August 2000

BY JOHN KAISER, E-TALK CORPORATION

To be smart about your business, you must be smart about your customer contact center. After all, the customer contact center is a primary factor in customer relationship management (CRM). One way to ensure that your customer contact center enriches relationships with customers and positively impacts your company's bottom line is to manage the quality and performance of your contact center agents through effective monitoring and logging techniques.

Selecting the best monitoring and logging system for your contact center is crucial. According to the GartnerGroup, quality-monitoring software is a mission-critical CRM application necessary for world-class performance. While logging is usually done primarily for archival and financial purposes, monitoring is a proven way to keep track of agent performance and customer interaction. Together, logging and monitoring are a great way to collect important data about customers and the level of service your center is providing. Because it is automated and exact, a good monitoring and logging system can enable managers to spend more time coaching and developing better agents. In essence, an integrated monitoring and logging system can mean the difference between a loyal customer now and a lost customer later.

Simply recording the interactions between your agents and your customers is not enough. You need to capture all voice and computer desktop activity for a completely synchronized view of the entire customer interaction. By capturing the whole picture, you can also generate useful reports based on managed samples so you may analyze the data and make informed decisions regarding how your contact center is run. Monitoring and logging complement the recording process, and together they can achieve a complete performance management solution.

What To Look For
Setting new standards for performance entails monitoring for quality in both your voice and data transactions. But receiving the full benefit of service observation requires reporting capabilities that enhance the effectiveness of your quality program while reducing managerial burdens. You should also have the ability to automatically analyze agent trends and individual performance. When you have begun focusing on individual performance, you can quickly assess development needs and better target future training.

In other words, there are three steps to successful performance management: monitoring service, analyzing the results and educating your contact center team. The following checklist will guide you in selecting a system that goes beyond basic recording and empowers you to cost-effectively change the performance and the atmosphere of your contact center.

Data-Rich, Integrated Systems
A good system is integrated and can attach additional data from other customer management systems in your contact center. This feature can make tracking and locating recordings less time-consuming. These data-rich systems allow you to attach caller I.D. information as well as information such as skills data, collected from other applications throughout your performance and quality assurance systems. Advanced systems use computer-telephony integration (CTI) to determine the start and stop of a recording.

Managed Samples
The ability to generate a managed sampling is crucial. Managed systems allow you to capture and collect information that is spread out across a range of days and times. Unmanaged systems are less effective as they collect only consecutive recordings until the recording expires.

Scheduling And Reporting
The manner in which monitoring is scheduled and reported is critical to the effectiveness of a system. Random monitoring is ineffective because it lacks continuity and may not return the data you need to make management decisions about performance. Reporting should be extensive and flexible. From individual agent performance reports to group scores comparisons, the reports the system produces should guide your effort in training and coaching.

Connectivity To All Major ACDs
To protect your technology investments, connectivity to all major ACD systems is vital. Companies change their phone systems periodically as needs change and companies grow. Mergers and acquisitions may introduce additional and disparate systems. A performance management solution with universal connectivity allows standardization across an organization regardless of the ACD system used.

Phone Playback With Easy Access
The ability to play back voice sessions from any touch-tone telephone is a very important feature. This allows easy access for agents, supervisors and quality personnel as well as others outside the direct structure of the contact center. Senior executives, product managers and others can easily listen to these sessions to see how the interaction between agents and customers is affecting the company overall.

Automated Management
Automated functions simplify the management of recorded transaction files and save you time. Examples are automatically deleting played files after a specified time period expires and deleting files that have not been played within a certain interval.

Database Management
Managing the database of agents, supervisors, etc., is a part of system ownership. The database management functions should be designed to make this task as painless as possible. A common database shared by the recording and playback system, as well as the data screen capture and evaluation system, is critical. Wherever possible, open database technologies such as ODBC should be employed. Basic functions such as customer-enabled changes and printout of database contents and structures should not be overlooked.

Database Structure To Match Organizational Hierarchy
Contact centers have a particular hierarchy within their organizations. This involves agent groups, supervisors, etc. The performance management system must be flexible in its database structure to allow it to be matched to the existing organizational configuration. The database must accommodate database changes and additions easily and without the need for manufacturer intervention.

Workforce Management System Interface
The ability to interface with workforce management systems is important. Since scheduling is fundamental to quality monitoring, connectivity and interaction with forecasting and scheduling systems can help automate the scheduling functions. By importing agent work schedules, a "rules-based" scheduling function can be implemented. Once the quality system knows which agents are working when, scheduling parameters such as X times per day or week, appropriately distributed, can be requested and easily accomplished automatically by the system.

Flexible Screen Capture Options
Be aware of the options available when it comes to screen capture. Your business may require that all key strokes and mouse movements are recorded and played back exactly as the agent entered them. Or, you may need only screen snapshots. Advanced systems provide you with the opportunity to choose the best method for your needs and minimal network impact.

Annotation
Annotation is the ability for reviewers to add comments directly into recorded voice files. This allows others who subsequently play those files to hear the comments as a part of the original file. Coaching and training are greatly enhanced by this function.

Scoring And Analysis
Merely recording and playing back voice and/or data transactions is only the beginning of a performance management system. Scoring and analyzing the results help turn data into valuable information you can use to change your business. Analysis -- and the changes you put in place as a result -- must be part of the program for any real benefits to be realized.

Agents' interactions with customers must be analyzed in a number of ways. First, quality and productivity data must be collected. Automated forms are typically used to score the calls as they are reviewed. These must be flexible and able to accommodate a variety of question and answer types.

Productivity data must be automatically collected from a variety of sources such as the ACD management information system and other business information systems. The data should be populated into the quality performance database and used to balance against the quality measurement information.

Analysis tools must be provided to report and graph the data in various ways to facilitate analysis and comparison. The analysis tools must allow selection and sorting by various means to compare agents against standards, each other and similar groups within the organization.

Specific functions should be included to help determine training and coaching needs. A comprehensive system will show the areas where individual agents or groups of agents need additional training or coaching. It will also help analyze the results of the training and coaching.

Remember, calibration tools are very important to help ensure that reviewers are using the same criteria where appropriate and scoring agents the same way.

Export
An export facility for system data is very important. It is impossible to predict all the reporting and data combinations that will be required. With an appropriately flexible exporting capability, the data can be retrieved and exported into other data systems. These may be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet or as complex as a corporate data warehouse.

Using these tips can help you build a performance management system that will grow your business and grow with your business. With the right performance management system, you can empower everyone in your contact center and boost customer service levels -- while you create an enthusiastic environment for the entire organization.

Tips For Smart Shoppers
Think of your logging and monitoring system as an investment. Know which questions to ask, because a good logging and monitoring system is a solid foundation for performance and quality management.

• Talk to the leaders in the field when shopping for a monitoring and logging system. They can tell you where the technology has been and where it's going.
• Ask for client references. Look at other companies like yours and investigate the systems they are using.
• Be sure the vendor you choose truly understands logging and monitoring. Look at each application separately and be sure the system has both logging and monitoring capabilities and is not just a recording system being passed off as a monitoring and logging system.
• Ask about support options. Buying the product is only part of the battle. Maintaining the system and receiving good technical support will save you time, money and headaches.

John Kaiser is vice president and general manager of e-talk Corporation. Formed in 1983 under the name Teknekron Infoswitch, e-talk is a global provider of performance management solutions for call centers.

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