Enhance Performance In CRM And Customer Interaction Through Analytics And Workforce Management

Demystifying Contact Center
Business Performance Management
By John Kaiser,
Vice President of Contact Center and Enterprise,
NICE Systems

Gone are the days of operating centers by the seat of your pants using a handful of ACD reports telling you how long customers waited on hold and how many calls were abandoned.

Successful contact center business management today requires a higher level of sophistication, more advanced methodologies as well as appropriate software tools. It is no longer enough to just manage the contact center or its workforce. Today’s complexities call for paying attention to the entire set of business operations within the center as well as to customer issues and opportunities.

Make no mistake, the stakes are very high. As the frontline for customer communications, the contact center can and does play a critical role in the overall success of the business, and it deserves an appropriate level of managerial attention as well as investment in the proper tools. What does it take to do this?

Key Performance Indicators
First and perhaps most important is to establish a link between corporate goals and those of the contact center. If one of the company’s goals is to increase revenue per customer then an appropriate upsell strategy should be put in place. If reducing customer churn is the corporate goal, then a similar strategy should be implemented.

To be effective, these strategies must be comprehensive. They must include measurable and attainable goals, appropriate training programs as well as internal processes and procedures that allow agents to do what they need to do for your customers.

Corporate goals integrated with the contact center can be reflected in key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs help the organization define and measure their progress. Establishing the right KPIs requires analysis of the business strategy, setting the appropriate goals and getting agreement from the various stakeholders as to how those goals will be met.

Today’s contact center business performance management software provides easy-to-use dashboards targeted toward specific users based on their job functions. Each dashboard, whether it is for a supervisor in the contact center or a business analyst elsewhere in the enterprise, delivers the right information, at the right time, in a format that allows that person to perform at a higher level. By consolidating information from various sources, combining the data into KPIs and presenting the information appropriately, these solutions help improve productivity, increase revenue, raise customer satisfaction, reduce agent and customer turnover while creating an important link between a contact center’s performance and the corporate goals.

Insight From Customer Interactions
To further improve contact center and overall business performance, it is necessary to find new sources of customer insight. These insights can be used to identify areas of customer pain as well as opportunity. Using these data allows you to respond faster and more appropriately to solve customer issues and detect trends much sooner than in the past. This way you can tailor programs more closely to actual customer demands.

Recent and ongoing developments in multimedia analytics not only make this easier to do but open new avenues for improvement that never existed before. Transactional analytics have been around for years and can offer excellent ways to improve performance and begin to predict future trends. Transactions are only part of picture, however.

Interactions between agents and customers represent the “rest of the story.” Through the use of tools like speech analytics and word spotting, we can learn what customers are really thinking and doing. We know when they mention competitors’ names, when they are upset, when they’ve been transferred too many times, put on hold too long and when the agent and the customer “talk over” each other.

These important insights derived from the customer interactions are invaluable — not only to contact center management but to others across the enterprise. Finance can learn more about why customers are not paying their bills. Marketing will gain a better understanding of how customers respond to their campaigns. IT and operations can learn ways to improve processes and systems. Sales can better understand who they’re competing against.

As these analytical tools have gotten more sophisticated, we can “see” what agents do on screen within the various applications they use while servicing customers. This helps us further understand what customers want and need. For example, when we see agents checking the remaining time on a contract, we know they are at risk of churn. When we see agents “stumbling around” their desktop, we know there is a need for additional training. Last but not least, we can also extract data from these applications such as customer numbers, and use the information for further analysis or to capture it for later use.

These are only a few of the many initiatives that can be taken as you strive to make the contact center a more strategic part of the organization. With contact center business performance management technology, you’ll begin to improve your entire business.

John Kaiser is the Vice President of Contact Center and Enterprise at NICE Systems Inc., (news - alert) a global provider of quality monitoring, liability recording and interaction analytics solutions. NICE recently acquired workforce management supplier IEX Corp. and performance management industry player Performix Technologies. He can be reached at [email protected].

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