Achieving True Performance Management in the Contact Center
by Doug Whitaker on January 6th, 2012
In recent posts, I have discussed the Workforce Optimization process in the contact center—specifically, how companies can create a cycle of continuous improvement in business processes—and the value it can generate for the entire organization. An essential component of this process is performance management software because it delivers the “action” for continuous improvement. This process is both guided (by suggesting best practices and corrective action) and automated (with applications triggering a process).
Before we discuss how companies should pursue performance management in the contact center, I’d like to clear up a common misperception. Too often, the term “performance management” is associated with either reports or dashboards generated by individual applications. In reality, these tools are just forms of performance reporting, not performance management. Reporting may provide a snapshot of progress against a goal, but users must take action based on this information to make any real progress. Unfortunately, once individual action is introduced, the overall process suffers because such efforts can vary widely from person to person and group to group.
Foundational elements of performance management
A comprehensive performance management solution helps remove this variability from the process in several ways.
1) Information from multiple sources is unified to create “one version of the truth,” removing the potential for different interpretations of the data.
2) Companies can measure performance, aggregate it across siloed groups, and then correlate with other metrics.
3) Contact centers can understand the impact that transactional measurements (such as handle time) has on customer-specific metrics (such as sales and satisfaction).
Communication and transparency are key
To support performance management efforts, companies must be able to share data with various stakeholders. This can be done in an automated fashion with alerts, forms, and e-mails rather than relying on the individual to look at the information and recognize the problem.
However, key performance indicators will vary based upon the stakeholder: an executive will want to see data on the contact center’s progress against corporate goals―such as profitability, cost structure, or forecast accuracy. Meanwhile, a lower-level supervisor will be more interested in team performance, handle times and individual adherence. Therefore, any solution must align to the needs of the individual role.
Translating data into action
The next step is to derive future improvement from the information. To achieve this goal, performance management must embrace business processes that are connected to results. This can be automated or guided.
For example, if a contact center agent has low customer satisfaction scores, an automated process can be launched that provides training to the employee on customer empathy. A guided approach may initiate a coaching session with a supervisor in which the supervisor is provided suggestions for remediation. The goal is to establish a standardized process to coach employees toward improvement, thus generating improved organizational effectiveness.
While successful performance management requires a coordinated effort at all levels of the organization, the results can be tremendous. Performance management helps companies identify best practices, which can result in a wide range of organizational benefits: increased productivity, higher revenues, and reduced costs.
Key 2011 Contact Center Trends—and What They Mean for 2012 and Beyond
by Tim Dreyer on December 29th, 2011
Over the past year, several trends emerged that will shape the customer engagement landscape for the foreseeable future. A number of factors, fueled by technology, have elevated the importance of the contact center, making it the hub of customer engagement efforts. Aspect’s executives and thought leaders weighed in on the new challenges facing companies as well as the steps they should take to position their contact center to serve today’s consumer.
The growing importance of the contact center
As consumer expectations continued to increase, progressive organizations came to the realization that the entire organization needed to be engaged in supporting customer engagement. This is easier said than done, as most companies have organizational structures that support 20th century business operations. Nancy Dobrozdravic weighed in on the strategy, tools, and organizational realignment that must occur to strengthen customer relationships:
- The Age of the Customer Elevates the Importance of the Contact Center
- If the Whole Organization Is Responsible for Marketing, What Role Should the Contact Center play?
- Marketing and IT Converge in the Contact Center
- Empowering the Entire Organization to Serve the Customer
Compliance with shifting contact center regulations
Technological advances are presenting new opportunities for contact centers, but existing laws on outbound calling and collections have created ambiguity and potential risk. Mike Sheridan and Lynne Levy shared their insight on how companies could make sense of the current regulatory environment and maintain the flexibility to adapt to changes:
- Ensuring Compliance in Contact Center Operations
- What contact centers need to know to stay compliant
- Features that every contact center should have in place to aid compliance
- How Companies Can Use Social Media in the Contact Center
Workforce optimization
Companies looked to the contact center not just to improve customer interactions and experience; they were also interested in achieving greater transparency and accountability to boost efficiency. In a series of posts, Doug Whitaker laid out the tools and functionality contact centers need to get more out of their workforce:
- How a High-Performing Contact Center Directly Supports Business Strategy
- Empowering the Contact Center with Vital Workforce Optimization Tools
- Four Critical Components of a Next-Generation Contact Solution
Be sure to check back to this blog throughout the year to get more insight on these and other topics. All the best for 2012.
Four Critical Components of a Next-Generation Contact Solution
by Doug Whitaker on December 26th, 2011
In previous posts, I discussed how a contact center can directly support business strategy as well as the workforce optimization tools that contact centers need to fulfill their potential. The next step for business leaders is to identify a solution that can empower the contact center—and the organization as a whole.
As the customer service environment has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past several years, what had been a straightforward exercise is now more complicated. Four forces have altered the landscape.
1) The customer-company dynamic has changed. One-way conversations, in which companies dictated the terms, have been replaced by an ongoing dialogue. What’s more, customers now expect a collaborative relationship with the companies they favor.
2) The availability of information about companies and products has exploded. Companies used to have control of the information that was available about products and services. Now customers can do their own research using forums, blogs, and reviews.
3) Technology has enabled greater connectivity. The mass adoption of mobile devices—Pew Research found that 83 percent of U.S. adults have a cell phone—has given rise to consumers who are always on. The same study found that nearly one-third of adults preferred to be contacted via text message.
4) Consumer expectations have increased. As soon as one company integrates such channels as social media into their contact center operations, consumers not only become aware of it but also immediately expect the same capabilities from other companies.
The evolution of consumer behavior and technology will likely accelerate, presenting businesses with new challenges—as well as new tools to address them. Therefore, a next-generation solution must incorporate traditional applications while allowing the flexibility to accommodate near-term and future requirements. The components of the solution must include:
- Customer empowerment – To give customers the ability to interact and get information in the way they want, companies will have to offer a variety of options for live and self-service communications. This strategy will require new functionality to ensure that information and experience across channels are consistent.
- Enterprise engagement – Aspect CEO Jim Foy noted in an interview in May of this year that the contact center as we know it won’t exist in ten years. Unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) have connected our enterprises so that physical, technological, and organizational barriers don’t inhibit a company’s ability to address customer requirements. Increased consumer expectations will compel companies to adopt UC&C so that back-office and knowledge workers can be included in the process.
- Social communications – New communications channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and even blogs have introduced exciting mediums for customers to share information and opinions on their consumer choices. What makes social media more complex is that the contacts are typically indirect rather than direct. Many companies are scrambling to address social media channels with their contact center operations. A key element of this strategy is the ability to monitor these communications, manage the interactions, and respond appropriately to the customer issues.
- Dynamic analytics – Contact centers have become the natural hub of customer data, but many companies haven’t adopted the tools and processes to use this information to shape business strategy and set priorities. Beyond the technology, executives must reorient their organization so that functions such as marketing, communications, and sales can all benefit from these insights.
Speaking in the general sense, companies must pursue workforce optimization to make the best use of their available internal resources. A comprehensive strategy to schedule staff, accommodate mobile agents, and right-size the physical contact center can increase efficiency and returns on investment.
In the coming year, Aspect will continue to share our vision for the future of the contact center and how companies can achieve the full potential of our customer experience efforts.
Empowering the Contact Center with Vital Workforce Optimization Tools
by Doug Whitaker on November 29th, 2011
In my last post, I discussed the strategies that contact centers should pursue to improve agent productivity and resource allocation. Once organizations have defined their strategy, they must have the functionality that can support it.
Contact centers need the ability to anticipate future activity and schedule the resources necessary in order to meet business requirements, manage the employee process to ensure agents are doing what they are supposed to be doing, understand their current status, and improve business processes through automation driven by business initiatives and best practices.
With these tools, contact centers can achieve better results through more effective customer communication and organizational productivity. Most important, the complete process enabled by Aspect Productive Workforce allows for the holy grail… a cycle of continuous business process improvement that offers better customer transactions, improved employee performance, and increased service to customers.
Workforce Optimization includes several technologies that were once independent but have grown together to offer synergy and a complete process.
- Workforce Management allows the ability to forecast future traffic, schedule employees to meet requirements and adherence tools to manage employee actions.
- Quality Management software records the customer contact and the employee desktop so evaluations can be made and quantitative assessments can be made.
- Performance Management software consolidates business metrics from disparate data sources so that key performance indicators can be identified and measured. Then the information is used for automated alerts, comprehensive coaching process and actions driven by business-driven workflows.
The workforce optimization process is enhanced significantly through a number of tools:
- “Dynamic analytics,” which include capabilities such as speech and desktop analytics. Speech analytics provides automatic mining of customer recordings for valuable information, while desktop analytics monitors employee workstation, which can then support information collection, proactively ensure best practices, and automate manual processes.
- Social media management solutions provide insight and automation to indirect communications such as blogs and social media sites.
- eLearning offers employee training and improvement.
In my next post, I’ll highlight the components that a successful workforce optimization solution must include.
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.
How a high-performing contact center directly supports business strategy
by Doug Whitaker on November 7th, 2011
I serve as the director of sales for Aspect Workforce Optimization, and from this vantage point it’s been interesting to see how the role of the contact center has evolved over the past decade. For instance, the notion that contact centers should focus primarily on cost cutting and saving money is an outdated concept.
Instead, many companies have recognized the pivotal role that the contact center can play in nurturing customer relationships by providing better service. So while efficiency is important to organizations, Gartner’s survey of CEOs and senior business executives found that their priorities in the contact center reflect this evolution. Here are the top five responses:
• Retaining customers and enhancing existing relationships
• Maintaining competitive advantage
• Attracting new customers
• Attracting and retaining skilled workers/talent
• Reducing costs via better efficiency
Clearly, companies understand that better service can both increase revenue and be a competitive differentiator. Based on the last two priorities, survey respondents also acknowledge the importance of an efficient, productive workforce to a successful contact center operation.
Setting priorities is one thing; enabling the contact center with the right tools and capabilities to achieve them is another. One challenge is that consumers have rapidly adopted new communication channels such as text messaging, e-mail, and social media, forcing contact centers to become more nimble and responsive. In addition, instant access to online information has increased consumer expectations for what the contact center should be able to deliver.
As a result, contact centers must adopt strategies to improve agent productivity and resource allocation. Fortunately, platforms and software can empower contact centers by delivering critical functionality in three key areas:
Driving effective interactions. The bottom line is that every customer interaction needs to be successful. With access to the right information and experts, contact centers can dramatically increase first-contact resolution, sales, promises to pay, and customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Controlling personnel costs. Through better resource management, the contact center can reduce overstaffing, improve contact handle time, and increase employee adherence to scheduling.
Enabling dynamic decision making. When a contact center has the ability to recognize business patterns proactively, it can resolve issues before they become major problems. And by consolidating vital business information into a single view, agents can gauge progress in attaining goals.
When a contact center performs well across these three areas, it becomes more effective and more efficient—and can directly boost revenues and profits.
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.
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.
Patience and Diligence Are Rewarded When Taking a Measured Approach to OCS
by Serge Hyppolite on September 2nd, 2010
There are several ways to plot a comfortable learning curve for contact center agents beginning to use UC capabilities. In my last post, I suggested considering a phased deployment for operations that have legacy PBX. Another best practice with a consistent payoff is pilot testing unified communications deployment with a small team of users. This gradual approach produces two advantages that are worth the wait. The first is the opportunity to test and optimize functionality for broader agent use, and what might be an even greater boon to an effective rollout is earning the test group’s buy-in to drive up interest and user adoption. Fear of the unknown is no match for the contagion of enthusiasm. After phone-only users shift to an empowered UC platform experience like Microsoft® Office Communications Server (OCS), they quickly put the past behind them. And they may actually look forward to future technology advances that enable even better communications in their next-generation contact center.
Communications-Enabling Business Processes for Improved Customer Experiences
by Manish Chandak on May 18th, 2010
The power of communication if often underestimated. Often times in the workplace, processes are unnecessarily lengthened by the inefficiency of the individual tasks. Regardless of where the bottleneck occurs, these hiccups in the operation affect the entire company. Creating new windows of communication in the enterprise streamlines the simplest tasks and allows for better usage of the employee’s time and in turn – better serving your customers.
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.