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Monitoring The Pulse Of Performance '
An Enterprise Initiative
By Mariann McDonagh and Wynne Wilder, Verint Systems Inc.
Agent performance that meets company standards but leaves the customer unhappy is like the operation that is declared a success although the patient has died.
Business success depends on more than agent activity. It depends on good products, good processes, good people and an experience that makes your customers want to come back for more. It depends on the efforts of your entire enterprise ' not just the agents in your contact center.
Your recording solution should manage risk and compliance, but it should also equip your business to measure and modify performance companywide. Here are four steps for selecting a recording solution that monitors the pulse of performance across your enterprise.
Monitor The Complete Experience
Capture every interaction so you can learn from the exceptional as well as the average. Your contact center is increasingly the primary means of communicating with customers; it is the heart of your company. Contact center recordings contain valuable insights about how customers regard your products, your people and your services.
A recording solution that monitors only random interactions captures primarily the average customer interaction. It prevents you from learning from the exceptional customer contact, whether that contact is exceptionally successful or exceptionally poor. Moreover, sampled recordings focus on agent activity rather than on the customer experience.
Select a recording solution that captures all of your customer contacts and automatically categorizes them based on your rules. This equips you to learn from every key interaction and track expectations from your customers' points of view.
A Holistic Approach
Look at quality as an enterprise goal and involve other departments in the needs analysis. Clearly, the ability to meet customer expectations has always been more about perceptions and less about protocol. These perceptions are shaped by every department that affects customer service, from products and logistics to orders and billing.
Establish a selection team that includes all departments that rely on your contact center (providing products or services to be sold) and that support your contact center (back office, logistics, finance, operations, etc.). The goal is to ensure the solution can deliver the samples, reports, trends and alarms to all of the departments that have a stake in the outcome of the quality initiative ' a must if you plan to improve quality and performance enterprisewide and realize a significant return on investment for your company.
Your customers think that your multisite contact centers are all one company. Your recording solution should, too. Many contact centers operate from multiple sites and may assign overflow calls to additional, outsourced locations. A single customer may be in touch with any or even all of your contact center sites ' a fact that must be transparent to the customer in order to convey a consistent experience.
Your recording solution should address performance and intelligence gathering consistently across all locations. It should:
' Report on both individual contact center locations and the enterprise as a whole,
' Centralize storage of your recordings so customer data are readily available on demand no matter where the information was recorded, and
' Provide enterprise access to these critical data from anywhere at any time.
Is Your Vision Myopic?
Plan your quality monitoring (QM) strategy before you buy. QM solutions do not create quality programs; they simply automate them. Before selecting your recording solution, research industry benchmarking, sampling and evaluation practices. Determine the goals of your QM initiative and assess whether the vendor can help you meet those goals.
Select a solution that delivers actionable intelligence. The successful customer experience is a branded experience that generates positive customer perceptions of your company. How do you create this branded customer experience? By finding out what your customers want and adapting your processes, products and services to meet their needs.
Customer intelligence is key to connecting with your marketplace, so your recording solution should do more than just capture contacts. It should transform those contacts into intelligence ' and deliver that intelligence directly to decision makers' desktops via e-mail and personal portals.
Rely on open standards to lower TCO and pump up the value. Your recording solution should add value to your current technologies ' your CRM, CTI, data marts and other management systems ' and should integrate seamlessly within your existing IT and storage infrastructures.
Select a recording solution built on non-proprietary, open standards for ready integration with your existing systems. Make sure your recording solution stores recordings in standard file formats so that users
can access them via Web browser or PC. Leveraging the tools already at hand helps keep total cost of ownership (TCO) under control and provides a greater return on investment in your recording solution.
Make sure you have room to grow. Look beyond your current needs. Five years ago, your company, your marketplace and the economy were very different from what they are today. They are likely to be markedly different five years from now.
While no technology is guaranteed future-proof, your recording solution should be scalable in all directions ' able to accommodate new infrastructure, additional sites, sudden spikes in volume and long-term growth. Success is desirable and change inevitable; it makes good sense to be prepared for both when they come.
Consider Service And Support
Select a vendor that stands by its products for the life of its products. Products malfunction, systems change, needs evolve. Make sure your vendor delivers ongoing customer care.
Does the vendor provide local service and round-the-clock support? If your contact center is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you cannot afford to wait hours or days for outages to be addressed.
Does the vendor offer remote diagnostics as an alternative to on-site repair? When remote support can solve a problem, you can save time and money on system maintenance.
Connecting The Enterprise To The Customer
Your contact center interactions are a ready source of intelligence for identifying areas for improvement and opportunity. By making the voice of your customer accessible enterprisewide, your recording solution continually connects your contact center to your company and your company to your customer.
Once organizations become truly customer-centric, the entire enterprise becomes an extended contact center, sharing and collaborating to enhance the customer experience and build customer loyalty.
Mariann McDonagh is vice president of global marketing and Wynne Wilder is senior marketing communications manager for
Verint Systems. Together, they have more than 30 years of high-tech and software marketing experience. Verint Systems is a global provider of intelligent recording and analytic solutions for contact centers.
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