Call Center Performance Management

Coaching is as much a critical process in today’s contact centers as workforce management, quality monitoring, and call routing.  Agents need feedback and goals to improve and succeed, and it is the supervisor’s role as a coach to manage and deliver that performance guidance. Unfortunately, in many contact centers today, coaching is not managed with strategy and rigor or treated as a first-class process. Often, the supervisor-agent relationship is broken, jeopardizing the success of...

In a six month study, Mattersight Corporation commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the total economic impact and potential return on investment  enterprises may realize by deploying its Behavioral Analytics platform.

The Behavioral Analytics platform captures customer and employee interactions, and then automatically analyzes those interactions using proprietary algorithms and unique behavioral models. The output of this analysis is new data attributes on every interaction measuring...

Achieve Better Performance Results with SharePoint

Contact centers utilizing SharePoint demonstrate significant efficiency gains, In a a recent report published by Aberdeen Research, “The 2012 Guide on Building a Next Generation Contact Center through Microsoft SharePoint,” some of the advantages outlined include:

* 43% better results in first call resolution rate

* 16% greater agent utilization results, which on average translates into approximately $1,872 in incremental annual cost per agent

*...

What Has Your Quality Monitoring Program Done for You Lately

How do you translate voice recordings into real-time business intelligence? While most contact centers actively record customer interactions, this data is useless until it has been analyzed – a process that can be time-intensive, inefficient and overwhelming. At best, most supervisors have the capacity to analyze only a fraction of the actual data collected.

Learn how to do more with the data you have. This white paper from Aspect...

What Contact Centers Can Learn from Public Safety

To the harried managers of a modern high-octane commercial contact center, it might seem like nothing could be more urgent than squeezing every last drop of efficiency and productivity out ofoperations. But they would be wrong.

There is an environment in which the stakes are higher, where delivering top-notch “service” is a number one priority for the organization. That is in the public safety sector, where callers are people in intense distress...

Quality assurance (QA) is a mission-critical business function that identifies contact center and enterprise trends, and provides insights into how well each agent is performing. For the past 30 years QA has been performed in contact centers around the world in basically the same way. Managers search through volumes of recordings to find the 10% to 20% of calls that require attention, either because they are really bad or really good. If a call is bad, the QA specialist or supervisor must...

To the harried managers of a modern commercial contact center, it might seem like nothing could be more urgent than squeezing every bit of efficiency and productivity out of operations. But they would be wrong. There is an environment in which the stakes are higher, where delivering top-notch “service” is an organizational number one priority. That is in the public safety sector, where callers are people in intense distress and the dispatcher is literally providing them a lifeline. Public...

Recent talk in the industry takes exception with the concept of making idle time productive by suggesting there isn’t really much idle time to be used, that it would cause adherence issues with the call center workforce management tool, and associating it with the detrimental effects of multi-tasking (suggesting that it lowers agent performance). We see these as critiques based on some limited information. Research data, integration technology and feedback from those using technology to manage...

FCR is one of the best ways to measure the overall performance of your contact center. It tells you how well your service organization handles customer requests the first time. Experts agree that it’s the only true metric that delivers a clear measurement of organizational effectiveness and customer satisfaction. When companies improve their FCR, they also lower their costs, improve their customer and agent retention, and increase their revenue.

Given the importance of FCR and the benefits it...

In a previous post, we covered the issues that workforce managers reported as their top challenges for 2012. Not surprisingly, the need to balance off-phone work while maintaining service levels was a top priority for workforce management professionals as it is their job to sustain this equilibrium within the call center.

To top it off, the pressure to ensure agents complete the training (or coaching, assessments, communications, etc.) necessary to keep agents performing is compounded by the...

The main topics of interest at the IQPC Call Center Week Las Vegas were ‘cloud’ and ‘multi-channel’.  Attendees were also concerned with the use of social media.

How customers connect to companies is evolving.  Customers want to connect on their own terms with the channel that suites them best.  Vendors are attempting to respond to the customer’s needs with a variety of new solutions.  Below is a recap of exciting technologies and solutions that were at the event.

360'CRM   is a full spectrum CRM...

In the first quarter of 2012, Knowlagent surveyed workforce management professionals to learn more about the goals and challenges that pertain to their role within the call center.  We wanted to understand more about the group whose daily responsibility is to deal with the complex nature of the contact center to match supply (agents) with demand (calls). We heard about the issues involved with scheduling agents, ensuring they have time to complete the necessary off-phone work that helps them be...

The latest generation entering the workforce brings a new energy to the contact center, which also brings new challenges to the table for call center management.  But this generation also represents the new social customer, so understanding what makes them “tick” can provide invaluable insight into what motivates your customers.

Donna Fluss, a recognized thought leader and innovator in contact center and real-time analytics, will join Knowlagent CEO, Matt  McConnell,  for an interactive webinar on...

 Benchmark research carried out by Ventana Research shows that contact center executives and managers are under pressure to provide the best possible customer service while staying within tight operational budgets. At the same time centers are receiving ever more inbound calls and responding to other types of interactions such as email messages and chat sessions. To demonstrate success, managers must improve the key performance metrics on which they are assessed, especially customer satisfaction...

Knowlagent recently surveyed 312 call center executives, managers or supervisors. Respondents represented a range of company sizes and types.  A majority of companies report tracking the obvious things that keep an employee offline – such as absenteeism, tardiness, and log-in times. Many track some of the more hidden issues that take up call center agents' days.

-- Close 50% of the companies track time spent on training.
-- 40 % report they track the amount of “idle time” agents spend waiting...

Precision monitoring is a process that is enabled by the introduction of speech analytics into contact centers.  According to a new DMG report, managers set up special QA searches in their speech analytics application – it is a best practice to set up multiple searches to address various aspects of QA. Here are some recommended searches:

1.Greetings – define all of the appropriate ways agents should perform a greeting, and capture interactions where this does not happen.
2.Closings – same...

As the contact center landscape changes, so too must the reporting and analysis solutions that drive decision-making and performance management. Each contact center is a unique mixture of systems, applications, people and culture serving a specific customer or client segment, each will need a different roadmap to their destination.

There are four common reasons that contact centers are driven to undertake this journey in the first place:

1. Current reports don't meet requirements: Typically,...