Call Center Monitoring

Quality management has stood as a cornerstone of contact center performance management for many years, and for good reason. It focuses on the interactions between agents and customers; those little moments of truth where customer satisfaction hangs in the balance. For the most part, quality management hasn’t changed much through the years. The advent and rapid adoption of analytics technologies in the contact center is about to change that.

A new white paper from Ventana Research explores...

Joe McFadden, jmcfadden@enkata.com, Enkata

Ventana Research recently reported that 70 percent of companies have deployed quality monitoring.  In the majority of cases this is a manual process.   And that 73 percent of companies plan to improve this process over the next two years.  The report states that “ultimately, adopting contact center analytics will enable companies to automate the entire quality monitoring process, giving them the information they need to improve agent development and...

Being a call center furniture manufacturer, we have noticed many recent articles that explain the negative impacts that sitting all day has on the body. This impacts everyone that spends most of their day at a computer, including most people in the call center industry, and especially agents.

The industry as a whole has a huge investment in the people manning their centers, so we wanted to point out a few articles that look into the negative impact of spending the entire day sitting, and...

Do you know if your interactive voice response (IVR) system is successfully handling customer interactions and providing your company the expected return on investment? Businesses need quantifiable information in order to effectively focus their IVR efforts; however, there is no commonly accepted standard for measuring IVR performance.

That’s not to say there’s a shortage of popular IVR metrics – there are plenty of them in fact. Many of them focus on indirect measurements like containment and...

Call Centers are fast paced environments and though they have a highly structured operating environment, constant change is the norm.  It is important to keep agents up to date and aware of these changes. This can be achieved using strategic furnishings to increase communication throughout the call center.

Bullpen Cubicle Panels
Workstations are available in a variety of panel materials. Tackable panels, for example, allow items to be tacked onto the workstation panel multiple times and in...

Your company’s brand and reputation depend on your team’s ability to deliver a superior customer experience. Yet, people, processes and technology often conspire to create headaches for management and unsatisfactory interactions for customers.

Do these problems sound familiar? You receive calls from management demanding answers about why a host went down or why customer complaints are up. You may be  off for the  weekend but you still worry that a problem will not be detected as quickly as it...

Retaining and growing a base of satisfied customers is the name of the game. In today’s global internet-based marketplace, customers have very high expectations and can find their next vendor with just a few mouse clicks. The challenge for modern contact center managers and supervisors is in determining how to identify customer satisfaction deficiencies and provide agent targeted coaching to improve on those deficiencies.

There are a number of best practices that should be deployed to maximize...

Second in a two-part series

Yesterday we looked at the Payment Card Security Council and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard which were established to protect the credit card user. Today we look  specifically at the standard and the requirements it places on contact centers.

DMG Consulting LLC is a leading provider of market research and consulting services for contact centers. The 2009 – 2010 Quality Management/Liability Recording Product and Market Report is the definitive guide to...

Global organizations often have little to no visibility into the non-phone based activities and processes that take place in their contact centers and broader customer service operations. And often times, it shows. The lack of visibility leads to such questions as:

•How can you know whether your agents and personnel are following the right processes?
•How effective and efficient is workflow across your customer service operation?
•Do employees’ maximize the vast number of applications...

Customer needs are increasingly being handled by employees who work outside a formal contact center. This trend is confirmed in Ventana Research’s benchmark research into agent performance management. Their research found that customer interactions typically are handled by a variety of business units – primarily the contact center (in 94 percent of companies) but also sales (42 percent), home-based agents (32 percent), back-office departments (31 percent), customer service (30 percent) and...

As part of the migration to an all IP infrastructure, more enterprises are adopting Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking, using it to replace expensive legacy and Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) trunk lines for voice service. SIP has become VoIP) protocol of choice for signaling, providing significant improvements over legacy IP protocols and Time Division Multiplexing (TDM).

SIP trunking offers companies easier infrastructure integration and management as well as increased...

In the real world, contact center agents are often presented with comparable calls under similar circumstances yet the outcomes are frequently inconsistent, and performance metrics can vary wildly among agents. The answer why this occurs lies in performance factors that are overlooked or undetected by the generally accepted agent performance measurement tools in use today.

Despite the use of monitoring and coaching tools and the best intentions of those tasked with coaching and training...