can learn through your recordings is a huge, untapped amount of customer understanding. When you can integrate that data with your overall analytical plan, you get deeper, holistic view into how you’re engaging with your customers.
Speech analytics looks at call recordings and is able to extract relevant concepts and convert them into usable data. The data can then be integrated with customer records (CRM), attached to transaction history, and persisted in any number of ways. The advantage of applying speech analytics to customer interactions that occur within the
contact center is that you are also able to preserve the context of the interaction as part of that data record. This gives you the knowledge of who the agent was, who the customer was, when they called, and what their inquiry was. You can also get metrics around the non-verbal pieces of the recording – how much silence was there? What kind of tempo? And even metrics that correspond to sentiment such as agitation or confusion can be captured.
A comprehensive analytical plan will encompass the many ways data is used within an organization to understand customers: who they are, what they do, what they prefer, and even predict what they are likely to do next. This is why it’s important that a contact center isn’t silo-ed, especially the data that the contact center is capturing. This is vital because when the data that speech analytics creates is integrated with broader enterprise data analysis, your customers’ behavior can be shared within the broader service department. This sharing creates deeper customer comprehension but it can also improve future customer outcomes and anticipate emerging customer needs.
More and more the contact center is becoming the hub of customer engagement. As speech analytics can provide richer data to that engagement, it can augment and even drive a deeper understanding on what enterprise knows about its customers as a whole creating a more proactive, predictive customer experience.
See more on Aspect’s speech analytics here.
The Right Tools for Next-Generation Customer Interaction
by Jane Hendricks on January 17th, 2012
Certain jobs require specific tools. For instance, if you see the cable guy coming and he doesn’t have his special bag of wire cutters, cable splitters, and signal testers, you’re probably not going to be watching your stories in HD tonight.
In the business world those tools are changing all the time. As new tools enter the consumer domain―for example, mobile devices and social media―the tools used by the business follow suit. This consumerization of IT is seen in the rapid adoption of the mobile devices, web-based communities, and even instant messaging within the walls of the enterprise.
The force that drives consumer adoption of new technology is a thirst for instant, real-time information and engagement. This anytime, anywhere access to information and people defines Consumer 2.0. As the tools that we use to connect to one another get smarter, our tolerance for slow, ineffective customer service, while already low, drops even further. As a consumer, I expect that if I am able to access competitive pricing and relevant suggestions for complimentary products while standing in line at a store, I will receive the same level of sophistication and intelligence when I have a question or issue.
The contact center has become the option that consumers tap only after all others have been exhausted—the last best hope for issue resolution. So after an individual has spent time on product pages, consumer forums, and the FAQ page of the company website, she is banking on the contact center to provide her with some information that she didn’t turn up on her exhaustive search and to be cognizant of what she has already reviewed.
This environment raises the bar for service agents and what they need to deliver to keep customers satisfied. That’s why some recent figures caught my eye.
Forrester released research findings on the adoption of customer service technologies in the contact center. According to analyst Kate Leggett:
“Our data shows that 55% of companies surveyed use knowledge management; 35% use real-time decisioning and another 40% are actively considering this technology; and, 34% use unified agent workspaces.”
While these numbers are moving in the right direction, they show that a large number of companies are sending their agents into the customer engagement space without the necessary tools. Some thoughts:
- Without knowledge management tools, agents don’t have the benefit of information generated by customer engagements. In practice, the result is multiple agents searching for the same answers to recurring questions—or worse, inconsistent answers to recurring questions—not exactly the model of productivity.
- Nearly two-thirds of companies aren’t using technology to route calls to the best agent based on expertise, performance, and other factors. When agent skills and customer needs are misaligned, you are gambling, and customer experience is the currency. In today’s environment, one negative interaction can irreparably damage the company-customer relationship, so why not lower those odds?
- Last, the majority of companies don’t give agents the benefit of a unified workspace or access to the same kind of tools they enjoy as consumers. Having to switch between screens, rely on phone calls and notes to pass information within their team, and use clunky interfaces not only increases handle times but severely reduces the likelihood of first-call resolution.
Over the past year, we’ve seen a growing number of companies awaken to the realization that effective customer engagement can deliver long-term benefits—happier consumers who spend more money on products and make recommendations to friends.
While the adoption of necessary functionality is lagging behind consumer expectations, the right technology can transform contact center operations. But there’s no time to waste.
Four 2012 Resolutions to Improve Customer Experience
by Jane Hendricks on December 19th, 2011
When the ball drops in Times Square to usher in 2012, many of us will raise our glasses for a toast, give a loved one a kiss, and mentally promise ourselves to work out more, eat better, and spend more time with family and friends. After all, every New Year, we resolve to be better. Some industry experts are predicting that 2012 is the year that the quality of the customer experience becomes king. As organizations begin planning for 2012, I would encourage all to keep these four simple resolutions in mind to help deliver a quality customer experience in the coming year and beyond:
Strive to be healthier
For an enterprise today, health is measured through customer loyalty and share of wallet. By nurturing loyalty and increasing customer spend, customer value grows, which helps increase revenue and is rewarded with accolades within the boardroom and in the press. Resolve to grow customer value with every interaction. Provide your customers with interaction on their own terms rather than on terms dictated by aging, disconnected technologies. Make sure you consider the total customer experience – not just customer-agent interactions, but also the fulfillment process as well – and use what you know about customers and the employees who serve them to make every interaction better than the one before.
Learn something new
Data is growing exponentially within the walls of your organization. Every interaction – whether through the contact center, a self-service portal, or through a sale – can contribute to what you know about customers and help you uncover something you don’t. The right technology can access data stores such as recordings, marry data together for a holistic view into customers and operations, and apply new views and analytical techniques (such as predictive analytics, interaction analytics, behavioral analytics) – not just once, but consistently – to turn numbers, words, and sounds into better decisions. “By combining quality monitoring, analytics, and social media, many companies get a true assessment of the customer experience they are delivering for the first time,” writes Louis Columbus, senior manager of the Microsoft Enterprise Marketing and Adjunct Professor Graduate Program at Webster University.
Be more adventurous
For contact centers, social media represent a new frontier for customer outreach. Customers are turning to social media with questions, issues, and problems – often because they don’t want to wait in long phone queues or have to explain their issue over and over again through multiple engagement channels. Since 2008, United Breaks Guitars has been used to showcase the danger of ignoring social media. In 2012, that example needs to finally be put to bed. Using social media for customer experience management is not an insurmountable challenge – it’s possible. It is time social media becomes a bona fide, integrated customer service channel.
Get rid of bad habits
In all honesty, this resolution is one I make every year. When December rolls around, I am often left with the same bad habits I started with. It’s hard because you need to be able to take an objective look at yourself and identify which habits – the things you do every day, what you rely on – have outlived their usefulness and need to be let go. For contact centers, it’s time to stop thinking of performance metrics as divorced and isolated from customer experience outcomes. Resolve to expand how you assess, train for and reward performance by expanding the measurement equation beyond average handle times to metrics that are relevant to the customer experience. Consider the nature of the interaction, customer need, customer value, and agent behavior as part of your quality assessment and performance programs.
Making resolutions is the easy part; keeping them is where the rubber meets the road. We all know (and I’m guilty of this as well) that most resolutions are cast aside as soon as the clean-up after the party begins. According to psychologists, the secret to keeping resolutions is to break up the goal into smaller steps and to celebrate success along the way. So as we look ahead to 2012, let’s start the planning process and begin the journey. After all, we all know that some resolutions – like being a customer experience leader – are worth keeping. Happy holidays, a happy New Year, and as always – let’s keep these conversations going.
Using Gartner’s findings to give every interaction an edge
by Jane Hendricks on November 11th, 2011
Gartner recently released two reports, Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure (worldwide) and Business Benefits Drive the Alignment Between Contact Center Infrastructure and Workforce Optimization. For organizations looking to their customer contact center to master customer engagement, this research contains good insight into the technology landscape.
Gartner highlights a number of benefits, including “incremental workflow benefits” that organizations can capture by taking a single-vendor approach to their Contact Center Infrastructure (CCI) and Workforce Optimization (WFO). The second report offers the following example:
“Several CCI vendors are adding unique workflow to their CCI-WFO solutions to enhance the value proposition. For example, if an agent gets a poor score linked to product knowledge from his or her supervisor following the playback and assessment of a call recording, then the automatic call distribution system will start rerouting calls accordingly.”
This incremental workflow benefit, with a bit of analytics and a dose of creativity thrown in, can help an organization predispose every interaction to be better than it would have been with a non-integrated solution. As the following examples illustrate, the impact can be striking.
1. A customer needs help with a product. She engages through some inbound channel (voice, IM, chat…doesn’t matter). A routing engine that is divorced from WFO looks at the problem, has some basic idea of agent skill based on information uploaded to the system a week ago, and makes a determination on who gets to serve that customer.
OR
2. A customer needs help with a product. She engages through that same channel used in the example above. But now our routing engine sees the aggregated customer score from recent satisfaction surveys on similar interactions performed by that agent vs. the same score of other agents, compares the empathy need of this customer with the empathy score of the agent, looks at the churn propensity of the customer, and evaluates it against the high-touch index of the agent. In a split second, the routing engine determines the optimal agent (the agent most likely to get to a positive outcome) for this interaction. At the same time, this agent sees within his portal that Bob (who is in product management, not in the contact center) is a product expert and is available to help the agent resolve the customer’s issues. Not only is the optimal match between customer and agent made, but the agent has the right enterprise backup.
In the first example, success rests in the hands of a single agent assigned solely on availability, geography, language, and assignment. If that agent is intelligent, the interaction will go well.
The chance of the second interaction delighting the customer is significantly higher, since it reflects a team approach. It’s not just the agent, it’s the enterprise as a whole considering the total need of the consumer and lining up the right resources―analytically driven workflows, interaction context, and enterprise expertise―to ensure success.
A blog by Dr. Sian Beilock in Psychology Today examines what drives a group’s ability to perform. Much of the article doesn’t easily translate to customer engagement strategies, but there are some interesting (and relevant) findings. Dr. Beilock found that individuals working together were predisposed to success if they had “c”―“it wasn’t the average or maximum intelligence of individual group members that predicted performance, but a collective measure of intelligence or ‘c’ of the group itself.”
For customer engagement strategy, cooperation between the two sides of the technology divide―interaction management through CCI and workforce quality and performance through WFO―can open novel possibilities to innovate, differentiate, and succeed.
As you review these reports, it’s important to keep these kinds of possibilities in mind. Because Aspect is the only CCI leader that builds its own feature-rich workforce optimization (WFO) technology. When we develop and deploy our software, these are exactly the kind of possibilities that we translate into reality.
Doing more with less: Performance metrics in the contact center
by Jane Hendricks on October 5th, 2011
Doing more with less has become an omnipresent mantra: the federal government is figuring out how to achieve its core mission while paring back expenditures. State agencies are struggling to maintain services levels in the midst of long-term budget gaps. Many organizations, still taking a wait-and-see approach with the economy, are keeping their powder dry for the time being.
Despite this focus on cutting costs, organizations have the potential to boost operational performance significantly simply by examining data already collected.
In the contact center, for example, the average company collects huge amounts of information in the form of customer recordings, surveys, and agent scores, among other sources. It’s just waiting to be turned into business intelligence and actionable strategy. There’s just one problem.
In many cases, collecting the information is the end of the process, not the beginning. Once the box is checked, all that potential knowledge lies dormant. One of the main culprits is the silos that exist in organizations.
Imagine a different scenario: one in which the contact center is able to aggregate information from these disparate sources and turn it into actionable strategy.
Performance metrics used in quality management programs can help the contact center drive business process improvements in a number of ways:
- Provide a customer-centric quality context to operational KPIs
- Obtain a more holistic view of agent performance
- Focus training and coaching programs on the total customer experience
- Drive more informed alignment between agent and customer
The result is a more complete definition of performance that takes into account operational metrics, agent behavior, and customer perception. And the cumulative impact is better customer engagement and loyalty, which can translate directly into more profit.
By adopting a more holistic approach, the contact center can accomplish significantly more with what it currently has.
To get more information about how your organization can shift its focus and optimize the contact center workforce, be sure to join us at the Quality Assurance and Training Connection conference, October 12–14. Aspect will be presenting a session, “Beyond dashboards: Orienting quality management around performance management.” We hope to see you there.
The social customer contact center
by Jane Hendricks on September 27th, 2011
It seems that every presentation, webcast, conference, or podcast I have recently watched, attended or listened to isn’t complete without a “social” mention. Typically, the approach advocates using social media to better understand and engage the customer. Given the importance that executives place on customer loyalty and the customer experience in the “Age of the Customer,” this should come as no surprise. However, social is more than a tweet or a review.
A recent article in CMS Wire got me thinking about how “social” applies within the walls of the organization itself. This article identifies the three pillars of the social business as people, processes, and platform. It goes on to describe the 15 indicators of social business transformation. Here, I want to focus on just a few of the indicators and discuss them into the context of the customer contact center.
People:
Global/functional teams sharing best practices frequently; organizational silos become nonexistent
When we consider the kind of information a typical agent needs, it can be overwhelming. They are often looking to multiple sources to understand who the customer is, what the nature of the request is, and the best way to meet the request. This progression takes place in a silo isolated by technology and communication barriers. With unified communication, a context-sensitive knowledge base, and visibility into enterprise experts (and their availability), the contact center can break down that silo and ensure that every customer interaction can take advantage of the enterprise’s collective customer experience knowledge.
Social behavior becomes engrained in the everyday fabric of employees’ workflow and process
For the contact center, this objective is no more and no less than the ability to share who you are and what insight you can add to the collective customer experience body of knowledge . With the right environment, the people behind the customer experience and their customer know-how become more visible to one another, to their management, and potentially to the enterprise itself.
Process:
Workflows created that collect external customer feedback and filtered back to the product organizations
Aspect’s technologies can gather customer feedback at multiple stages and in multiple ways: survey feedback is collected that measures satisfaction with the interaction; the interaction is recorded as a conversation as well as a process (through screen capture); and our IVR channel also collects data. The hard part is the “filtered-back” portion of the equation.
Organizations need to communicate this information to a range of employees:
- The agent who needs it to understand whether they are meeting customer need consistently
- The supervisor who needs to understand how their team is performing
- The enterprise itself
Here, the collaborative framework can play a central role to provide visibility and heighten the focus on customer engagement. Organizations must think beyond visibility to understand how to integrate the insight into their operations. To truly make use of this rich asset, insight must be turned into action―for instance, by automating the right decision.
Platform:
Internal communities and collaboration systems deployed and being used across functional business units—sales, marketing, customer support, supply chain management
This is the framework that can pull together the data, the people, and the knowledge needed to create the next-generation customer contact environment that we talk about. Microsoft’s SharePoint, with it’s endless integration possibilities, is particularly well suited here.
Collaboration is happening more within internal communities than in email
In “Information Overload: We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us,” Basex analysts Jonathan B. Spira and David M. Goldes claim that interruptions from phone calls, emails, and instant messages eat up 28 percent of a knowledge worker’s work day, resulting in 28 billion hours of lost productivity a year. It’s about time that cycle is broken.
Given this groundswell of engagement, now’s the time to turn our collective attention to the practical side of social technologies—using them to create better, more productive working environments. Instead of just watching for the tweets and status updates, businesspeople should really consider how social technologies can shape how we interact with one another as colleagues.
Social technologies enable connections―bringing people together electronically, providing them with relevant information, and creating a venue for collaborating with one another. When we think of “Enterprise 2.0,” this is exactly the environment we imagine: one where information is centralized and organized, collaboration isn’t a scheduled event, and knowledge is timely, relevant, and easily accessible.
It seems that within the Enterprise 2.0 environment, social business would be the norm everywhere you looked. And there is no function more social than the contact center.
Analytics unleashed
by Jane Hendricks on July 19th, 2011
It used to be that analytics were reserved for the lonely business analyst or statistician, sitting in a dark room next to the mimeograph machine, calculator in hand. Today, analytics are everywhere. Technology can capture pretty much anything humans and machines do, it can apply mathematics and statistics to that information automatically, and it can present the results in multiple ways―from providing reports that we can drill into to driving our day-to-day decisions without us being aware analytics are in play.
Traditionally, contact center performance is measured by hard statistics such as handle time, abandonment rate, and cost per contact. As Forrester’s Diane Clarkson found at the CXP (Customer Experience) Forum, those metrics are certainly not going away. But they are increasingly balanced by customer-centric indicators such as satisfaction and engagement. While the contact center may (and should) ensure its platform includes the ability to measure satisfaction sentiment through surveys and feedback, the richest source of satisfaction data is typically already sitting there, captured as a recording, just waiting for someone to unleash its potential.
You may be surprised at what your recordings can tell you about what you do well―and what you aren’t doing so well. We recently recorded a webinar where we talked about how companies from various industries, facing multiple challenges, were able to find solutions just by taking the time to look at what they already had.
Now to truly unleash analytics, you need to ensure that your system has the kind of integration that lets you put it all together. With an integrated platform that leverages multiple analytical approaches, you have:
- Speech analytics to make sense of words;
- Acoustics to assess the silence, tempo and agitation, and duration of recorded voice transactions;
- Survey data;
- Events captured through desktop analytics;
- Quality forms and assessments; and
- Traditional performance data.
These work together in reports and as part of work flows to inform the decisions you make, the actions your agents take, and sometimes the direction the enterprise chooses. Without this integration, you essentially have multiple lonely statisticians looking at their own numbers, each with his (or her) own calculator.
And while you are here, you may want to take a bit of time and register for the entire Insight On Workforce Optimization series of webinar events. It’s a great opportunity for you to see what we at Aspect―and your peers―are up to.
Your customer is blogging about you: Why you should care
by Jane Hendricks on June 22nd, 2011
Forward-thinking organizations have embraced social media since its inception. Many, like P&G, see social media as a source of rich data―so rich that it may replace the traditional consumer panel and market research surveys that have been a staple at P&G since 1924. Now while most would applaud P&G as an innovator, there are detractors.
The main argument against the use of social media for research is that it is a vehicle for the overly negative, vocal fringe. P&G’s response? Rather than debate and theorize about what it should do, P&G focuses on what the customer is doing. Joan Lewis, global consumer and market knowledge officer says, “We will learn enormously whether [social-media samples are] representative or not.”
Now that organizations are increasingly trying to actually join the social media conversation, this argument is being made again. It is articulated by Forrester’s Paul Hagen, who cautions organizations on the danger of using social media as an escalation strategy. He asks, “Is this [social media] really the venue in which you want to solve problems?”
Unfortunately, your answer doesn’t matter. If we think about social media as research, P&G could certainly ignore social media and hope that its traditional surveys will pick up on whatever the social media conversation is about. The conversation certainly won’t stop.
This is true from a customer service perspective as well. The customer will say what they want to say when they want to say it. And other customers will read it. Posting a comment, tweeting, blogging―all have become quite natural.
In fact, blogs, which likely take the most concerted effort on the part of the poster, are growing exponentially, at a rate of 18.6 posts per second. If you’re a fast reader, by the time you are done, there will be a thousand more blogs and about one-third of them will talk about a product or service experience. When you search for a product or service on the Internet, about a quarter of the results will be “user-generated content.” This is likely to increase as both Google and Microsoft are building ever-tighter integrations between social media and their search engines.
Many cite “United Breaks Guitars” as a case study that highlights the perils of ignoring social media. It’s a nice case study with some catchy tunes. But the real case studies will be organizations that are able to apply a disciplined response to this new channel―one that translates to a measurable improvement in customer experience. Next-generation contact centers put customer service within customer reach―and today’s customers are on their smart phone tweeting and texting (sometimes at the same time).
Once we stop looking at social media as the exclusive domain of the fringe and start thinking about social media as a way to improve customer service for everyone, that’s when useful case studies will begin to emerge.
One of the responses to Paul’s blog was from the person who prompted Paul to write the blog in the first place. She writes, “I didn’t tweet about the DMV thinking they would see it and come to my aid. I tweeted about the DMV because I was pissed off and frustrated and venting to my followers. Whether the DMV saw it or not, that tweet was going to be out there in the public stream.”
Social media is a runaway train. You can ignore it and hope it will derail (it probably won’t) or you can jump aboard and try and apply the right breaks and steer it to your advantage.
Avoiding the ‘brand gap’ through customer contact strategies
by Jane Hendricks on June 2nd, 2011
Every customer interaction is an opportunity to remind customers of who you are as an organization. Forrester’s Diane Clarkson blogged about a recent experience she had – specifically, a chat agent at a financial services company using smileys in the course of a communication. While the interaction was helpful, it was inconsistent with the financial service provider’s brand.
Professor David Jobber, author of Principles and Practice of Marketing, puts “well-blended communications” as one of the seven main factors in building a brand. This brings us right into the contact center. The following three key strategies can enable the contact center to deliver a consistently positive customer experience and reinforce the brand image with each and every interaction:
Let the customer in
Open and coordinate all communication channels so customers can interact on their terms. At the same time, don’t block access to expert resources and neglect the total customer experience – fulfillment matters regardless of whether it’s in the front office or the back.
Prepare for execution
Make sure that your resources are ready to deliver. Capture best practices and put a continuous process improvement loop in place. Equip your resources with expert support and coach with the end goal in mind. Ensure all the resources who touch the customer experience process have the ability to deliver.
Be vigilant
Organizations need the ability to see into the total customer experience process – listen to what the customer is saying, what the agent is saying, measure what the customer is feeling – and put that into the context of actual performance. Many companies capture what is happening and then begin digging through enterprise data stores, recordings, and survey data to try and figure out why. Vigilance means you have that holistic view so you see the “what” and the “why” as its happening – and can make corrections in real time.
In his book, The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeier, a brand design expert, says that “a combination of good strategy and poor execution is like a Ferrari with flat tires. It looks good in the specs, but fails on the street.” Avoid the brand gap – ensure that every interaction delivers on your promise.
Improving the way companies communicate internally and externally with their customers is an important objective for all organizations. This blog is focused on levaraging the collective knowledge withing Aspect.