April 1999

Customer Interaction Recording: Your Key To Measuring Service Performance

BY OSCAR ALBAN, WITNESS SYSTEMS, INC.

A great deal has been written about the evolution our industry is experiencing as we provide more and more avenues for customer contact. As organizations strive for competitive advantage, industry analysts agree that call center agents will be increasingly challenged with handling cross-medium interactions (e-mail, Web, fax, etc.).

Your call center may route specific interactions to the agent with the appropriate skills or even have a few talented "universal" agents who can handle any meda. Either way, these new interaction points into call centers are important for the sake of enhanced customer service, which in many cases is a company's sole point of competitive distinction.

If customer service representatives (CSRs) are going to be summoned to respond to these new channels of communication, how are we going to prepare them and help them improve their performance? You want to ensure your CSRs are meeting your quality standards, regardless of how they are interfacing with your customers.

Many of your customers relish the opportunity to communicate with you via e-mail or fax. But how are you responding to them using these media? Are your CSRs consistent in their responses? When communicating via e-mail or the Web, are you maintaining the sound reputation for quality service that your company has established through voice interactions? Are you able to see and measure exactly how well your agents are performing?

Like most companies, you are probably performing some type of call monitoring to coach your CSRs and improve call quality. Is that really enough as your call center increases its avenues of communication? As call centers continue to expand their contact mechanisms, recording is fast becoming an urgent need. It is not only basic call recording, but customer interaction recording that will become key.

Get Started With Synchronized Voice And Data
Over the next several years, industry analysts from the META Group contend that interactions will be observed and recorded "cradle to grave" (i.e., from interaction entry through call resolution). Having this information will not only help your supervisors and call center managers train your CSRs, it will also help senior management gauge the overall performance of your company's service delivery.

Recording your customer interactions will provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of your service operations. Customer interaction recording software will record and evaluate complete customer contact across a variety of media.

Already available today are voice and data recording applications, the most effective of which boast a multitude of installations where customers are using the synchronized voice and data recordings in a production environment as coaching and training tools. Securing a client/server voice and data recording solution is a critical first step toward a full-fledged customer interaction recording environment.

Data recording is crucial because in addition to seeing how well your agents are verbally interacting with your customers, you want to know how well they are using your in-house software applications for taking orders and providing customer service. By capturing agent screen activity, you can train agents to navigate screens more effectively and see that they are using your software to its fullest potential. The most effective and advanced data-capture techniques will capture only changed areas of the screen to minimize your network utilization, as opposed to remote-control capture methods that tax network resources and offer a less fluid presentation of the captured data.

From Event Monitoring To Business-Driven Recording
Some recording applications available now can perform random monitoring based on specific events, such as dialed number identification service (DNIS). By recognizing any incoming calls delivered to a particular CSR from the automatic call distributor (ACD) as an event, call center managers can hone in on specific campaigns or callers. Other event-monitoring examples include call centers that want to track a certain caller using automatic number identification (ANI) or customer account numbers. This approach helps call center managers gauge customer service delivery by collecting historical data on customer interactions.

Next-generation customer interaction recording solutions will take the recording process one step further. Your recording software will soon have the capability to recognize specific call information -- such as call type, dollar value per call or sales volume per agent -- which will activate customer interaction recordings. Whether your CSRs are interacting with customers via the Web, e-mail or a traditional call, recording will begin when the business rules (i.e., call types) are initiated. Who establishes the business rules that trigger the recordings? That information is supplied by you and your call center management team.

Center managers will then be able to review these recordings and link them to evaluation and reporting software for agent analysis. Your quality monitoring software may already include a module that facilitates review, evaluation and scoring of agents, providing immediate performance summaries. Those software products that have custom design capabilities can enhance the way your call center measures productivity. By customizing the reports and graphs to meet your exact specifications, your supervisors will become more productive and have the right tools for improved coaching sessions.

The next level of analysis from your customer interaction recordings will combine scores from your monitoring sessions with other performance data, such as ACD or workforce management information. The software will then produce customized graphs and reports showcasing service delivery and perhaps even recommend specific courses of action to improve service performance. This is valuable information to help management make proactive decisions that enhance the business.

Conclusion
If your organization is focused on progressing to a comprehensive customer contact center, now is the time to begin researching the technology needed to record your customer interactions. A good starting point is securing an integrated voice-and-data monitoring solution that has the underlying architecture and clear future direction to support customer interaction recording capabilities.

Oscar Alban is a former call center director for one of the nation's leading telecommunications companies and is currently the director of product management for Witness Systems, Inc. and its WITNESS customer interaction recording software. Witness Systems is located in Alpharetta, Georgia.