How “Real Time” Is Revolutionizing The Contact Center: The Essential Role Of Real-Time Analytics, Reporting, Scheduling And Training

By: Patrick Botz,Voice Print International, Inc.

Up until a few years ago, the contact center was an overlooked and relatively untapped source of business intelligence.The full extent of its value to the enterprise as a whole has only come to light in recent years, mainly due to the emergence of technologies that enable organizations to capture and meaningfully evaluate multimedia interactions. These days, various workforce optimization applications are routinely used in contact centers worldwide. However,most of these technologies fail to leverage one of the contact center's most unique characteristics — it operates in real time, therefore it offers incredible potential to provide valuable, up-to-the-minute intelligence that can impact and influence the performance of every sector of the enterprise. With the advent of real-time performance management solutions such as business analytics and automated agent coaching, the contact center is finally being recognized as a missioncritical business intelligence center that delivers a strategic advantage to the enterprise as a whole. Indeed, real-time intelligence garnered from customer interactions can be leveraged to improve managerial decisions and investments made by strategic departments such as sales, marketing, human resources, research and development, finance, operations, etc.

Avoid Disasters. Optimize Opportunities.
The contact center is fed a constant diet of real-time customer intelligence. It is uniquely positioned to channel this real-time information to the rest of the organization.By reacting promptly and appropriately to real-time intelligence, an organization can optimize an opportunity or avoid a potential disaster. For example, if a decision or action made at the corporate level — such as a poorly executed marketing campaign, procedural fiasco or unpopular policy implementation — is resulting in an inordinate number of customer complaints, a real-time performance management solution will immediately identify this development as it is actually unfolding and send an alert to the appropriate department.The situation can then be addressed and agents can be promptly advised about how to best handle those specific customer complaints.Without real-time solutions in place, can you imagine the massive losses that would come to light in the days, weeks or even months before the problem has even been properly identified?

In addition to averting disaster, real-time performance management solutions can help organizations take advantage of rare and fleeting opportunities. Early recognition of customer trends can provide a major competitive advantage. For example, as a direct result of a competitor having implemented a price increase or a change in the scope of service, your agents might suddenly find themselves handling an unusually high volume of new orders from the competitor's disgruntled customers. A real-time performance management solution can alert you to this trend, sending a report in which you can actually drill down to individual agent/customer calls that have resulted in a sale, listen to the conversations and discover what the customer is responding to and why: the actual root cause of the customer behavior. This information can be used immediately to strengthen and focus your current campaigns, thus increasing profit margins and customer satisfaction. Simultaneously, automated business rules will trigger the delivery of targeted training materials directly to the desktops of the agents in specific skills groups, helping them to close future sales.In addition to averting disaster, real-time performance management solutions can help organizations take advantage of rare and fleeting opportunities. Early recognition of customer trends can provide a major competitive advantage. For example, as a direct result of a competitor having implemented a price increase or a change in the scope of service, your agents might suddenly find themselves handling an unusually high volume of new orders from the competitor's disgruntled customers. A real-time performance management solution can alert you to this trend, sending a report in which you can actually drill down to individual agent/customer calls that have resulted in a sale, listen to the conversations and discover what the customer is responding to and why: the actual root cause of the customer behavior. This information can be used immediately to strengthen and focus your current campaigns, thus increasing profit margins and customer satisfaction. Simultaneously, automated business rules will trigger the delivery of targeted training materials directly to the desktops of the agents in specific skills groups, helping them to close future sales.

Real-Time Performance Management — The Driving Force Behind Successful Workforce Optimization
Advanced, real-time performance management applications can collect data and present real-time and historical performance information to agents, managers and executives within the contact center environment.Key performance indicators (KPIs), quality scores, scheduling information and service-level indicators can be distributed to contact center personnel using desktop dashboards,Web-based consolidated reporting and television monitor display systems. Superior solutions can monitor both telephony and business metrics in real time — providing the tools to leverage that information into business intelligence that can dramatically enhance contact center and business performance. In addition to enabling contact center managers to deliver real-time multimedia training to agent desktops on a schedule- or rules-driven basis, track agent improvements over time, quickly identify training weaknesses and flaws and implement prompt remedial measures, real-time performance management applications enable management to gauge the effectiveness of sales and service tools such as scripting, training, calling lists, etc. By integrating a workforce management application with a real-time performance management solution, contact centers can take advantage of real-time agent productivity tracking, multimedia agent training and agent performance reporting tools.

Automated Agent Coaching — A Powerful Alternative To Traditional Training
A study by the Olsten Corporation, a provider of staffing services to multinational companies, found that contact centers that implement a specific training regimen for at least one month have an annual turnover rate of 20 percent versus 55 percent for those companies with less training. In a sales environment, an investment in ongoing sales training will directly increase your close rates. Providing agents with new product information increases first-call resolution and decreases the costs associated with callbacks. Better trained agents provide better customer service, which customers view as a significant differentiator in a competitive market. Proactive computer-based coaching is the
most efficient training method for training agents in a contact center — far more effective than traditional classroom training. Successful agent coaching is embedded in the processes, projects and experiences of a business and can be customized and distributed quickly and easily. Considering the logistical challenges of scheduling hundreds of agents with multiple shifts into a classroom, it becomes evident that automated coaching provides companies with a powerful alternative or complement to traditional learning.

Workforce Management — A Fundamental Essential
By integrating a workforce management solution with real-time contact center analytics and agent coaching solutions, organizations can take advantage of real-time agent productivity tracking, multimedia agent training and agent performance reporting tools. In addition to optimizing agent scheduling, they can also improve agent productivity and accountability. For example, when the agents who are not adhering to schedules have been identified, managers can automatically deliver scheduleadherence training to these agents through the integrated agent coaching module. Contact centers can enable agents to see key personal performance metrics such as average talk time, average wrap time and calls handled in real time by displaying schedule-related data and messages on agents' dashboards. If the workforce management scheduling system is linked at the back end, the dashboard can be used to broadcast scheduling changes, solicit overtime volunteers and issue scheduling reminders on an agent-by-agent basis without any interruptions to call handling.

Delivering The Right Information To The Right People At The Right Time
Real-time workforce optimization solutions were designed to adhere to a very simple philosophy: to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time, thus stimulating dramatic improvements in quality and production. Although the actual systems and software are remarkably sophisticated and highly advanced, analytics and agent coaching and training solutions are quite simple to implement and use. The ability to efficiently access, analyze, share and leverage valuable business intelligence in real time can make a substantial impact on your bottom-line — increasing customer confidence, maximizing productivity and dramatically improving workforce performance — all of which will inevitably culminate in increased revenue and greater profitability. Dramatic improvements in agent quality, performance and efficiency lead to reduced agent attrition rates, which in turn result in a contact center comprised of experienced, highly trained agents.

Leaving Behind The Days Of “Data Rich, Information Poor”
Call centers have always been bursting with data. These data included information acquired during inbound or outbound telephone calls, e-mail, written communication from postal mail or faxes, order and invoice information, details about returned merchandise or cancelled service. It's always been there, it's just that generally, all the puzzle pieces of the customer relationship resided in different databases, and never were those databases to meet. In fact, if a customer had two separate relationships with a company (a checking account and a mortgage with a bank, for example), you could probably double the amount and the disparity of piecemeal information. It was akin to being a millionaire, but with one dollar resting in a million separate accounts with a million different banks. Sure, you're a millionaire…but it would be prohibitively expensive to actually get the money out. A customer would spend more trying to attain the money than he possessed in the first place. Modern contact center technologies have gone a long way toward putting an end to the old "data rich, information poor" scenario. Newer technologies have aggregated all customer information so it's easily usable for both maintaining and building the customer relationship properly and training and keeping agents. The availability of real-time data and the ability to mine those data, coupled with high-quality analytics and a common-sense (and customizable) method to deliver meaningful information to managers, supervisors and agents have made all the difference in the world to both customers and agents.

Too often, companies perceive improving the customer experience and increasing agent performance and retention as two separate activities — possibly even mutually exclusive to one another. This is most certainly not the case.What's good for customers is also good for agents (and vice-versa, of course).Nothing will burn out quality agents faster than a lack of information and tools to serve the customer properly. This lack of meaningful, real-time data will lead to customer exasperation and rudeness to the agent,which will in turn increase agent stress levels and negatively affect call center staff performance.When agents feel ill-prepared and poorly equipped, it will show in their performance, and it will ultimately lead to the kind of nightmare agent turnover that was common in the "boiler room" call centers of the 1980s — turnover in excess of 200 percent per year or more.We often hear the adage that it costs much more to keep an existing customer than to prospect a new one.What many people in the call center industry forget is that this is also the case with agents, but the costs of attaining a new agent are far higher than those of attaining a new customer. Providing agents with the right information and the right tools,when they need them,will by definition improve customer relationships and loyalty…a true case of "one thing leads to another." Your agents are your emissaries…the face of your business.Not supporting them with all the tools in the modern call center's toolkit to do their jobs properly
is as good as hanging up on your customers.

The author may be reached at [email protected].

Patrick Botz serves as global director of marketing for Voice Print International, (news - alert) a global provider of interactions recording and workforce optimization solutions for contact centers. Voice Print has partnered with Pipkins (news - alert) and Syntora (news - alert) to develop Solution Made Easy — a tightly integrated, modular suite of award-winning contact center solutions for call recording, quality monitoring, workforce management, performance management, speech analytics and agent coaching. Visit http://www.SolutionMadeEasy.com (news - alert) or call 866-596-EASY for more information on Solution Made Easy — Your One Stop Workforce Optimization Shop.