Manage Effectively with Knoa Software Experience Performance Manager (Continued)

 

In a call center environment, it’s even more interesting, first of all the call center environment is really one of the most complex in terms of the amount of technology. During one customer interaction a call center agent might need to deal with ten different applications: a customer data management application, a CRM application, a billing system, a knowledge base, that’s just to name a few and what is interesting is that even though there is a lot of monitoring in the call center, the monitoring of the interaction between the agent and their use of the software is like the last blind spot in the call center.

 

 

First is one from a consumer services company and what they found was that they had invested significantly in a knowledge management system that the agents were supposed to be using in order to answer questions about the service and about the various plans and such. What they found by implementing our software was that the agents were actually signing into the knowledge base system at the beginning of the day but they were never using it. It was there and opened in case a supervisor ever walked around and asked questions but they weren’t using it. Instead they were doing when they had questions was using IM and they were like phoning a friend, so the fact of the matter is you don’t know whether that is good or bad. Maybe that was getting the customers questions answered better and faster but the company was planning a major upgrade of the knowledge management system and no one was really using it. They were going to upgrade to the latest edition and found that there was no business value in that because it wasn’t really being used. The visibility into that was able to give them the ability to make an intelligent decision of first of all let’s put that on hold and not spend that money for this multi-million dollar investment and let’s find out what’s happening. The real problem is that if all this knowledge is being exchanged in IM, it’s not being captured and it’s can’t be reused and certainly there’s no visibility as to whether or not it’s giving bad advice to the customer.

 

Another implication is the ability to really just see how the agency is using the technology and what affect that has on average handling times and productivity. This is an example from British Telecom that they discovered that one of their call centers in the UK, the sales associates were 25 percent more productive in terms of the number of orders that they took at day. They were a consumer phasing retail telephone sales environment and when they started to look at why that was happening and what they found out that these particular call center agents were using the application or the system, which was a number of business software, differently. They weren’t using it the way they had been trained and not the way they have been designed but they had invented a work around that in fact was faster. So once the company had discovered that they were able to roll that out as best practice to all the other call centers which ended up impacting 300 agents in total and they calculated that it was equal to 75 full time equivalents.

 

 

It’s a very quick installation. Basically, a Knoa software agent gets deployed to each employee desktop and there is a software that needs to be installed on a server or a piece of equipment in their IT environment so that the data that we’re collecting can be stored somewhere and then the information is viewed through a Knoa dashboard which is a Web-based application so that anyone who has an Internet connection and the right permission can look at the information. Generally the implantations take 4-6 weeks.

 

The progression, looking at most of our call centers now, are just looking at what’s happening and the first step is just to see inside the average handling time and see how you can improve it and strip time out and see how you can implement best practice but, over time what the real value is correlating this information into the overall analytic strategy. So, a lot of information about a customer experience is picked up through survey techniques that are conducted far after the call. But being able to correlate the customers who had a higher rating in regards to customer experience were correlating with agents who used this kind of work flow or that kind of work flow who used the knowledge based platform when didn’t use it before, when you’re really able to correlate the actual performance of the end-user with the behaviors of the agent with the ultimate outcomes in terms of revenue, up-sale, customer experience, that’s kind of the end-game to really fine tune your performance enhancement program.

 

In a statement released by DMG, Donna Fluss, president of DMG explained that these solutions, like the Knoa EMP are already making positive contributions to contact centers and their customers.

 

DMG expects CEA and DA solutions to grow rapidly over the next three years, despite the recession. The number of CEA implementations is expected to approach 1,000 by the end of 2011. The number of DA seats is expected to exceed 1.5 million during the same period.