[November 30, 2004]

Is Your Contact Center Enterprise as Efficient as It Should Be?
The next “must have” technology for the contact center: Real-Time Business Optimization

By Bob Furniss, Touchpoint Associates, and Stuart Granger, Informiam

If you have management responsibility in a contact center, you know one thing for sure -- you are drowning in data. But at the same time, there never seems to be enough information to manage.

Ask yourself a couple of questions: How many spreadsheets have you reviewed this month to understand what’s happening in your contact centers? How many “real-time reports” have you received on paper or as an e-mail attachment? How many of these reports were really “recent-history” reports?

In many contact centers, problem identification and root cause analysis for both business and technical issues still takes way too long. This creates extended periods of poorly optimized operations that cost organizations millions of dollars a year in lost productivity, lowered customer service and higher operating costs. Contact centers are known for using innovative technologies to squeeze every last ounce of efficiency out of their agents and communications infrastructure, but most managers and executives are stuck in the past when it comes to managing real-time operating problems. A Fortune 100 contact center executive may have summed it up best when he said, “Most days I feel like I am trying to drive my operations forward by looking in my rear-view mirror”.

Much of the difficulty stems from two main problems. First, getting to the root of an issue in today’s complex web of interdependent systems takes time -- in many cases too much time. The second issue is that trying to analyze these environments through printed or Web-based reports and historical data only creates a snapshot of what was.

Industry expert Bob Furniss, President of Touchpoint Associates, has seen this problem in contact centers for years. What we really need, Bob feels, is the equivalent of “live video” of what is happening RIGHT NOW -- across all contact centers and systems -- across the entire enterprise. Essentially, contact centers need to move from a “rear-view mirror” look at operations to a “heads-up display” system. Fortunately, there are new technology solutions emerging to help solve this problem. Known as Real-Time Business Optimization or RTBO, these next generation management and analytics solutions promise to do for contact center operations what the spreadsheet did for the calculator.

RTBO brings together information from all core systems to provide a real dashboard of “right-now” information in the contact center. Information is presented in a new format and helps managers make decisions based on pre-designed decision-points. RTBO allows companies to create “if-then” decision trees that monitor the business from the inside. Decisions can then be made based on how customers view the company from the outside.

According to Bob, we often get wrapped-up in the need to meet internal goals and metrics but forget the reason we set the goals in the first place -- the customer experience. With the right dashboard, we can see how changes in areas like sales, marketing and training are affecting the contact center and the overall customer experience.

In essence RTBO combines some of the advanced analytical features of Business Intelligence (BI) tools with the event management sophistication of enterprise management products to deliver a new breed of management solution. You will not get RTBO from BI tools alone because they are mostly focused around relational data, and many systems in the contact center don’t produce or rely on relational data. Enterprise management tools are unable to do it alone because they are not designed to analyze and correlate complex workflows and business relationships. RTBO solutions are uniquely positioned among today’s technology solutions to enable contact centers to quickly identify, understand and resolve critical events that impact a center’s operations.

RTBO in Action: Decision Process Reduced From 35 Minutes to 2 Minutes.

Let’s look at an example of how RTBO can reduce problem management cycles in a contact center. In one recent example of success, an organization with multiple centers saw a surprising increase in the number of customers on hold. Before RTBO, the workforce manager had to recognize service levels were dropping and begin reviewing Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) reports across all three contact centers along with workforce management reports to understand what was causing the problem. The ACD report showed no increase in contact volume over forecasts. The workforce management system (WFS) showed that attendance shrinkage was within guidelines. However, the ACD reports showed that there were fewer people logged in across the enterprise than what was allocated in the WFS forecast. Further review showed there was a problem in the Phoenix contact center. A call to the Phoenix contact center revealed that several teams were taken off the phone for required product training. The entire process took 35 minutes.

With the right RTBO solution, the system would have been monitoring the situation based on pre-defined parameters. Within seconds of the agents logging off the phones for training, the problem would have been analyzed and notification would have been sent to the workforce manager. A decision would have been made and the problem corrected within a couple of minutes -- all without manual intervention or review of historical reports.

Another example relates to managing unexpected changes in call volume. Many contact centers have a goal to improve the efficiency of their agents by having them perform off-line work when inbound call volume is below expected levels. Managers use the workforce management tool, intraday forecasts, and ACD reports to analyze the data that predicts trends, detects status of agents, makes decisions on how many people should go off-line, and have supervisors notify the specific agents. This lengthy, manual and random process is cumbersome at best and usually unrealistic in most of today’s fast paced environments.

An RTBO solution, however, can consistently monitor the overall duration of idle agents, detect available agents for more than an acceptable period and direct those agents to log off and proceed with off-line activities. It then automatically notifies supervisors as to which agents have complied with the request. This entire process is conducted without any human intervention. Additionally, RTBO notifies the agents when to resume taking calls when call volumes pickup.

If you think this sounds too good to be true, think again. Best practice companies are already starting to deploy such solutions. Recently one of the largest U.S. wireless service providers implemented a RTBO solution to monitor national operations in real time and has seen dramatic service improvements. An independent consulting organization calculated their five-year savings on the project at over $6.5 million dollars with a payback period of less than 10 months.

RTBO has the unique ability to bring sweeping changes to contact center productivity because it can reach beyond the limitations of existing reporting and management processes. Gartner Group predicted that by the end of this year, over 30% of the Global 2000 CIO’s will list a project similar to this as one of their top five initiatives.

The current and foreseeable economic climate demands that companies re-assess their business processes to see where they can gain a competitive edge, lower costs and maximize revenue opportunities. Just as heads-up displays were developed to help fighter pilots keep their eyes focused forward on their mission, RTBO is poised to help contact center professionals keep their eyes focused on running their operations, not looking down to review reports and search through spreadsheets. Now it’s up to you to decide which direction you want to look, backwards or forwards?