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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