Call Accounting Shouldn't Rely on Outdated Technology
April 20, 2015
By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor
In the area of customer service, there’s a lot of information that must be measured on a daily basis, including call accounting. Companies need to know where to associate specific charges and how those charges contribute to a healthy or shrinking bottom line. A renewed focus on the back-office is driving demand for workforce management as contact center managers seek opportunities to improve forecasting and scheduling.
In a Smart Customer Service post by Michelle Masterson, we have the opportunity to examine the findings of a recent DMG Consulting report that shows the workforce management sector grew by 11.2 percent in 2014. Much of this growth is due to the increased focus on the back-office. Vendors recognized the opportunity to sell the solution in an area where call accounting was a primary focus and two- to three-times more people needed to use the system.
Beyond forecasting and call accounting, contact center managers are using workforce management to properly schedule for upcoming shifts, the level of service that needs to be reached in any given timeframe, the amount of abandonment, the average talk time, absence rate, occupancy rate, average work time, average handle time and more. The sophistication of these applications today give contact center operators considerable insight into the business, the customer base and more.
Traditionally speaking, workforce management applications rely on Erlang algorithms to predict the arrival rate of calls, to mathematically address the need for the calls and more. In the back-office, different mathematical equations are needed, yet many a vendor simply modified Erlang to try and fit the back-office mold. While it’s not the perfect fit, it is the closest match in an effort to give the back-office what they need. If vendors could instead develop more accurate algorithms to reflect activity in the back-office, this could be a significant opportunity, according to DMG Consulting.
The technology available today is easily off-putting to the innovative user. Some of the reporting functions are based on technology that is as much as 20 years old. Given the speed at which technology advances today, this reality can interfere with the ability to sell the technology and miss the mark when trying to deliver value for the customer’s environment. When the goal is to capture relative information to support call accounting and other functions, the technology has to keep pace with the environment.
At the end of the day, those vendors able to recognize what’s happening in the industry and develop solutions that solve the immediate needs of their customers will dominate the industry. As the need continues to grow in the back-office, innovation will have to take priority.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi