VPI has fully integrated its award-winning VPI PERFORMANCE real-time call center reporting and performance management software with Cisco’s UCC Express and UCC Enterprise platforms. VPI PERFORMANCE contact center reporting software complements and enhances Cisco UCC Express and UCC Enterprise 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 managers, supervisors and agents to make better, quicker decisions.
It’s the sound all motorists dread. The click, click, silence that we all know is the sound of a completely dead battery. Stuck on the side of the road, late to work and sitting in your driveway, or stranded in a parking lot somewhere. Just waiting for some kind soul to come by with jumper cables and give you a boost.When Interstate Batteries, the nation's #1 replacement battery company, was looking for a solution that would boost its call quality monitoring and analytics, improve agent performance, and ensure PCI call recording compliance, they looked to VPI's best-of-breed VPI EMPOWER telephone voice recording, call center analytics, E-learning and Cisco reporting software solution.
“Interstate Batteries chose to implement VPI’s call recording, quality evaluation, E-learning and analytics to ensure our PCI DSS compliance and to enable in-depth tracking and improvement of our sales and ordering processes and outcomes,” said Patsy Reid, Interstate Batteries’ project manager. “Our partnership with VPI opens the doors to new levels of customer care and competitive differentiation for Interstate Batteries.” VPI EMPOWER VoIP recording software, call center analytics and workforce optimization software solution will automate the classification of all calls handled by the company’s contact center according to type and outcome, mute and mask out sensitive portions of customer interactions according to PCI DSS standards, and will then prioritize high-value interactions related to sales for quality evaluation and targeted, personalized call center elearning to rapidly close skill and knowledge gaps where needed.
VPI EMPOWER is designed to enable business organizations to proactively cultivate exceptional customer experience and improve agent attitudes and behaviors. The Cisco call recording software and Cisco reporting solution enables organizations to achieve performance goals and identify and share valuable business intelligence throughout the enterprise. VPI's proven system design approach, based on lean six sigma continuous improvement principles, provides powerful workforce optimization software solutions that deliver value quickly and cost-effectively – designed for fast deployment, customization and training.
Read the full news release.
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.
Ahead of this year's holiday season, consumers charged more to their credit cards for second straight month. Robust holiday spending is driving the speculation that U.S. consumers are shifting their use of credit and debit toward credit. Early spending patterns do suggest that total credit card spending is increasing, as it has all year. Worldwide, consumers carry more than 1 billion Visa cards alone. More than 450 million of those cards are in the United States. The number of U.S. identity fraud victims rose 12 percent to 11.1 million adults last year. Credit and debit card fraud is the No. 1 fear of Americans in the midst of the global financial crisis. Concern about fraud supersedes that of terrorism, computer and health viruses and personal safety – one in ten Americans have already been victims of credit card fraud. Software.net found that as many as 40% of its transactions were fraudulent. Expedia.com lost $6 million due to fraudulent credit card purchases. During the holidays and throughout the year, contact centers that engage in catalog sales, up-selling and/or cross-selling, service providers, and collection companies that take payments in the form of credit or debit cards can become unsuspecting targets of cyber criminals. The card information is typically entered by agents into a CRM or other sales automation software and may be recorded by voice and screen recorders. And there it resides - thousands and even millions of card records inviting remote criminals or even greedy employees to extract consumer card data for personal gain or sell into a sophisticated secondary market.
The payment card industry (PCI) established a Council to define technical standards aimed at minimizing the risk of cyber crime to the misuse of credit cards. The Council subsequently issued a Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) which details security requirements for members, merchants and service providers that store, process or transmit cardholder data. Contact centers and other organizations that accept credit card payments are generally prohibited from archiving sensitive information such as account numbers and security codes after payment authorization has been received. Compliance to PCI-DSS is now mandatory for all non-credit card 'issuing' organizations dealing with credit, debit and ATM cards, as defined by the PCI Security Standards Council - size of an organization and its annual sales are no longer a factor for exceptions. While being compliant to PCI DSS - an already daunting task - is the first part, it it also required that you prove your organization's compliance to PCI-DSS. This PCI Audit is performed either with a set of questionnaires or by a Qualified Security Assessor, external to the organization.
On October 28, 2010, the Payment Card Industry Standards Council made a major update to the PCI Data Security Standard to clarify it. PCI DSS version 2.0 went effective on January 1, 2011. In PCI DSS version 2.0, the PCI DSS standards were clarified to require that no sensitive credit card information be stored within recorded calls, even if those calls are encrypted. The standards committee made the change because of the availability of sophisticated malware that could penetrate encryption algorithms. Organizations that do not take action by December 31, 2011 to ensure compliance with these new PCI call recording requirements could face costly fines.
Achieving PCI DSS Compliance
To help organizations ensure compliance and avoid costly fines, VPI has developed an effective, affordable solution. The VPI CAPTURE PCI call recording system has the ability to detect when an agent enters an application screen with sensitive information, when sensitive information is inputted, and when they leave a screen containing sensitive information. The VPI telephone voice recording system then has the ability to promptly mute sections of recorded audio and mask screen video during this sensitive portion of the call.
To further secure sensitive information, the VPI CAPTURE PCI DSS call recording system help you:
- Secure File and Data Transport and Storage Encryption – VPI uses built-in end-to-end data encryption and key management to secure the SQL database that holds attributes of all recordings. The media manager provides for AES 128, 192, 256 or variable bit encryption/decryption when files are stored and accessed from the media manager.
- Ensure Authenticity with File Watermarking - Every call within the VPI system is wartermarked in real time to ensure authenticity. VPI offers a powerful application to validate the authenticity of any WAV file.
- Monitor User Activity with Detailed Audit Log Reporting – VPI records all user activity within the system so that organizations can conduct full trace audits to determine who accessed any recording in the system and when - for playback, export, or any other critical events.
As the December 31st deadline approaches, we're here to guide and help you in achieving your goals of becoming PCI compliant quickly and affordably.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
I recently attended the annual Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC) Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. At the “60 Quality Assurance Ideas in 60 Minutes” panel, I learned numerous best practices to implement in a QA program. Here are three great tips worth implementing:1) Focus your Quality Assurance resources on high value calls – all calls are not created equal.
Typically today, we select a random sample of calls to evaluate from all calls and score a small number of calls for each agent. By using affordable and easy-to-implement tools like desktop analytics software that will automatically classify your calls based on the application screens or fields entered by your agents, you can focus on more high value calls such as calls from high value customers, high value transactions, costly calls that were not resolved on the first call, or new campaigns. When you evaluate low value interactions the only thing you can score is agent quality, but you’re unable to make accurate business decisions on your operational processes or the customer experience. Evaluating low value customer interactions only adds to the cost to an interaction that’s already cost you a lot of money!
You should also ask questions on your call center quality assurance form that are interesting to the 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 those interactions are being evaluated and the agents are properly trained?
VPI Fact Finder desktop analytics is a powerful tool that can be used to quickly and cost-effectively pinpoint the specific information you need to monitor the health of your business, and make better business decisions. With VPI’s desktop analytics tool, you can save time and money by only listening to the high value calls you really want to hear that are actually coachable and worth the effort.
2) Establish a closed-loop process between Quality Management, Customer Satisfaction and New Hire and Ongoing Training.
Quality and training should be one workflow. If separate, you should consider combining or closely linking your Quality Assurance and Training departments.
You can also include a customer feedback process – compare QA with CSAT scores. Proactively maintain relevancy of your quality scoring forms and processes by periodic updates based on customer feedback. Make sure there is a feedback process in your operation to gauge customer satisfaction when interacting with your operation. There’s no point in assuming what your customers want in terms of call quality. A simple yet effective customer advocacy survey will help to validate the steps you are taking in your operation and will help identify where to fine tune the process.
VPI EMPOWER allows you to have your customers directly evaluate your agents on things like 'how friendly was the agent friendly?' so that supervisors and QA analysts don't need to subjectively . With business call recording and VPI Smart Evaluations, QA evaluation forms can be completed automatically and information from a customer survey can be entered automatically on the form.
3) Put the time into training and coaching.
The biggest issue where the call center quality monitoring processes fall down is a lack of thought put to training and coaching the skills the agents are going to need in order to succeed. Be sure you have spent some time with some experts who can show you how to coach these skills effectively into your operation when required. Also, don’t underestimate the power of an application to assist your agents and your team leaders through QA and coaching procedures.
Supplement your formal training program with ongoing, timely coaching and feedback that's integrated with your call center workforce management software schedules and doesn’t disrupt call handling.
Targeted desktop coaching is an incredible supplement to formal training. A recent study by the International Personnel Management Association found that coaching increases productivity by 22.4%, while training combined with coaching results in an overall productivity gain of 88%.
A Gallup poll found that companies that have implemented targeted coaching programs:
· Are 50% more likely to have lower turnover
· Achieve 27% greater profitability
· Have 56% higher customer loyalty
· Reduce average handle time by 10% to 20%
VPI EMPOWER’s automated, targeted call center eLearning software and alerts rapidly address your agents’ skill gaps and expedite performance improvements. With VPI COACHING call center agent coaching software, you have the ability to automate your feedback and coaching process and empower your employees and supervisors to be highly effective by providing immediate feedback via tickers and delivering personalized training directly to the agents’ desktops.
When showcasing new products and services, many companies tend to go a bit overboard with the hype and promises – delivering little in the way of actual details and substance. Few of us have the time or the inclination to dig through mountains of fluff to get to the facts. This is the information age, right? Isn’t everything supposed to be at our fingertips? This is why you’ll find VPI’s new solution overview video makes a very refreshing change to the tedious, over-the-top product showcases churned out by many companies these days. VPI’s video gets straight to the point, highlighting the various business issues faced by contact centers today and showing you how VPI's call center workforce optimization solutions can address and resolve these problems. You’re in and out in no time – and you don’t leave your desktop empty handed.Few have come through the last few years of economic turmoil unscathed. It’s been tough. The contact center industry has been pushed to the brink and forced to adopt new processes, technologies and philosophies in order to function efficiently and survive. As a pioneer in the development of integrated digital call recording recording and workforce optimization solutions, VPI has been highly proactive in anticipating the needs of contact centers big and small, designing solutions that have transformed the way these organizations operate and function. These solutions have been implemented worldwide to successfully improve the customer experience, increase workforce performance, ensure compliance, minimize risk and align tactical and strategic objectives across the enterprise. VPI’s new VPI EMPOWER solution overview video puts your pain on display, and offers you plenty of powerful remedies to choose from.
Even if you’re not shopping for new solutions right now, it’s worth checking out this video to see that you’re not alone – chances are, other organizations are facing all the same challenges and issues. From maintaining customer loyalty and managing quality assurance, to ensuring compliance and minimizing risk, everyone is struggling to survive and come out on top. Fortunately, there are plenty of highly effective, affordable solutions out there. You just have to look. When you have a few spare minutes, check out and if you’re interested in learning more, just schedule a demo.
Ventana Research just released a new research perspective focused on the use of advanced analytics in the contact center, “Improving Business Performance through Outcome-Focused Quality Monitoring.” In the brief, Ventana discusses the prevalence of call recording (anywhere from 2.5% to 100% of calls) and the range of tools, from spreadsheets to advanced analytics, used to review these calls. Although these recordings contain potentially valuable insights into what agents and callers say during calls, research shows that most contact centers review them manually and only to assess agent performance. Even worse, they only review a randomly selected 5% of the calls that are recorded. Imagine the valuable data that is being left behind and the intelligence that could be shared! Luckily, new technologies are enabling companies to change their quality monitoring processes to better support overall business objectives. Advanced analytics tools work with unstructured data such as call recordings, text and event data collected as agents use their desktop systems. Now it’s possible to record 100% of your calls and also capture the critical data found in emails, letters, web-based chat sessions, survey forms, and then link it all back to the original call. This provides a more comprehensive view of the customer’s interactions and allows managers to identify problems areas more quickly, ultimately impacting the customer experience and business outcomes.
As a sponsor of Ventana's research, we’re proud that VPI Empower™ is a solution that provides the benefits of an analytics-driven approach mentioned in the brief, including:
- It is timelier and less costly
- It enables companies to prioritize the review of the interactions by categorizing interaction recordings by business issues and outcomes
- It has a more unified structure
- It is more objective, so all participants can trust the outputs
How are you monitoring calls in your contact center today?
Patrick Botz, VPI’s VP of Workforce Optimization, recently met with the editors of Contact Center Pipeline to share his thoughts on the state of today’s Quality Assurance practices. The resulting article, “Hope is Not a QA Strategy: Don't Leave Your Contact Center Quality to Chance,” appears in this month’s issue of the journal. Patrick’s premise is that if sales is a carefully planned strategy offering solutions to problems, why wouldn’t contact centers leverage the same level of strategy to focus their Quality Assurance (QA) efforts on driving business outcomes, solving customer problems and ensuring an outstanding experience?Randomly selecting calls to listen to as a sample of what’s really going on is not an effective way to get the whole picture. But since contact center quality assurance has been performed randomly for so many years, some managers are under the impression that random call selection is the only way to be objective. In this article Patrick explores why so many organizations leave their QA to chance, and presents powerful new tools that provide solid strategy and results, instead of just hope.
Download the full article: Hope is Not a QA Strategy: Don't Leave Your Contact Center Quality to Chance
Are you still randomly monitoring calls? What's your QA strategy?
Lately it’s been tough to find much positive news about business and the economy. However, the latest report from the National Association of Call Centers (NACC) shows a very positive outlook for the contact center industry. The benchmarking report shows that the contact center industry has rebounded from the recession and has been steadily growing over the past couple of years. In fact, 95% of the respondents felt that economic and business conditions in 2011 will be the same or even better than they were in 2010. Download the North American Contact Center Industry 2011 Mid-Year Update and Forecast research report now to learn more about how our industry has weathered the tough times and come out smarter, stronger and prepared for the future.
In this report you’ll learn what the NACC sees as some of the contributing factors to the industry's resilience, including:
- Advances in Workforce Optimization technology, including quality monitoring, performance management, E-learning and workforce management.
- Growing interest in Social Media
- High interest in Desktop Analytics solutions
- How First Call Resolution is being tracked
- Key Unified Communications trends
- Contact Center Hiring patterns and trends
Featured in the Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC) newsletter
After over a decade of doing things the same way, traditional contact center quality monitoring is getting a major facelift. New analytics solutions and best practices are taking the ‘random’ out of and quality monitoring and transforming the way contact centers pursue and the speed in which they achieve their goals.
William A. Foster once said, “Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” Today, this quote seems quite appropriate with regard to the quest for improved quality management in the contact center. Contact centers are constantly searching for new ways to cut back without compromising on quality. This is by no means an easy feat, particularly when we take into account the complexities of modern contact center environments and the vast array of quality monitoring technologies available. Fortunately, some of the latest solutions and best practices have been designed to radically improve the effectiveness of the QM process – harnessing the power of a more refined, focused approach.
All Calls are Not Created Equal
Many leading organizations have now rejected the concept of “random selection” as part of a viable QM program. They recognize the fact that all calls are not created equal. Some interactions are more relevant and important to achieving an organization’s objectives than others – the key is to determine which recorded interactions to evaluate in order to gain maximum insight and impact. In a traditional contact center quality monitoring program, analysts or supervisors typically select a random sample of calls to evaluate, and score a small number of calls associated to each agent. While traditional random evaluation of low value interactions can enable agent call quality and compliance to be measured to some extent, does not enable management to effectively assess, measure and execute accurate business decisions regarding important operational processes and the customer experience. In addition, the evaluation of low value interactions is a waste of resources – the available time of evaluators and supervisors is scarce, and it’s vital to ensure that their time is focused on high-value tasks, such as evaluating the most coachable calls that also contain the information most relevant to an organization’s business focus.
Progressive organizations are implementing analytics-enabled quality monitoring solutions to tag call recordings with more useful, relevant data. By using analytics-enabled quality monitoring software to tag recorded interactions with more meaningful information, organizations can take a unique targeted approach to improving quality based on the evaluation of pertinent business intelligence.
Powerful new desktop analytics-driven quality monitoring solutions are able to tag important events and data directly from employee’s desktop screen applications to call recordings without any extensive back-end integration work. This enables automated classification and analysis centered on key business issues, such as first contact resolution, customer churn, differences in call handling patterns between employees, frequency of holds/transfers associated with order cancellations, up-sell or cross-sell success of individuals or teams, and much more.
To illustrate the power of desktop analytics - if you were in a sound-proof booth, and could only watch the agent access or enter information, do you think you would have a handle on what the call was about? Sure you would. Using desktop analytics is like looking over their shoulder and automatically taking notes of the key information and events that happen within a call and appending your observations to the call record, so you can understand the call context from an at-glance view before you even listen. For example, you could pull Customer ID, Sales Value, Product Codes, Call Disposition, etc., and place these values in the database associated with the call record. Often the data about the interaction is more important than the call recording itself.
Once the valuable data has been tagged to the interaction, calls can then automatically classified based on the application screens opened and/or fields entered by their contact center agents. Obviously, there are considerable benefits to be reaped when organizations focus their resources on more valuable interactions, such as those associated with high value customers, high value transactions, missed up-sell opportunities, long hold and handle times, one or more transfers or escalations, costly repeat calls, or calls with a specific product focus.
Make the Most of Your Quality Assurance Forms
Another key area that many contact centers are now focusing upon is the development of strong, effective Quality Assurance (QA) forms. It’s crucial to keep QA forms brief and concise – long, rambling forms tend to force evaluators to spend more time completing the evaluations rather than gleaning any measurable, actionable results from them. When designing the QA form it is important to ask questions that are valuable and pertinent to the business. Every question should be owned and some should be held accountable for that question. For example, if up-selling falls below a certain threshold, which person within the team is accountable for making sure that the relevant interactions are being evaluated and the agents are properly trained? It’s also crucial to use different QA forms for different purposes or types of calls. For example, when evaluating sales calls and trying to understand which sales closing tactics are working best, it’s necessary to create a much targeted form. Forms should be reviewed and enhanced periodically — at least every nine to 12 months in order to keep them in sync and fresh with ever-changing business needs and customer expectations.
The Importance of Agent Awareness and Empowerment
The quality monitoring process is inherently agent-focused. However, many organizations don’t maximize the value of actively involving agents in the process. For example, top‐performing agents can be brought in to conduct side‐by‐side peer monitoring and training sessions with agents who are not meeting their potential and are “under‐performing.” Agents learn best from their peers. Using the top performers for this activity will recognize their outstanding performance and help gain their confidence and support of management objectives. It also creates a pathway to a career in management or training that often some top performers have not yet considered. Coaching is the new buzzword these days so why exclude them?
It’s vital for organizations to recognize and embrace the shift in culture from agent control to agent empowerment. Some of the best, most profitable ideas come from agents, and their direct feedback can lend credibility to the QA program. Most agents like being involved in activities like this because they feel that they can contribute enormously when involved in focus groups on improving operational processes and customer experience. Agents should also be included in calibration sessions — it helps them appreciate the effort management puts into accurately assessing calls and emails and fairly evaluating agent performance. It’s also good to invite agent participation in the quality monitoring feedback process, as they can find this quite empowering. This is one of the critical stages that should not be overlooked in the overall continuous improvement process.
Share the Wealth Throughout Your Enterprise
Clearly, delivering an exceptional customer experience is mission-critical and strategically crucial to virtually every enterprise. It is important to constantly advocate for and share the voice of the customer through collaboration with other departments. If quality monitoring reveals an inefficient process, such as billing, that needs attention, the call recording related to the billing process can be sent to the appropriate department managers for review and resolution. The wealth of information to be gleaned from the QM process is valuable to the entire organization and should be shared whenever possible.
Several leading contact centers are implementing executive quality monitoring programs, where senior managers from sales, marketing, operations and all other supporting areas sit with contact center agents as they handle calls, or they automatically receive a sample of high-value recorded interactions from the quality monitoring system to listen to. Often, executives stumble upon new insights and problem-solving solutions simply by listening in to calls or by observing how the agent is delivering quality as envisioned by the CEO. This has been proven to create customer‐focused awareness and foster collaboration between departments — rapid process change is facilitated when senior executives hear for themselves about the impact or lack thereof of their processes and programs on customers. When senior managers take this program seriously and fund it adequately with the relevant resources, it has a very positive impact on agent morale and job satisfaction because it validates and underscores the importance of their job. In addition, the profile of the contact center is raised to another level within the organization, resulting in significant breakthroughs and the emergence of a truly customer-centric organization.
After over a decade of doing things the same way, traditional contact center quality monitoring is getting a major facelift. New analytics solutions and best practices are taking the ‘random’ out of and quality monitoring and transforming the way contact centers pursue and the speed in which they achieve their goals. William A. Foster once said, “Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” Today, this quote seems quite appropriate with regard to the quest for improved quality management in the contact center. Contact centers are constantly searching for new ways to cut back without compromising on quality. This is by no means an easy feat, particularly when we take into account the complexities of modern contact center environments and the vast array of quality monitoring technologies available. Fortunately, some of the latest solutions and best practices have been designed to radically improve the effectiveness of the QM process – harnessing the power of a more refined, focused approach.
All Calls are Not Created Equal
Many leading organizations have now rejected the concept of “random selection” as part of a viable QM program. They recognize the fact that all calls are not created equal. Some interactions are more relevant and important to achieving an organization’s objectives than others – the key is to determine which recorded interactions to evaluate in order to gain maximum insight and impact. In a traditional contact center quality monitoring program, analysts or supervisors typically select a random sample of calls to evaluate, and score a small number of calls associated to each agent. While traditional random evaluation of low value interactions can enable agent call quality and compliance to be measured to some extent, does not enable management to effectively assess, measure and execute accurate business decisions regarding important operational processes and the customer experience. In addition, the evaluation of low value interactions is a waste of resources – the available time of evaluators and supervisors is scarce, and it’s vital to ensure that their time is focused on high-value tasks, such as evaluating the most coachable calls that also contain the information most relevant to an organization’s business focus.
Progressive organizations are implementing analytics-enabled quality monitoring solutions to tag call recordings with more useful, relevant data. By using analytics-enabled quality monitoring software to tag recorded interactions with more meaningful information, organizations can take a unique targeted approach to improving quality based on the evaluation of pertinent business intelligence.
Powerful new desktop analytics-driven quality monitoring solutions are able to tag important events and data directly from employee’s desktop screen applications to call recordings without any extensive back-end integration work. This enables automated classification and analysis centered on key business issues, such as first contact resolution, customer churn, differences in call handling patterns between employees, frequency of holds/transfers associated with order cancellations, up-sell or cross-sell success of individuals or teams, and much more.
To illustrate the power of desktop analytics - if you were in a sound-proof booth, and could only watch the agent access or enter information, do you think you would have a handle on what the call was about? Sure you would. Using desktop analytics is like looking over their shoulder and automatically taking notes of the key information and events that happen within a call and appending your observations to the call record, so you can understand the call context from an at-glance view before you even listen. For example, you could pull Customer ID, Sales Value, Product Codes, Call Disposition, etc., and place these values in the database associated with the call record. Often the data about the interaction is more important than the call recording itself.
Once the valuable data has been tagged to the interaction, calls can then automatically classified based on the application screens opened and/or fields entered by their contact center agents. Obviously, there are considerable benefits to be reaped when organizations focus their resources on more valuable interactions, such as those associated with high value customers, high value transactions, missed up-sell opportunities, long hold and handle times, one or more transfers or escalations, costly repeat calls, or calls with a specific product focus.
Make the Most of Your Quality Assurance Forms
Another key area that many contact centers are now focusing upon is the development of strong, effective Quality Assurance (QA) forms. It’s crucial to keep QA forms brief and concise – long, rambling forms tend to force evaluators to spend more time completing the evaluations rather than gleaning any measurable, actionable results from them. When designing the QA form it is important to ask questions that are valuable and pertinent to the business. Every question should be owned and some should be held accountable for that question. For example, if up-selling falls below a certain threshold, which person within the team is accountable for making sure that the relevant interactions are being evaluated and the agents are properly trained? It’s also crucial to use different QA forms for different purposes or types of calls. For example, when evaluating sales calls and trying to understand which sales closing tactics are working best, it’s necessary to create a much targeted form. Forms should be reviewed and enhanced periodically — at least every nine to 12 months in order to keep them in sync and fresh with ever-changing business needs and customer expectations.
The Importance of Agent Awareness and Empowerment
The quality monitoring process is inherently agent-focused. However, many organizations don’t maximize the value of actively involving agents in the process. For example, top‐performing agents can be brought in to conduct side‐by‐side peer monitoring and training sessions with agents who are not meeting their potential and are “under‐performing.” Agents learn best from their peers. Using the top performers for this activity will recognize their outstanding performance and help gain their confidence and support of management objectives. It also creates a pathway to a career in management or training that often some top performers have not yet considered. Coaching is the new buzzword these days so why exclude them?
It’s vital for organizations to recognize and embrace the shift in culture from agent control to agent empowerment. Some of the best, most profitable ideas come from agents, and their direct feedback can lend credibility to the QA program. Most agents like being involved in activities like this because they feel that they can contribute enormously when involved in focus groups on improving operational processes and customer experience. Agents should also be included in calibration sessions — it helps them appreciate the effort management puts into accurately assessing calls and emails and fairly evaluating agent performance. It’s also good to invite agent participation in the quality monitoring feedback process, as they can find this quite empowering. This is one of the critical stages that should not be overlooked in the overall continuous improvement process.
Share the Wealth Throughout Your Enterprise
Clearly, delivering an exceptional customer experience is mission-critical and strategically crucial to virtually every enterprise. It is important to constantly advocate for and share the voice of the customer through collaboration with other departments. If quality monitoring reveals an inefficient process, such as billing, that needs attention, the call recording related to the billing process can be sent to the appropriate department managers for review and resolution. The wealth of information to be gleaned from the QM process is valuable to the entire organization and should be shared whenever possible.
Several leading contact centers are implementing executive quality monitoring programs, where senior managers from sales, marketing, operations and all other supporting areas sit with contact center agents as they handle calls, or they automatically receive a sample of high-value recorded interactions from the quality monitoring system to listen to. Often, executives stumble upon new insights and problem-solving solutions simply by listening in to calls or by observing how the agent is delivering quality as envisioned by the CEO. This has been proven to create customer‐focused awareness and foster collaboration between departments — rapid process change is facilitated when senior executives hear for themselves about the impact or lack thereof of their processes and programs on customers. When senior managers take this program seriously and fund it adequately with the relevant resources, it has a very positive impact on agent morale and job satisfaction because it validates and underscores the importance of their job. In addition, the profile of the contact center is raised to another level within the organization, resulting in significant breakthroughs and the emergence of a truly customer-centric organization.
Recently, VPI teamed up with Ovum Research, a premier analyst firm in the technology and telecom sectors, on a new white paper titled “Getting Workforce Optimization Right: How to Align Your Agent Training and Management with the Needs of Your Customers.” It was a great opportunity for us to learn firsthand what Ovum Analyst, Aphrodite Brinsmead, sees as the “must haves” for best-in-class contact centers to use as Workforce Optimization Technologies (or WOTs as she calls them). She specifically focuses on the many advantages of levering an integrated workforce optimization suite, like VPI EMPOWER suite.As I’m sure you’re painfully aware, contact centers are under immense pressure to improve customer satisfaction while at the same time, reducing costs. It seems that the mantra for businesses these days is “Do More With (much) Less.” This is challenging in any enterprise, but the contact center is unique in that its performance metrics and satisfaction scores are usually separated. It’s tough to know where to cut back or where to add staff when you can’t pinpoint the problems! Ovum believes that enterprises need to connect those traditionally siloed customer satisfaction metrics with agent performance, and tailor training accordingly. Makes perfect sense, right? But, in many cases, easier said than done!
This is where WOTs clearly provide a clear competitive advantage. This white paper shows you how to harness the power of these unified solutions in your own contact center. I really liked the graphic Ovum created to illustrate how the tools work together and the role each plays in the overall success of the contact center:
Here are a couple of quick examples of how to leverage WOTs in your own contact center:
- Quality Monitoring + Analytics: Desktop or speech analytics can be integrated with quality monitoring/call recording to automatically select important calls or call from a particular category to be monitored.
- Quality Monitoring + Performance Management: This enable managers to combine quantitative and qualitative information for a complete assessment of contact center productivity and its contribution to the bottom line.
Click here to download the white paper now!
Let me know what you think about workforce optimization technologies in the contact center. Are you currently using a unified solution? How has it helped 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.
2011 is certainly shaping up to be VPI's year - VPI Quality Pro recently received the 2010 Product of the Year Award from Customer Interaction Solutions (CIS) magazine! Even better, this is the second consecutive year we've won the award. And while our most valued praise always comes from our customers, it never hurts to receive recognition from the industry. We know that selecting a call center Quality Assurance solution is a big decision, and most people rely on industry resources such as TMC and CIS magazine to help guide their decisions.
So, you may be wondering what this award is all about. Each year, CIS presents its Product of Year awards to products and companies in the contact center and CRM industries that help users deliver an enhanced customer experience. Why did CIS choose VPI Quality Pro? First, it's built on our secure and powerful VPI Empower platform. This gives users confidence and reliability. Plus, VPI Quality Pro allows users to automatically categorize and prioritize recordings by customer names, products offered, transaction values and more -- across multimedia communication channels -- so that contact centers can focus on their most critical business issues instead. Now managers have these crucial recordings at their fingertips and can act quickly to resolve issues, improve performance and increase productivity. We're proud to deliver this innovation to our customers and the industry.
Does your contact center use VPI Quality Pro? We'd love to hear what you think! Or click here to learn more about VPI Quality Pro.
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 3rd 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 3rd 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 31st, 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
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.
Highly Anticipated 4th Annual Call Center Optimization Forum Will Provide Contact Center Professionals with Groundbreaking Strategies and Proven Best Practices to Boost Performance and Profitability
A full schedule of cities and dates was released today for the highly anticipated 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum (http://www.OptimizeYourCallCenter.com). The fourth annual event, which has garnered rave reviews from industry experts and attendees alike, will be hosted by the Call Center Network Group (CCNG), and Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC), the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP) and CRMXchange, and sponsored by VPI, Cicero, Pipkins, FurstPerson and Mindshare Technologies – pioneers in the development of best-of-breed call center optimization technologies. The nationwide series of educational seminars is tailored for call center professionals challenged with keeping up with the latest performance optimization strategies, techniques and solutions. In an effort to maintain a free and open exchange, the Forum is open to end-users only – registrations submitted by non-sponsoring vendors and consultants will not be accepted.
“Over the last three years, we have been delighted by the remarkable success of the Call Center Optimization Forum,” said David Hadobas, president and CEO at CCNG. “We’ve diligently maintained contact with attendees in order to ensure that they’ve had the most rewarding experience possible and we’ve been deeply gratified to hear their success stories upon having implemented the strategies and best practices learned at our events.” Hadobas went on to explain that attendee feedback is crucial to the success of future events. “We listen to our attendees and act upon their opinions and advice. As a result, the agenda for the 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum is more informative and engaging than ever before.” In addition to the event’s various educational seminars and workshops, attendees that register and attend will receive many additional benefits, including a one-year full CCNG individual membership (a $150 value), connection to a 90-minute Call Center School Online Training Class of the attendee’s choice (a $275 value) and a registration to the 2011 CRMXchange Virtual Contact Center Conference.
Attendees will learn how to fully maximize the value of key contact center solutions for pre-hire assessment and simulation, workforce forecasting and scheduling, quality monitoring and performance management. They will also discover the importance of implementing the latest solutions for customer experience management and post-contact surveying and customer feedback. With support from leading call center industry networking and educational organizations including CCNG (Call Center Network Group), The Call Center School, CRMXchange, QATC and SWPP, the 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum seminars will outline breakthrough strategies and techniques that can be used to exceed customer expectations, raise performance standards, intelligently reduce costs and achieve attendees' personal career goals. The seminars will reveal powerful new, cost-effective ways to hire the right employees, set and track the right performance objectives, accurately forecast workload and schedules, improve quality of service, measure and boost customer satisfaction, and win the support of top executives.
Due to limited availability, early registration is recommended in order to guarantee a place at any of the following Call Center Optimization Forum seminars:
CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA (April 7th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Charlotte
WASHINGTON DC (June 2nd) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/WashingtonDC
OMAHA, NEBRASKA (July 14th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Omaha
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS (August 8th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Boston
ORLANDO, FLORIDA (September 15th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Orlando
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA (November 10th) - http://www.optimizeyourcallcenter.com/Las-Vegas
To register or for additional information on the upcoming 2011 Call Center Optimization Forum seminars, please visit http://www.OptimizeYourCallCenter.com.
About Call Center Optimization Forum
The Call Center Optimization Forum is a worldwide series of educational seminars tailored for call center professionals challenged with keeping up with the latest performance optimization strategies, techniques and solutions. Hosted by the Call Center Network Group (CCNG), CRMXchange, QATC and SWPP, and sponsored by VPI, Cicero Pipkins, FurstPerson and Mindshare Technologies – pioneers in the development of best-of-breed call center optimization technologies – the event is designed for executives, managers and IT decision-makers who need to stay informed about the latest industry trends, best practices, and rapidly evolving contact center optimization technology. Attendees will have the unique opportunity to learn about industry best practices from multiple experts in the field at one time and see demonstrations of the latest advancements in call center technology. To learn more and register to attend, visit: http://www.OptimizeYourCallCenter.com.
Are you interested in keeping up-to-date on the latest developments in contact center call recording, quality monitoring, analytics, performance management or eLearning technologies?
As organizations look to optimize the performance of their contact centers and the vital role agents play in providing customers with the right experiences as they handle interactions, the demand for thorough research into vendors and products that support agent performance management is becoming critical. Ventana Research has just released this ground-breaking independent research report on Contact Center Agent Performance Management solutions.
You can download your complimentary 2010 Value Index for Agent Performance Management Research Report by Ventana Research at http://www.VPI-corp.com/2010-Value-Index to learn:
- What tools can help you more effectively manage of all the business activities associated with handling customer interactions to ensure an optimal customer experience and alignment to a common set of customer and revenue goals and objectives.
- A framework for buyers to thoroughly review technology vendors as they seek to purchase new systems to support their efforts.
- How 13 agent performance management software vendors and their products were ranked in several categories.
- Why VPI achieved the highest 'Hot Vendor' rating and was rated #1 in Customer Assurance.
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