March 2001

Closing The Contact Center Quality Loop With Customer Experience Management

BY ILAN FREEDMAN, NICE SYSTEMS

The advent of multimedia customer interactions in today's contact center has heightened the need for highly skilled agents who can multitask in a variety of communication forms, ranging from the telephone to e-mail to an ever-widening array of Web interactions. To perform their jobs, agents must constantly learn new applications to access information in a timely manner and provide a superior customer experience. To ensure that agents are learning and properly implementing what they need to know, contact centers monitor their performance.

But quality monitoring to identify shortcomings and improve agent performance is only the beginning. Once you capture, evaluate and analyze agent-customer interactions, how can you truly improve the customer experience -- not just today, but every day? The trend seems to be growing away from a singular, inward focus on the supervisor's view of agent skills to a more comprehensive, 360-degree view of the customer experience -- one that provides the information and tools to improve service, productivity and business practices to build and sustain lasting customer loyalty.

Any contact center dedicated to contributing to the bottom line monitors agent performance. However, once calls are monitored, what is done with those interactions determines where the real advancements occur. The fast-emerging customer experience management (CEM) strategy and business platform enables contact centers to achieve more with their recorded multimedia interactions by integrating and leveraging the growing list of tools and applications so they can close the loop on quality and deliver superior customer service.

Tools And Applications To Close The Quality Loop
Analytical tools for the contact center. New data mining and data analysis applications are enabling contact centers to transform their wealth of customer interaction data into powerful, actionable knowledge. Until now, call recording and data analysis functions were completely separate. With newer solutions, the data analysis application can be fully integrated with call monitoring and recording to provide contact centers with a comprehensive analytical tool that goes far beyond a standard reporting tool. These tools enable contact center managers and supervisors, as well as senior executives, to cut through all the clutter so they can hear and understand why certain activity on the contact center floor occurs.

By taking information from the ACD and combining it with recordings of those interactions, managers can obtain an end-to-end view of a customer's experience from the time he or she entered the contact center, to the time the call was finished. Managers can get answers to questions such as, "Why are customers placed on hold?" "Why did call volume double between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m.?" "What were these calls about?" "What are the causes of excessively long calls?" At a highly practical level, managers can quickly identify, drill down and play back the calls, which may elicit a new question: "Why are callers to the Cruise Campaign transferred twice, at which point they typically abandon their calls?"

Recordings integrated with CRM and eCRM tools. Integrating recording applications with the wide array of available CRM and eCRM applications enables managers to target specific agents, customers and campaigns. Value-added benefits can be as simple as customizing customer communications by capturing specific caller data or can be much more sophisticated. Integration between screen capture and e-mail, for instance, allows a manager to search for specific e-mail messages using the "to," "from" and "subject" lines; track the back-and-forth between customer and agent; and assess how the agent puts together the e-mail responses. This is a powerful, integrated tool and represents just one example of the potential that exists in contact centers today by integrating recordings with software solutions.

Web-based survey tools. Until recently, a company's understanding of the customer experience was limited to its contact center supervisor or quality group's view of operations. New Web-based survey technologies represent the next step in CRM. Survey tools can import data from your CRM applications to tailor surveys and survey invitations. It then automatically sends an e-mail invitation to customers to click on a link to a Web survey. In so doing, companies can augment their internal perceptions with direct customer feedback--using the internal and external information essential to smart and timely decisions. These customer surveys can then be compared with internal evaluations. One major ISP surveys 40,000 customers a month, comparing internal evaluations with their customers' opinions to arrive at a 360-degree view of their contact center.

Targeted and individualized training. We've seen that far beyond the standard practice of quality monitoring, the tools described above enable mangers to evaluate overall contact center flow. But we can go further. We need to evaluate the story behind how each agent is scored to identify specific training needs. Once accomplished, contact centers can use technologies to "push" highly specific training to the desktops of agents who need it, when they need it and when they can complete it. New training and delivery methodologies focus on the intended recipient based on his or her individual scores. Additionally, the training itself can include best practices of actual contact center activity embedded into the training module. The entire process of development, delivery and evaluation is continuous, so contact center training provides exactly the information and learning necessary to deliver an improved customer experience.

Contact Center As Business Intelligence Center
As mentioned earlier, there is little point in recording if you don't take it back to the agent to train for improved performance, which directly improves the customer experience. We've reviewed an emerging set of tools and applications that offer the contact center potential competitive advantage in the battle for customer loyalty. That should be sufficient, right? Hardly. These tools also empower and prepare the organization to meet the "what's next" set of challenges: the contact center as the focal point for gathering business and marketing intelligence.

While we have seen the potential to use these new tools and applications to gain a 360-degree perspective of the customer experience and deliver highly targeted and effective training, the technology is still primarily focused on the agent and agent performance. Find the agent shortcomings and fix them. But as managers listen to the customer, he or she often provides two sets of information -- an immediate problem and/or the need for more general information or the expression of general issues. The next set of challenges (and the advantages that flow from them ) are contained in those "other things."

Contact center managers can listen to and solve the immediate needs, but also need to evaluate the rest of the information contained in the conversation. Why not add to the standard evaluation form questions such as, "Did the customer mention a competitor?" "Did the caller mention a competitor from among X, Y or Z?" "Was it a favorable or unfavorable mention?" This focus on the entire conversation represents a fundamental change, and an expansion of the contact center role.

Let's return to the question managers may have about the Cruise Campaign after they have evaluated ACD recordings and agent calls. The question can be easily answered by adding a minor task to the manager's job of agent monitoring: customer feedback evaluation. Questions such as, "Did the customer mention a competing offer when calling 1-800-I-cruise? What price was the customer willing to pay for this product? Did the customer expect the cruise offer to include something it didn't?" The answer is in the calls -- a resourceful company should listen to them! The information captured will lead to a deeper understanding of the product offering and the way the customer perceives it. It is not the sterile feedback from a focus group; rather, it is true and unsolicited customer feedback.

Tools and applications from within CEM and existing CRM suites let you do this, and the cost to do so is minimal. Do not stop evaluating agents -- just do more. This will allow the contact center to deliver unique value to other organizations within the company, or an outsourcer to deliver unique value to its clients. At present, a few contact centers contend they are already doing this; it is sometimes referred to as "root call analysis." This is a start, but it's not the whole picture. What else is the customer saying?

The general model suggests a marketing role for the contact center and the individuals who manage them. Managers have the opportunity to provide tremendous increased value from the vantage of the contact center, as well as expand the contact center's stake within the company. In doing so, the contact center achieves higher visibility and can draw on additional budget from other departments that benefit from the expanded contact center role. With marginal additional effort and investment, the contact manager can contribute even more toward building lifetime customer loyalty for the organization while significantly strengthening his or her position within the organization. Sound a bit far off? It's right around the corner.

Ilan Freedman is director, Strategy and Planning, for NICE Systems (www.nice.com).

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