Drawing Your Roadmap for Better Contact Center Reporting and Analysis

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Tuesday, November 15, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

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,...

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Virtual Contact Center Conference - Best Practices in Workforce Management and Performance Optimization

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Thursday, October 27, 2011   |   [1] Leave a Comment »
Join the annual November Virtual Contact Center Conference.  The popular online Conference features presentations by experts on issues that confront customer care professionals daily.  The Conference is fully interactive and all customer care professionals within an organization are able to participate.

Speech Analytics and a Unified Analytics Strategy for Workforce Optimization

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, September 12, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Analytics applications are deployed in a number of functions and departments within the enterprise, and for a number of requirements in service operations. It is as critical to sales optimization in the marketing department, for example, as it is to performance optimization in the contact center. As a result, analytics often performs in a cross-functional capacity, typically without the benefit of coordination among users.

In the contact center, “cross-functional” may be narrowly defined as...

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Social Media and Informal Learning

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, September 7, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

According to the comScore 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review, social networking sites accounted for 12% of all time spent online in 2010, and the average American spent more than 14 hours watching online videos in December, a 12% increase over the previous year.

As social media continues to gain popularity in our culture.  Many call center agents are comfortable with social learning in their personal lives and, as a result, more and more companies are adopting social and informal learning platforms...

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Improving Process Efficiency with Workflow Automation

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, August 29, 2011   |   [1] Leave a Comment »

Quality management (QM), with its ability to drive agent behaviors that impact the customer experience, is a valuable tool for contact centers. Technological advances have increased QM process efficiency by replacing paper forms and making recordings more readily available. Significant areas of inefficiency still exist, however, increasing the cost of quality to the business.

According to a new CXM white paper,   integrating workforce automation and quality management offers opportunities for...

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2011 Quality Management/Liability Recording (Workforce Optimization) Market Share Report

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, July 11, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

DMG Consulting’s annual Quality Management/Liability Recording (Workforce Optimization – WFO) Market Share Report is essential for vendors and investors who want to understand the current status and expected future performance of the 45-plus WFO competitors. In its eighth year, the Quality Management/Liability Recording (WFO) Market Share Report provides a detailed analysis of the performance of WFO suite providers, applications and sectors for fiscal 2010.

While some vendors experienced a...

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Getting Workforce Optimization Right

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, July 11, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
Although the economy is seemingly improving, pressure on contact centers to improve customer satisfaction while reducing internal costs remains. Managers face challenges in ensuring that they have employed the right number and best-skilled staff, delivering relevant training and preparing agents to handle customer queries efficiently. All too often, agents do not have the right information at their fingertips and customers must wait while representatives search different applications and input...continue reading this post »

Additional Highlights from Call Center Week 2011

Posted By Larry Matte   |   Wednesday, June 29, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

The following are some more information on the vendors who attended the IQPC event.  

Analytics

For companies frustrated with isolated or disparate data sources, 360'CRM's latest advances in its InSight data analytics tool provides new levels of actionable information for the Call Center or Channel Management practitioner.  InSight not only automatically draws call center performance data in to a common, universally comparable dashboard and report analytics library, it also integrates internal...

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Call Center Week – June 2011

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Tuesday, June 28, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

The staff of CRMXchange was present at the IQPC Las Vegas Call Center Week. IQPC did a commendable job with the content and speakers in the event. The exhibit hours were long, running close to 11 hours on day one, but the vendors were pleased with the amount of interest that people showed in their products and services. 

We traveled the exhibit hall. Below are some vendor highlights.

Analytics

Contact Solutions – The Continuous Improvement Practice (CI) is based on a unique methodology and supported...

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How to Improve Business Results with Engaged Employees

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Tuesday, May 31, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Your customers are coming to you via an variety of   channels.  As a result, every employee is now customer facing — either directly or indirectly — and distinctions between the front
office and back office are blurring.  With many more channels coming to the multi channel contact center, and a much more dispersed workforce, organizations today are forced to manage a dizzying array of customer service systems, customer touch points and customer-related tasks.

The question is, how do you make sure...

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The Power of Real-Time Delivery

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, May 25, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

Even in the best-managed and busiest contact centers, where workforce management solutions are used to optimize agent schedules, there will always be unexpected downtime without calls. Using this idle time productively will improve agent satisfaction and service quality while reducing agent-related costs. Delivering real-time, targeted training, coaching and communications during slow periods can alter your contact center’s dynamics – boosting productivity, quality and customer perception. A new...

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The ROI of Workforce Management Systems

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, April 18, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
Are you satisfied with the usefulness and return you’re getting on your contact center workforce management solution? If you are not, you’re not alone.  According to a report by DMG Consulting, overall satisfaction with workforce management solutions is very low, with ratings averaging 3.3 out of 5.

Reasons for dissatisfaction include cost, weak intra-day capabilities, inflexible solutions, inaccuracy of data, and difficulty of use. If implemented correctly, however, your workforce management...continue reading this post »

Top Workforce Shrinkage Offenders

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Tuesday, April 12, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
When call center agents aren’t on the phones resolving customer issues and promoting your brand, they are busy with a whole host of other activities referred to as shrinkage.  Knowlagent recently conducted a survey of more than 100 industry leaders – across all types of call centers – to find out what activities make up shrinkage in their centers.

According to the study, the average amount of an agent’s time spent in shrinkage is around 24%, or roughly one fourth of the work day.

By types of...continue reading this post »

Contact Center: Hosted vs Buy

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, March 28, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

The hosted business model gives enterprises access to contact center infrastructure and the other contact center applications they need to cost effectively provide an efficient and outstanding customer experience.

The hosting business model:

-Allows companies to acquire functionally rich technology and applications without a large capital investment or long-term commitment.

-Is highly scalable  and gives users ongoing technical support and access to innovation and upgrades at no additional cost.

-...

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Speech, Performance, Desktop and Text Analytics The Case for Unified Analytics in the Contact Center

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, March 16, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

With the advent of analytics in the contact center over the past decade, the industry has experienced unprecedented gains in operational productivity and customer service. Typically deployed as part of a workforce optimization (WFO) solution, analytics is a primary driver of performance and quality monitoring improvements. Analytics provides an objective means by which to identify where opportunities for improvement exist while providing a pathway for executing on those opportunities.

Analytics...

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Call Center Quality Monitoring and Worforce Optimization Report

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Wednesday, March 9, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
after nearly three decades, the contact center quality management (QM)/liability recording (also known as workforce optimization (WFO)) market continues to evolve and progress at a surprisingly rapid pace.

While many consider QM and recording solutions to be commodities, the 2010 – 2011 Quality Management/Liability Recording (Workforce Optimization) Product and Market Report reveals quite the opposite. The core concepts of QM, recording and WFO have certainly become standardized, a clear benefit...continue reading this post »

Market Demand for Analytics

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Friday, March 4, 2011   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

The first decade has seen steady growth in market demand for analytics solutions
of all descriptions as evidenced by the results of the annual survey of contact center end-users conducted by Saddletree Research in conjunction with the National Association of Call Centers (NACC). An offshoot of the Call Center Lab at The University of Southern Mississippi, the not-for-profit NACC conducts surveys of its members and newsletter subscribers in order to keep a finger on the pulse of the industry...

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Riding the Seasonality Curve - Best Practices in Forecasting and Optimizing Strategic Plans and Staffing Decisions

Posted By Sheri Greenhaus   |   Monday, February 21, 2011   |   [2] Leave a Comment »
The goal of the strategic/operational plan is to make sure the exact right amount of call center agents show up to work every Monday morning. There are methods of optimizing  the levers available to management- hiring, controllable shrinkage, overtime and undertime- so the long term goal is met every week.

Other items to consider:

• Seasonality of workforce forecasts, call center scheduling,  and the appropriate level of detail for each forecast
• Methods for developing week over week...continue reading this post »

Who is a Boomer? Generational Hiring for the Optimal Customer Experience, Part 2

Posted By Jeff Furst   |   Tuesday, December 28, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »

My colleague, Brent Holland, continues our series on "Generational Hiring for the Optimal Customer Experience".  The second installment considers two important questions:  (1) how to define generational groups and (2) whether contact centers rely on generational groups to guide recruitment.

How does FurstPerson define generational groups for this research?

When we began studying the impact of generational classifications, one of the first things we noticed was that many people disagree on who is a...

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Balancing Agent Productivity and Lifestyle

Posted By Brian Spraetz   |   Thursday, December 23, 2010   |   [0] Leave a Comment »
We talk a lot about balancing efficiency and effectiveness in our call center operations. Something we don’t talk as much about is balancing agent productivity and quality of life. Agent attrition is the bane of call centers, and its costs are huge. For every agent that leaves a new one must be recruited, screened and trained.  Those are just the direct costs associated with agent turnover. Often overlooked are the indirect costs from turnover’s impact on productivity, service quality and...continue reading this post »