Join VPI and Straumann for an exciting webinar showcasing the powerful reporting solutions for Cisco UCC Contact Centers. You'll learn how Cisco and VPI helped Straumann develop and award-winning real-time contact center performance reporting solution.

Date: Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Time: 1:00 PM ET, 10:00 AM PT
Register here.

Now you can get even more value from your Cisco UCC Express (UCCX) or UCC Enterprise (UCCE) investment. VPI, a Cisco Solution Developer, VIP and SIP Partner, has integrated its award-winning VPI Performance contact center reporting and performance management software application with Cisco. This functionality complements and enhances the UCCX and UCCE platforms greatly by consolidating data and presenting actionable, real-time information in the form of Web dashboards, interactive reports, scorecards and desktop tickers to empower contact center managers, supervisors and agents to make better, quicker decisions.

Learn how Cisco and VPI customer Straumann, a global leader in dental implant solutions and restorative dentistry, enhanced the capabilities of its Cisco Unified Contact Center system and operations with VPI’s award-winning real-time Cisco reporting software solution.

Register to attend the complimentary Webinar, hosted by subject matter experts from Straumann and VPI, to learn how you can:

• Create and report on metrics based on Cisco UCCX, UCCE and other contact center data (CRM, ERP, QA, WFM) to meet business objectives.
• Report across multiple teams and queues, locations and Cisco UCCX/UCCE systems to get a holistic view of contact center operations.
• Perform true historical reporting with unlimited data collection – get insights into trending over time and a historically accurate representation of your agents’ group assignments.
• Create flexible grouping structures to report on groups and teams in any manner that makes most sense to your business.
• Drill through layers of data for root cause analysis and trigger targeted alerts, notifications and Coaching assignments based on performance thresholds to promptly correct performance gaps.

Scheduling Conflict? Register for the Webinar and we'll send you the recorded version.

Presenters:

Carlo Wise - IT Specialist, Straumann

Carlo Wise serves as a senior IT Specialist at Straumann, a global leader in dental implant solutions and restorative dentistry, leveraging his strong background in all facets of telephony and network systems integration. He is an experienced IT and Contact Center professional with over 16 years of experience in supporting and implementing Contact Center technologies in small to large Contact Center environments. Mr. Wise holds a variety of industry certifications, including Cisco, CompTIA and Redhat.

Delee Shields - Channel Sales Director, VPI
 
Delee has been instrumental in working closely with Cisco in developing VPI's Cisco Developer Network (CDN) Solution Developer, Value Incentive (VIP) and Solutions Incentive (SIP) partnership programs. She is responsible for working hand-in-hand with Cisco customers and channel partners through the entire sales process. She has extensive knowledge of Cisco Unified Communications product platforms and is highly experienced in Cisco reporting software, Cisco call recording software, workforce optimization, VoIP, LAN, WAN, MAN and wireless solution design. Prior to joining VPI as a sales engineer in 2007, she worked in sales and sales engineering capacities promoting Cisco solutions as well as earning her Cisco CCNA and CCNP certifications.

Just like a home that sometimes needs to be refreshed, traditional quality assurance has reached a fork in the road of its 30-year life. Now's the perfect time to re-evaluate the way we monitor and measure our call center agents and “cleaning house” in the Quality Assurance (QA) department to make room for analytics-oriented QA tools and best practices. By implementing this makeover in your contact center, you can radically reduce manual steps required by most QA applications by more than 60 percent. And, who among us can’t use 60% less manual work?

Get started with these key items of focus in the new article 'Extreme Makeover: Contact Center QA Edition' authored by Patrick Botz, VP of Workforce Optimization at VPI, featured this month’s issue of Contact Center Association’s Inbound Magazine:

• Random Selection = Random Results The focus is no longer just on recording calls or randomly checking on how well agents adhere to scripts and policies, but rather upon prioritizing customer interactions according to their business value – so that every minute of the in-depth quality evaluation is optimized by its potential to deliver business insights.
• Embrace the New Generation of QA The new generation of QA goes far beyond internal agent compliance – representing a rebirth and evolution of the concept of QA designed to meet the needs of today‘s contact centers. The new, intelligent QA systems rapidly identify and deliver insights into critical business issues and opportunities to improve the customer experience and revenue.
• Using Analytics to Focus QA on Desired Business Outcomes Tagging data directly from desktop screen analytics enables you to focus your QA resources on calls with outcomes such as: Was the call put on hold? Was it transferred? What level of employee was it handled by? Was it a VIP customer? Was there a sale or no sale? What was the value of the sale?
• Re-evaluate your current QA Evaluation Forms As your business evolves every year, so should your QA forms. Ask questions on your call center quality assurance forms that are interesting to your business. Any question that makes the form should be owned and some should be held accountable for that question. For example, if “Upselling” falls below a certain threshold, who is accountable for making sure that agents are being properly coached and trained on upselling? And consider using different QA forms for different call types to get more valuable information from your QA program.
• Rapidly Close Skill Gaps With an automated QA solution, instead of flying blind, every agent, supervisor and executive gets their own personalized desktop ticker, dashboard and scorecard displaying all the metrics or KPIs on which they’re measured in real-time. This level of transparency often leads to improved agent satisfaction and supervisor efficiency.

Spring cleaning may not have been enough this year. Is it time for an Extreme Makeover: QA Edition in your contact center? Check out the full article here. What are you doing to keep your contact center quality assurance program fresh?

I recently attended the Avaya Evolutions Conference in Toronto at the Metro Convention Center and had the opportunity to discuss the latest technology trends and best practices of Avaya partners and hearing success stories directly from satisfied customers.

It was insightful to hear from leaders on the direction of the industry as it embraces another exciting year ahead in Canada. I learnt how organizations in today’s turbulent economy have used these practical tips for improving their overall effectiveness through VPI products on the Avaya platform.

VPI has been a dedicated Avaya DevConnect Gold Partner since 2002 and has fully integrated its award-winning VPI Performance real-time reporting and performance management software with Avaya Communication Manager.

VPI Performance consolidates and presents real-time information to empower contact center managers, supervisors and agents in several integrated ways to help them make better, quicker decisions with actionable, targeted performance and business intelligence. Included in this robust suite are 18 Avaya CMS reports, over 40 Avaya CMS metrics for use in customizable scorecards and desktop tickers, and a messaging and alerting capability.

This functionality supplements the Avaya Communication Manager platform greatly and has been a valuable asset to many Avaya customers in achieving their objectives. Regardless of the industry—an effective deployment requires the right partner like VPI who has insight on the right improvement methodologies and talented resources available with the highest impact and most cost-effective resourcing opportunities.

VPI Performance consolidates and presents real-time information to empower contact center managers, supervisors and agents in several integrated ways to help them make better, quicker decisions with actionable, targeted performance and business intelligence. Included are 18 Avaya CMS reports, over 40 Avaya CMS metrics for use in customizable scorecards and desktop tickers, and a messaging and alerting capability.

In a turbulent and volatile economy, organizations still must strive to improve their business environments using these tools and strategies to develop their skilled workforce while automating routine tasks and processes.

This is where I believe VPI can greatly enhance an organization find ways to enhance their overall operational effectiveness with our wide range of products and professional services.

Here are some important capabilities that I believe, that VPI Performance offers beyond standard Avaya CMS reporting capabilities:

1. Gather Performance Information from Additional Contact Center Systems – VPI Performance can bring in meaningful data and metrics from other sources – including other business systems (CRM, ERP, WFM, etc.) and other VPI modules (Quality, Coaching) and in a timely and relevant manner for each user – to Avaya CMS to get a fully consolidated view of the contact center which is critical in today’s environments.
   
2. Easily Report Across Multiple Teams Across Multiple Queues, Multiple Locations and Even Multiple Avaya CMS Systems – Managers get a single, holistic and enterprise-wide view of their contact center operations across several work groups and channels. 
   
3. Create Custom Metrics based on Avaya CMS and Other Contact Center Data to Meet Business Objectives, then report on those metrics displayed in a variety of formats including real-time Web dashboard charts, scorecards and desktop tickers. No need to rely on raw Avaya CMS data alone.
   
4. Presents Information Instantly in Real-time – no need to rely on IT or reporting analysts to pull together information, by downloading it, adding to Excel, and preparing for management.
   
5. Off-loads the Burden on the Avaya CMS Server – all reporting is performed within VPI Performance. This saves time and money when creating reports for senior leaders.
   
6. Create Flexible Grouping Structures to Report on Groups and Teams in any Manner that Makes Most Sense to the Business – managers are not used to seeing reports by a single queue only. For example, most contact centers will have a team of agents that handle calls from multiple queues. VPI reports give managers a true view into an individual agent’s performance thereby the true measure of their individual performance.
   
7. Create a Flexible, Hierarchical Grouping of Split/Skills – Allows users to reorganize and consolidate data across multiple splits. Multiple hierarchies can be created to provide different views of split data. This is helpful when split/skills are created by IT and don't directly map to business measurements.
   
8. Reports Present a Historically Accurate Representation of an Agent's Group Assignment – team data is retained as agents are moved to different teams, something that is often asked by managers especially when skilled agents are moved around to help call loads.
   
9. No Limitation on the Amount of Contact Center Data Collected or How Long it is Stored – managers can do true historical reporting on consolidated contact center metrics (such as sales conversions, CSAT, emails, Web chats, etc. in addition to CMS call metrics), giving them insight into trending over time, or simply giving them the option to pull reports on older data. With VPI Performance, interval-based data is retained indefinitely.
   
10.   All Group and Agent Data can be Controlled and Dispersed Based on User Profiles and Permissions – this type of reporting flexibility allows contact centers to mitigate and contain risks and unwanted breached caused by agents. 
    
11.   Ability to Deliver Targeted Alerts, Notifications and Optional E-Coaching Assignments based on Performance Thresholds to promptly correct performance gaps while at the same time keeping a watchful eye out for situations that are creating issues for agents.

I found that VPI’s Call Center Reporting and Call Center Coaching Software are perceived as a cultural transformation within the contact centers by their leaders who are deeply appreciative of VPI. We have trained their Supervisory staff and Managers in powerful work habits that are easy to describe on a large scale and on a regular basis. For example, coaching, performance management, feedback sessions, formal rewards, and people development are now part of our customers’ culture where one did not exist. Such developments have strongly motivated our team of developers, our managers and most importantly the front-line agents, which is our ultimate goal.

Renowned contact center market research firm Pelorus Associates just published a new and exciting resource guide on the use of analytics in the contact center. In it, they discuss 7 problems that can easily be solved with desktop analytics:

1. Measurement and analysis of first call resolution (FCR)
2. More effective agent evaluations
3. Optimizing call handle time
4. Campaign analysis
5. Identification of at-risk customers
6. Collections optimization and compliance
7. Achieving PCI-DSS compliance

Chief analyst and author Dick Bucci does a great job of illustrating the power of contact center analytics by describing the challenges faced by the contact centers of a fictional cable company. By digging deeper, desktop analytics like VPI Fact Finder can, for example, identify outstanding agents out of seemingly poor-looking call handle time statistics by uncovering call types, processes, and policies that are unnecessarily increasing handle time. Other compelling examples include the poor results of a marketing campaign that were turned around once analysis showed that agents were having to return calls due to lack of training. Once the agents received proper training, the campaign met its revenue goals.

Another powerful capability of call center analytics is providing more effective agent evaluations. The primary aim of these evaluations should be to improve performance by identifying specific target areas for coaching and training support. Call center analytics software allows for selection of call monitoring on the basis of several criteria, including call type, call length, repeat callers, customer type, disposition code, credit score, account balance, and many others. You can even combine criteria to track very specific types of calls.

Finally, desktop analytics is a critical factor in increasing collections while maintaining compliance with federal regulations.  It can help to identify best practices that help speed collection of overdue accounts and ensure that all contacts made are within compliance guidelines.

Download your complimentary copy of the guide 'How to Solve 7 Everyday Contact Center Problems with Analytics' now to learn how you can put this powerful tool to work in your contact center.

Leading industry analyst firm, Gartner, predicts that employees will account for up to 80 percent of contact center budgets in the increasingly demanding world of customer interaction. Such a substantial investment cannot be left to chance, yet, it is often an area that is overlooked and rarely reviewed by managers.

Like many other industries in which employee performance is crucial to the customer experience, the utility industry provides an essential commodity to the public. As they are often under intense scrutiny, utility companies must also take steps to minimize their exposure to liability issues. For utilities that provide direct service to retail power customers, the large volume of customer service calls they manage demands both courtesy and accuracy on the part of call center agents. And, consequently, their contact centers need reliable and effective quality monitoring and training solutions. Similarly, "upstream" energy providers specializing in transmitting power to other utilities need interaction recording systems to accurately record 100% of their service and event calls to and from their technicians (and other utilities) for liability protection and to recreate major incidents.

By now, most successful utility contact centers have already adopted baseline call recording and quality monitoring solutions –  the fundamental building blocks for any type of workforce optimization solution. However, although useful, these solutions can be of limited value if they are outdated, early generation quality monitoring applications,  and may be due for review and reevaluation..

The good news is that quality assurance technologies have evolved significantly. They have now reached  the point where they can enable contact centers to focus the entire process on what really matters and what can make the biggest impact on business performance – all without losing objectivity in the assessment of agent performance.

Anticipate and Plan for Agent Satisfaction to Maximize Operations and the Customer Experience

Customer service and help desk environments have traditionally been known as high-turnover environments, where employees tend to consider their positions to be transient or temporary. There are many things that contact centers can do to overcome this challenge.

To anticipate and reduce  turnover, it is best to give agents some time away from the phone for cross-training and multi-skilling. Allowing agents to respond to email or perform other administrative duties while they are mastering the skills of becoming expert contact center professionals makes their jobs feel more fulfilling and enables them to provide a better customer experience.

It is also crucial to provide ongoing training. This will keep agents engaged, alert and empowered to quickly and accurately resolve customer issues. In fact, with today’s tightly integrated quality monitoring and coaching software tools, skill development can be highly personalized according to the needs and objectives of each agent.

The Right Technology Can Help

In addition to process improvements, implementation of the latest technologies can be crucial to the continued success of utility contact centers. When liability and accuracy are the challenges, it is vital to adopt an interactions recording solution that can record 100 percent of calls and data interactions. Using an advanced telephone call recording solution, utility companies can determine what to retain, for how long, and on which storage device by implementing flexible, intelligent business rules. Recordings can be unified across audio and data sources and multiple locations while users can freely search, locate, playback and share using instant searches and filters.

The beauty of a completely integrated suite of workforce optimization applications is the interoperability. Each technology application – recording, QA, performance management, analytics, coaching, E-earning – has valuable capabilities, but multiple solutions can work symbiotically to provide even greater results. Beyond the immediate improvements in contact center performance and lowering operating costs, workforce optimization solutions allow for quick decision making, which helps resolve customer issues.

By adopting advanced technologies for monitoring quality and optimizing customer service — including analytics-driven call center quality assurance systems that help identify and automate routine contact center tasks — utility companies can dramatically improve performance and profitability. The decision to choose one solution instead of another depends on the specific utility’s needs, goals and circumstances. However, with modular workforce optimization software suites, there is a sensible, financially sound path for every budget and objective.

In an already competitive and crowded marketplace, organizations today are continuously seeking ways to lower operating costs and increase revenues. The landscape has changed dramatically in the past decade. Organizations  are closely scrutinized by regulators and consumers who have high expectations from outsourced partners and 3^rd party vendors. In the wake of  the global financial crisis that has negatively impacted some of the world’s leading economies, organizations are starting to revisit their strategy, in terms of outsourcing contact center contracts, and demanding more than just cost savings. This mindset is now creating concerns among outsourcers and 3^rd party vendors, who can no longer attract and maintain their customer base just on the basis of their ability to provide a cost savings advantage.

The role of the contact center has undergone a dramatic shift from that of a cost center to that of a profit and value center. In light of this new pressure to provide greater value, outsourcers are now responding to their clients’ raised expectations by implementing increasingly complex solutions.   Despite the proliferation of e-commerce and digital technology, one fundamental principle remains consistent: Outsourcers are key strategic partners for organizations to deliver value by focusing their operations on attracting, fulfilling and retaining high value and loyal customers. As a result, the fragile relationship in which the outsourced operation manages its entire resources is critical to the client and their customer base. Outsourcers are beginning to recognize the positive correlation between customer experience, employee engagement and increased revenues, even in a stagnant condition within the economy.

Today's unpredictable, volatile and increasingly competitive economic climate continues to add to the pressure to decrease costs and increase revenues while simultaneously delivering higher than normal levels of customer service. Following are five ways for outsourcers to reduce contact center operational costs while at the same time “delighting” clients with superior levels of service. Think of each recommendation as an idea worthy of consideration and capable of standing on its own merit, yet part of an overall strategy addressing the optimal performance of the contact center.

1) Make agent attrition rates a KPI – The management of retention in an outsourced contact center has the most significant impact on payroll costs and profitability. While HR may be generally involved with the recruitment, selection and hiring of staff, the key driver in agent satisfaction lies in the knowledge and capability of their line managers. High performing outsourced operations invest in the training and development of their team leaders and supervisors to ensure that they have the necessary tools and resources to support agents. As a result, high performing outsourced contact centers build scorecards and other intervention tools to ensure that the overall strategic goals of the contact center are met.

2) Ensure that you're measuring the metrics that really matter – It is crucial to select meaningful and effective metrics necessary to enhance performance that lead to customer satisfaction. It is important to maintain the discipline of reviewing these metrics using a rigorous methodology that is adopted across all levels of the contact center and links desired behaviors necessary to meet organizational objectives. A sample list of metrics for outsourced operations should be reviewed as business needs change and fluctuate. Typically high performing providers link their operational objectives to their clients and review these over Business Review Meetings and Quarterly Reviews for alignment.

3) Eliminate guess work by implementing real-time reports, tickers and scorecards – Outsourced operations that implement rigorous, regular performance scorecards and analysis consistently outperform mediocre centers due to their speed and reaction time advantage. Weekly or daily historical reporting in a dynamic, ever-changing environment is neither effective nor efficient for the purpose of determining the tactics needed to address a particular situation where calls spike unexpectedly. If managers receive real-time reports on the performance of their operations by agent group or skill, they are able to rapidly make strategic decisions without impacting service levels. Often, these tactics are overlooked and end up costing contact centers more money than they had forecasted. Avoid red flags and those repeated frantic calls from clients by being proactive to daily operational issues with real-time information and data.

4) Tighten the span of control between Managers and Agents – Numerous surveys and a great deal of research point to the fact that, due to costs, outsourced operations are guilty of having an unusually high number of agents relative to the line managers. One of the reasons that agents quit is the level of contact or the lack of coaching or leadership they receive from their line manager.. Typically for optimal performance the span of control should be between 1:10 or 1:15 to generate the desired results within a contact center.

5) Automate e-Learning, coaching and virtual classroom training – The emergence of the internet and the proliferation of innovative electronic learning and coaching courses have enabled high performance outsourced centers to bring training to the agent desktop during low call volume moments.  Team leaders and supervisors can also use quiet time to enroll in critical mandatory modules for compliance and product or process knowledge. This can create enormous opportunities for contact center training teams to focus and deliver other mission-critical courses and modules that require classroom training during those scarce resource hours. The combination of these methods will drive down costs while at the same time increase proficiency of agents while building a training team that is highly effective.

When implemented properly, each of these ideas offers the potential to deliver anywhere from a small benefit in a short period of time to much larger benefits over a period of a year. While any one idea may provide some short-term savings, the effort to optimize the performance of the contact center is best undertaken within the context of a continuous improvement program with regular reviews of all the components of the solution prescribed for the contact center.

Life has been very exciting around VPI lately. We recently launched our VPI Empower Suite 5.2 and several new capabilities, especially our Smart Evaluations and have received rave reviews from Ventana Research, DMG Consulting and our customers.

Quite frankly, Smart Evaluations is unlike anything I've seen to date in the contact center quality assurance marketplace. Managers now have the power to assign automated actions to QA forms based on customized triggers. Actions like training, coaching, emails and actionable alerts that immediately appear on an agent's screen. To give you an idea of the impact Smart Evaluations can have on contact center performance, let me give you a quick scenario:

Susan is a manager responsible for quality at a 300-agent contact center. She sets up triggers based on specific agent behaviors. For instance, did the agent state his name and the company name clearly and politely when answering a call? Or, did the agent confirm the spelling of the customer's first and last names? Obviously, for both of these questons the answer is either Yes or No. Susan can set up specific actions for the system to follow in the event of either answer. And depending on the question result, she can select the type of action she wants to take – suggest training, schedule a coaching session, send an email to his supervisor, send a reminder message to the agent on their desktop ticker, or even send an immediate screen pop-up alert. 

Now imagine establishing dozens of triggers and actions that all work automatically! The possibilities are seemingly endless, and you can even replace previously manually answered questions with metrics about that call. The impact on the productivity and performance of an entire contact center is huge. And, because the Smart Evaluation interface is designed specifically for non-technical users, it's easy to start using it quickly. Click here to see a brief demo video of the Smart Evaluations feature in action and share in our excitement. 

How do you think Smart Evaluations could change your contact center? 

So many of our customers today are conducting business over the phone, which frequently includes processing credit card transactions. We all know how crucial it is to keep that personal data safe and secure – protecting the identities of the buyers and the reputation of the companies taking their sensitive information.

What some companies don’t know, however, is that in October 2010, the Payment Card Industry Council made a major update to the PCI Data Security Standard that tightened the rules for recording and access to sensitive credit card data. Like many other regulations, the requirements are detailed, the information is overwhelming and it may be hard to discern whether or not you are truly prepared.

PCI DSS version 2.0 went into effect on January 1, 2011. Organizations that do not take action to ensure compliance with these new requirements by December 31^st, 2011 could face costly fines and possibly even revocation of their rights to process credit card transactions.  Larger organizations will be required to pass PCI security audit to prove their compliance. VPI is here to offer insights and guidance.

For a limited time, you can download your free copy of the Call Recording Guide to PCI DSS Compliance authored by chief analyst, Dick Bucci, from Pelorus Associates, to learn:

• How the new PCI DSS requirements will affect your organization
• Important PCI DSS requirements that impact telephone call recording and call center quality assruance
• How to protect against breaches of sensitive card and personal information without sacrificing performance management, quality assurance call monitoring and call center coaching and training
• Six alternatives for preventing unauthorized recording, storing and access to sensitive credit card authentication data
• Best practices for securing at-home and remote employees

Internal efficiency coupled with quality of patient care, customer service, and communications within a network of linked organizations are quickly becoming top objectives for healthcare insurance plan providers and care givers alike. Since overall quality scores will directly drive healthcare funding incentives versus disincentives, organizations face an urgent need to reevaluate their tools and processes for measuring and improving quality. And that must include a close look at monitoring of call quality and operational effectiveness in contact centers. These new priorities are driven by the fact that healthcare is undergoing a major transformation today. The purpose of the reformation is to address the many challenges including increasing costs and decreased, outcome-based reimbursement. Healthcare organizations are also grappling with internal pressures like spiraling out-of control costs, critical shortage of qualified healthcare workers and high employee turnover, combined with external pressures such as stricter CMS quality guidelines and pressure to achieve high star ratings to earn adequate funding, HIPAA compliance, increased insurance fraud and an aging population that is placing increasing demands on the entire healthcare industry.

Strikingly, only 5% of patients account for 60% or more of medical expense today, mostly due to high costs of managing chronic conditions – prevalent in our aging population. Out of the 3.8 million boomers aging into Medicare every year starting in 2011, 60% already have at least one chronic condition, so the pressure on healthcare insurance and care providers is about to grow even more dramatically. Amongst the many high level concerns to tackle, there are two significant concerns which keep healthcare executives awake at night and these are increasing operating costs and medical errors. Many leaders including federal, state and patient advocacy agencies have begun to address these critical issues by challenging previously held assumptions about these two factors. Evidence shows that elimination of errors alone leads to significant cost reductions. Therein lays the challenge to implement change to the patient experience. Historically, most efforts to manage the needs of these patients-customers have been stifled by a fragmented delivery system and lack of true care coordination. This simply will not be sustainable going forward. One of the areas that can positively impact this is at the contact center level which handles and serves patients, doctors and healthcare providers.

New call quality monitoring tools are helping contact centers within these healthcare organizations make a contribution to improve the overall experience of patients and healthcare network participants. They have helped to make significant costs reductions in training dollars through targeted coaching which helps the overall process improvement effort. All of these elements of patient care dictate renewed focus on the quality of communications among all parties – patients, healthcare plan providers, hospitals, specialty physicians, pharmacists, social services, home health, nursing homes, and a variety of ancillary providers. Periodic, intelligent capturing and assessment of information from patients, their employers, the insurance providers, the physicians and all other pertinent data sources leads to executive insights into operational effectiveness, as well as options for activities that would help address rising cost and eliminating defects. As a result, these healthcare providers are embracing innovative contact center quality monitoring tools that enable them to pinpoint critical business issues with laser-like precision. The latest-generation interactions recording and quality monitoring systems come with built-in analytics, which helps automatically sort out recorded communications according to their type and value – the financial value and the recording’s potential to provide insights into operational inefficiencies or errors. Gone are the days of hunting and pecking through all calls to identify issues.

This new generation of evaluation systems can present quality metrics automatically based on the multi-dimensional information that is automatically captured with each recording. Plus, they drive management attention to high value calls for detailed evaluation, while still providing objectivity for periodic evaluation of each agent. These systems can automatically trigger alerts or notifications when thresholds are crossed or errors occur – based on metrics that result from detailed quality evaluations, as well as data that is collected at the time of recording interactions. These early warning indicators could also be in the form of real-time dashboard graphs or desktop tickers that alert employees when certain thresholds are missed and targets are not met. Actionable nature of this monitoring system is further enhanced with automated training delivery. Coaching and E-learning content can be automatically assigned to the agents according to their individual quality scores, in addition to encouraging their progress with new learning opportunities. This has proven to help improve morale and increase agent satisfaction. These are some of the practical innovative solutions that help answer the very real challenge of managing healthcare contact center problems - in a systematic, disciplined, and productive way - the collective potential of individuals to continuously enhance the value delivered to patients, their families, and the communities in which they provide healthcare services.

Credit unions and community banks are increasingly coping with federal and local legislation, interest rate hikes and volatility in capital markets, all of which entails placing greater emphasis on local and regional customer retention, quality assurance, internal controls, as well as more careful compliance and risk management. Although these smaller banks share many common challenges with large contact centers, they have unique needs that can be addressed using today’s modular, highly customizable call quality monitoring and workforce optimization solutions.

Small- to mid-sized financial services contact centers face a number of operational challenges relatively unknown to the larger contact center. With limited resources and shrinking budgets, a Branch or Regional Manager for smaller contact center needs to carefully keep an eye out for inefficient practices to find opportunities for cost reduction. He or she needs to carefully plan capital expenditures, and training investments, while keeping up with significant hardware and software investments within their broader organization.

Traditionally, customer service and help desk environments are known as high-turnover environments. This is rather typical for smaller financial services contact centers as well, where employees tend to consider helpdesk positions to be transient or temporary. To anticipate and reduce the impact of this phenomenon, it is best in the early days of their careers to give agents some time off the phone for cross-training and multi-skilling to respond to email or perform other administrative duties while they are mastering the skills to becoming expert contact center professionals.

Another necessity is ongoing training to keep them engaged, alert and empowered to resolve customer issues quickly, while they answer phone calls during their careers. In fact, with today’s tightly integrated quality monitoring and coaching software tools, skill development can be highly personalized according to the needs and objectives of each agent and simultaneously targeted directly at business goals of the contact center as well as the broader home organization. Gartner predicts that staffing will account for up to 80% of contact center budgets in the new world of customer interaction. The need for such a substantial investment just cannot be left to a chance. Yet, it is often an area that is overlooked and not really routinely reviewed by managers.

Regardless of size, every contact center must provide excellent customer service, reduce costs and maintain a healthy profit margin to thrive in the new economic model. By adopting advanced technologies for monitoring quality and optimizing customer-service and contact centers — including analytics-driven call center quality assurance systems that help identify and automate routine contact-center and customer-service tasks — mortgage companies and credit unions can dramatically affect their performance and profitability.

By now, most successful contact centers have already adopted at least baseline grade digital call recording and quality monitoring solutions. They are the fundamental building blocks for any type of workforce optimization solution, but they are just a start that may be due for review and re-evaluation, especially if they come from early generations of quality monitoring that couldn’t see beyond the horizon of individual agent compliance with (possibly outdated) internal rules and policies. These older technologies did not really have a good way of connecting standards for customer/agent interactions with evolving business objectives of the bank, let alone being able to incorporate voice of the customer into any part of the quality management process. The good news is that the call center quality assurance technologies evolved to the point where contact centers can focus the entire process onto what really matters and what can make the biggest impact on business performance, without losing any objectivity in assessing agent performance. In fact, evaluating agents based on their quantifiable contributions to the contact center’s business success supports their drive to do well, succeed in their jobs and avoid defection.

The proverbial “needle in a haystack” is now rather easy to find – with the implementation of advanced desktop screen analytics, supervisors can easily identify and evaluate the calls that resulted in a customer cancelling their account and taking their business elsewhere. Or the calls where agents attempted an upsale successfully or unsuccessfully, or where they saved a customer by resolving their issue during the first call – even without unnecessary concessions. Instead of wasting time and adding costs with reviewing completely random selection of low-value calls, why not concentrate on evaluating those calls that provide insights into the bank’s business practices every time, so that something could be done about it before opportunities are missed or lost forever?

Real-time performance management and automated E-Learning tools are the latest additions to the workforce optimization family of solutions that can be closely tied into quality management processes, to provide options for action mechanism whenever a manager needs to be notified or agent supported by just-in-time help.

The decision to choose one solution instead of another depends on a company’s needs, goals and circumstances, but with modular workforce optimization software suites, there is a sensible, financially sound path for every budget and objective.

The beauty of a completely integrated suite of workforce optimization applications is interoperability. Each individual solution has valuable capabilities, but multiple solutions can work symbiotically to provide even greater results. Beyond the immediate improvement of contact center performance involving operating costs, workforce optimization solutions allow for quick decision making which in turn helps resolve issues for customers. Easy access to call recordings can help contact centers give better customer service. Call records can be used to settle disputes quickly and with minimum inconvenience.

Recorded calls provide excellent material for training purposes – real-life examples of good and bad agent-customer interactions. This helps the manager effectively intervene when agents are underperforming. The latest-generation solutions have the capability to automatically select and assign coaching and training through courses, tips, quizzes, training flashes, pre-shift announcements and bulletins according to individual agent needs, identified through quality evaluations or simply by monitoring their performance metrics. This tool allows you to set rules that send targeted coaching and training to individual agents or groups when they reach predetermined thresholds based on their performance scores, customer survey results and more. By targeting the right training to the right person at the right time, your agents will be empowered with personalized guidance that will make it easier for them to offer improved service, thus heightening customer satisfaction and ultimately increasing both, agent productivity and satisfaction with the job. Managers can track sales and address marketing and service challenges quickly.

Integrated workforce optimization systems can accomplish this in a cost-effective manner while decreasing expenses, increasing revenues and enhancing customer loyalty and satisfaction – all of which can lead to strengthened market position, customer loyalty and long-term bottom-line growth.

We know how difficult it can be in today’s highly competitive and rapidly evolving marketplace to find time for call center coaching to equip your agents with the appropriate skills to respond to customers effectively and efficiently.

Call center coaching and E-learning tools are proven to help mitigate agent churn, reduce staffing shortages and improve performance. And there are some surefire ways to make sure you succeed in your e-learning and coaching initiatives.

Check out this white paper to see what premier industry analyst firm, Ovum, has to say about the five best ways to deploy and maximize call center coaching and E-learning solutions in the contact center. You will gain insight into why contact centers need to develop specialized training strategies, learn how call center coaching and E-learning can best improve agent performance, and read case studies that detail how innovative companies use training.

Download your complimentary copy of the white paper here.

It is that time of the year where contact centers are gearing up for the holiday season over the next couple months. Traditionally, this means hiring and training more agents than usual, based on forecasted volumes.  Due to the seasonality of contact center work, expectations and stress placed on contact center resources rise  - this affects especially team supervisors and their agents who are more prone to turnover during higher-stress periods. In fact, multiple  factors contribute to turnover - the most significant variable is the nature of the work the agent does and how they perceive their role within the center. 

While recently visiting an outsourced contact center, I was able to observe how training was delivered to a new hire training class. It turns out that my high school sports coach was right   - coaching and teamwork matter, especially today when selecting the right  agents from a pool of candidates, training them and getting them certified to be on the phones must be done in less than a month. I witnessed extraordinary collaborative effort expended to get the job done. However, the impressive enthusiasm of the contact center team clashed with their process design and technical challenges.
 
Dave, the Director of Operations advised me that it costs approximately USD $12,500 before an agent is competent enough to satisfactorily handle calls. He was perplexed with why in spite of this significant investment, he was experiencing a large turnover of his new agents within the first 30 days on the floor. When  we visited the contact center floor,  I noticed that the agent to supervisor ratio was rather high - around 1:25. I have immediately noticed that call center management was insufficient, as was mechanism for providing agents with timely, intraday feedback on their performance or guidance for improvement.  It looked like the agents were “abandoned” after their initial training. There was call recording equipment and workforce management software in the IT room. However, the center had no visible individuals who actually owned the metrics or were responsible for the generation of scorecards that would provide information to Dave on how the center was doing in the course of a day or, for that matter, a week.  This tough situation was further complicated by the fact that Dave only had four Supervisors to manage a team of hundred agents AND each Supervisor had  less than one-year tenure! . And as if that weren’t hard enough, one Supervisor was on vacation and  another called in sick. Sadly, it is an experience all too familiar to contact center managers today. Successfully managing a multi-channel contact center is one of the most difficult roles in business today due to the dynamic nature of the environment and all the intricacies woven into the equation. 

The contact center is often the only place that customers turn to when they require assistance or to purchase products and services. As shown in our example, working as an agent in a contact center can be a rather stressful job. As a result, turnover can be as high as 50% annually. That is a significant number that directly affects the operating costs of a center. But my question is - what is the real cost of this common phenomenon within a contact center?  Clearly, it will be  reflected in hard-to-measure ways each Monday morning to start with. Agents are likely to develop apathy and grow ever less engaged in their work due to the unsupportive environment that has been created for them. They will be less receptive to new ideas and more importantly, less willing to follow the coach or go the extra mile for the customer or the team. All of this triggers a cascade of  consequences for the business - reduced customer satisfaction, high agent turnover, and negative impact on  profitability.  And that’s exactly the opposite of what the holiday season promises to deliver for the business. Contact center managers must do their homework in order to understand the causes of their challenges as well as available options for addressing them.

Research at VPI has shown that agent and supervisor satisfaction and productivity can be dramatically improved through  an effective strategy of keeping everyone in the loop at all times.  You can achieve this by using call center performance management software that presents real or near-real time scorecards and other forms of status updates - personalized for each employee role according to their responsibilities, goals and needs.  Better yet, tie real-time call center performance management with intelligently triggered e-learning and coaching to help front-line agents learn and grow, supporting their individual skills and talents, giving them the tools and knowledge to please customers.  You will be soon rewarded with higher job satisfaction of the contact center staff and related cost savings. Customers will respond with increased trust and loyalty – so that you can be on the forefront of their choices during the holiday season and beyond.

Real-time Call Center Performance Management - Sample Agent Desktop Ticker


Real-time Call Center Performance Management - Sample Agent Web Scorecard

Measuring performance is fundamental to contact center operations of all sizes. The call center quality assurance (QA) measurement process is often one of the main performance data collection vehicles for management. However, few contact centers have implemented a program or have adequate resources in place for meaningfully tracking and improving performance, let alone providing feedback from customers to the rest of the organization to enable strategic-level business improvements. Many contact center managers operate with a haphazard collection of uncoordinated and often irrelevant performance statistics that require too much time and error-prone manual work to interpret, which often leads to misguided decisions. In these conditions of ad-hoc “analysis”, wasteful utilization of resources can go undetected for long periods of time and business objectives may not be achieved, as managers take ineffective actions to correct deficiencies which are aimed to attack symptoms instead of root causes. The problem is deepened by the fact that most quality and performance measurement tools are rigid or inflexible to change. Some efforts focus on compliance-driven performance tracking and call center reporting - in accordance with internally developed standards and procedures that are outdated, outmoded, or even assuming that the contact center is already providing the right products and services to its customers. What’s more, many contact centers have not discussed the business strategy with their front line agents or supervisors. Consequently, there is often a great need to go back and revisit their goals and objectives and to adjust the functions of their department in order to ensure that the right products and services are being provided by the agent.

To start recovering from this situation, managers must first recognize that measuring of performance in a coordinated, systematic, standardized way that provides true insights and direction for achieving business objectives is a basic need of an organization - and a fundamental responsibility of management. It is the key to any organization’s survival.

To achieve high-value business insights as they track performance, contact center managers should focus data collection, interpretation and analysis on a set of measures that answer the following questions:

·         Are we providing the correct services to our clients, using the most skilled agents?

·         Are we able to resolve customer issues and overcome objections in a timely manner?

·         Are our agents providing a positive and memorable experience to our customers?

·         Do our agents and their immediate supervisors really understand what is expected from them?

Using VPI Empower, you can consolidate all data that is periodically collected from disparate source systems in your contact center. Once you have all data in one place, apply real-time performance tracking tools, intuitive graphical call center reporting dashboards, and business rules-driven alert system to monitor key performance indicators. Now you can measure progress towards meeting business objectives for the contact center, gaining insights that can be acted upon in an effective and timely manner – for optimization of service delivery. Call center quality assurance goals can then be subordinated to the overall strategy, so that they support the mission and objectives of the organization. The specific call center quality assurance goals defined in this process should be strategic, tactical, and operational, depending on the level of service channel that is being supported. They may include the definition of quality, timeliness, resource utilization, or customer satisfaction from the customer’s point of view.  

Call center quality assurance processes should be guided and supported by performance measures as they define specific standards that allow the calibration of performance and overall quality, which, when made actionable and acted upon, ultimately leads to more business from happier customers. Performance measures should be selected carefully and funded proportionately to their value, in order to support corporate goals and strategy, contact center objectives, and critical success factors for an effective call center quality assurance program. Review them regularly to evaluate how well the delivery system is performing and whether the correct products and services are provided. The value of adequate recruitment, selection, training and education of line managers to execute these objectives should not be underestimated. Success ultimately rests on their coaching effectiveness and their ability to cultivate skill while inspiring their staff to higher levels of performance.
 

I was at a conference with a group of educators and policy makers who were lamenting at the state of funding from the Federal Government for additional classrooms to an already crowded high school system. In addition to the space limitations, they were concerned on how these students are not being responsive to basic foundational concepts involving the 3 R's - Reading, Writing and Arithmetic. A leading Canadian author and senior lecturer on technology and emerging trends at the University of Toronto, Don Tapscott feels quite differently on this issue. He feels that educators must embrace technology and change the way they teach in the classroom to elicit passion and engagement from students because the current system does not serve the digital generation well. According to him, the old model was based on lectures and memory which is a model that is flawed and inappropriate for a newer generation. It is a one-way, one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach where students are isolated in the overall learning process. This condition as I prefer to call it, is similar to situations that most contact centers are encountering today.
 

Ovum Research recently authored and published a great new white paper titled '5 Secrets to Contact Center E-Learning and Coaching Success.' You can download your complimentary copy of the white paper to:

• Understand why contact centers must develop specialized training strategies.
• Learn about the key benefits of e-learning and coaching in improving agent performance.
• Read customer case studies detailing ways in which training is used in innovative contact centers.
• Gain insight into factors to consider when implementing training solutions in the contact center and maximize value from both technology and agents.

Early this year, I went behind enemy lines. Actually, I was on vacation with a client in Manila and took up her invitation to visit their manager Betty who manages several help desk centers for large global organizations. I spent a few hours inside the contact center and Betty noticed that I wanted to listen to calls the moment I walked into this high tech facility. I sat next to Dave who spoke very good English and listened in on a few calls as part of my research. He seemed eager to speak with me on what he does on inbound and outbound calls. It was refreshing to see data and information providing analytics with real-time performance information displayed on monitors above the clocks with the times of all the locations that they serve. Surprisingly what was missing were the "coaching moments" which one would assume happens frequently in the course of a day in the role of a Supervisor at a contact center. Unfortunately, that did not happen much to my surprise as I wanted to be able to observe and give feedback to the Supervisor. In the vast real-estate that I covered there, less than 10% were allocated for specific coaching and training of the agent. Did someone miss the memo here during the design stage? Was this intentional or was there lack of rooms for coaching and ad-hoc meeting rooms?

For most people, a job in a contact center is a foot in the door, a starting position in an extremely competitive market for talent. Some of the work can be repetitive and boring like the one I observed. Hence it is no surprise that attrition in some cases can be as high as 50% for agents in the contact center. It is probably the same for Supervisors however there is a correlation to this phenomenon. The churn rates and the lack of a coaching environment in which these young men and women work in could be root causes to these symptom. I know it can be relentless and unforgiving in the best of times. Aside from the compensation, most agents like Dave agree that they would like to spend more time honing their skills and move up in the organization but Supervisors have no time in their day to coach, develop and build trust with their people. They are so busy putting out fires and managing the low performers that the mid and high level performers are often ignored.

What is this relationship between a Supervisor and an Agent? It is not about buying pizzas or sharing personal stories after work (although that is important too). It is about building confidence and trust in these fragile relationships at the workplace. These elements starts the relationship, sustains it through coaching interactions and becomes the foundations of success in a contact center. It is a proven fact that teams that take coaching seriously have better results in attrition and career development of their agents. Employee and Customer surveys increase and most of all, customers stay loyal through the good and bad times, just like our agent Dave or Betty. I know I stuck around long enough with Heather (my first Supervisor, God Bless Her) in my early years because of her commitment to my personal and professional development while under her supervision. Coaching takes less effort once it is done effectively, with the right tools and the right supervisor. It is one of the key enablers in the knowledge economy where time is money and money is created by agents who are engaged, motivated and well coached. Enhancing their confidence by focusing on skill development in the contact center with meaningful metrics designed to build customer (and agent loyalty) should be a key priority especially in these tough times.
 

In today’s challenging economic climate, analytics is changing the way companies do business and dramatically improving contact  center operations, managers want quick and  accurate insights into the effectiveness of their contact center operations in order to make prudent, timely decisions, but they don't have the time or resources to listen to and review  the vast amount of customer interactions  handled by the agents every day. 

In addition to this there is no shortage of performance metrics available from their PBX and ACD. These days there seems to be more sophisticated tools including multimedia recording, desktop analytics, instant chat, self service options in the IVR, cloud computing,  etc. Managers and supervisors today are able to choose from a myriad of options to manage performance but where do they start to do their quality evaluations in a systematic manner using complex algorithmic mathematical formulas combined with scientific methodologies and their own intuition? Therein lies their dilemma. So little time, so much to accomplish in the course of a day...

Quality monitoring systems offered today are not only to evaluate agents but also to evaluate a contact center reputation. Yes, reputation, might sound obvious but too often contact centers seem to miss this critical view point. A customer's perception of service captured in a call recording or video file says a lot about the culture of the organization. Call Center Reporting and Call Monitoring Systems are a means to an end in that one has to learn from the information and who else to translate these to actions and outcomes than the Supervisor. This has to be one of the most critical and unforgiving roles within the contact center next to the agent. Sort of being a start quarterback being called in to throw a touchdown on each attempt when the offensive team is on and the line backer when the defensive line is on.

The role of the supervisor and their agent has been so devalued over the years that it is not a surprise the attrition rates for these roles are in double digits. This is not a malaise or a disease or caused by the recent global financial crisis or globalization. We did this to ourselves. We have become part of a culture that communicates via a keyboard than by voice skills and the traditional skills that our parents taught us about being polite and respectful. We complicate the connection with our customers and prospects through voice prompts and boring scripts to keep the agents from really having a connection with the customers.

Enter VPI and it's Empower suite of products. In my humble opinion, this product is a god-send for managers, supervisors and front-line agents. VPI has truly defined the new expectation of a customer through a fresh set of lenses. It shatters the level of "mediocrity" to "excellence" in quality and performance from the customer's point of view. The power of the data can now be turned into knowledge which in turn can be turned into wisdom for coaching to excellence and that translates to actionable analytics and outcomes.

Quality Assurance is everyone's responsibility and by giving power to the people who  influence agent behaviors, then the Supervisor should be the quarterback that determines the outcome of the game. Like they said in the movie, if you build, the customers will come. VPI has started this movement by building on a framework that is supervisor-friendly for QA success. If we synthesize all these goals, the aim of QA and Call Monitoring becomes a matter of linking outcomes of calls to a customer's behavior not only the agent's behavior. As a result, contact centers can also learn what effects, if any their approach to training and coaching agents have on customers and ultimately the outcomes.

Being proactive and giving agents a larger stake in the pie by identifying areas of strength, best practices and also key training to be used for modeling success. In this way, a contact center can leverage the VPI Empower suite of products and establish guidelines and standards for handling calls instead of dictating what agents should or should not do. In the larger picture, the role of the supervisor and the agent has to be supported through all levels of the organization. As a result, success and a best practice model will show up sooner than later!
 

VPI invites you to download this insightful Frost & Sullivan authored white paper to learn how advanced call center performance management and contact center analytics solutions and integrated call center coaching and training tools can identify and address employee skill gaps and deliver the right information at the right time - enhancing performance and driving greater effectiveness in meeting customer needs.

Download your copy of the complimentary white paper authored by premier research analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, to learn how to:

• Make Better Decisions with Real-Time Information

• Provide Real Time Metrics to Motivate and Empower Employees to Improve

• Achieve Consolidated Reporting from Multiple Systems and Locations

• Drill Down Through Dashboards and Reports to Identify the Root Cause of Problems

• Ensure Alignment of Operational Objectives with Corporate Goals

• Benefit from attractive ROI and Quantifiable Call Center Optimization Benefits