We use speech analytics to run call campaigns specific to the types of calls we are interested in sampling month-to-month, seasonally, and based on a current issue in the media or public eye. 

For example, every summer we run a campaign on high water use calls (or high bills).  In the winter, we run a campaign on emergency calls for frozen pipes.  In January, we will run a campaign on the rate increase and in April we will run a campaign on the new services installed in a specific area.

As we evaluate these calls, we can ensure that the majority of the volume we are handling at the time is getting the appropriate business response, has valid and relevant reference materials and is not being exacerbated by other/unknown/outside influences.

These campaigns do not preclude us from listening to the general queue of calls captured. Instead they simply provide more targeted results for the majority of the assessments year-round.

Note:  This QATC (Quality Assurance & Training Connection) tip is provided by new QATC Board Member Penny Tootle of Las Vegas Valley Water District.  

To learn more, you are invited to attend the training Webcast: QA and Analytics: A Match Made in Heaven Webinar!

Want to Get More Value from Your Quality Assurance Program?

Traditional contact center quality assurance (QA) is a bit like blind dating – time consuming, stressful and usually a waste of time and effort. We randomly listen to lots of calls in the vain hope of finding one that’s actually coachable and worth evaluating. At the end of the day, we’re left disappointed and despondent, with little to show for all our our efforts. Fortunately, just as they can be implemented to set up quality dates for deeply compatible singles, analytics and workflow automation are also revolutionizing the way we locate valuable customer interactions that we really care about.

Join us on Thursday, June 20th at 1pm ET as we take you through the day in the life of an organization a using a more a targeted, value-driven QA approach and toolset.

Did you know that almost one in every 25 jobs in the US is within the contact center industry? Pretty thought provoking, huh? But just what does the future hold for the people, processes and technologies of this constantly evolving environment? As the leading developer and provider of contact center workforce optimization solutions and services, we at VPI decided to compile a list of compelling statistics that are shaping the future of customer contact and our solution portfolio. Check it out:

Customer Experience

1) Even in a negative economy, customer experience is a high priority for consumers, with 60% often or always paying more for a better experience. (Source: Harris Interactive)  Tweet This Stat!

2) 86% of consumers quit doing business with a company because of a bad customer experience, up from 59% 4 years ago. (Source: Harris Interactive)  Tweet This Stat!

3) 89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience. (Source: Harris Interactive)  Tweet This Stat!

4) 59% will try a new brand or company for a better service experience. (Source: American Express)  Tweet This Stat!

5) The top three drivers for investing in customer experience management are:

• Improve customer retention – (42 %)
• Improve customer satisfaction – (33 %)
• Increase cross-selling and up-selling – (32 %)

(Source: Aberdeen)  Tweet This Stat!

What These Customer Service Statistics Say about the Future of Contact Centers

These stats make it clear. Your company’s customer service simply can’t be ignored. Customers are choosier and more discerning than ever before. If you neglect the quality of your customer service you will lose key customers to your competitors. Interestingly, these customers are actually willing to pay more for better service and a superior experience.

Self-Service and Call Automation

6) By 2020, the customer will manage 85% of the relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human. (Source: Gartner)  Tweet This Stat!

7) The number of consumers preferring automated self-service has doubled to 55% in the last five years. (Source: Convergys)  Tweet This Stat!

8) US contact centers spend $12.4 billion annually verifying the caller is who they say they are. 59% of calls require identity verification, but only 3% of these are handled entirely through automated processes. (Source: ContactBabel)  Tweet This Stat!

  9) The IVR accounts for an astounding 27% of the total call experience. However, only 7% of organizations currently offer an IVR solution that delivers a better experience (CSAT) than their live agent experience. (Source: JD Power & Associates) Tweet This Stat! 

What These Self-Service Stats Say about the Future of Contact Centers

Self-service is growing by the minute. Your customers’ preferences are rapidly changing. They expect and demand immediate service and satisfaction. These days,regardless of age, gender or occupation, customers expect almost instant gratification when it comes to customer service – they have tools at their fingertips that provide constant and immediate communication. They don’t want to have to wait on hold and they don’t want to have to repeat their information. Can you live up to their expectations? It’s crucial to adapt to your customer’s self-service needs or you may be left behind.

Artificial Intelligence is now being applied to self-service to make it smarter, faster and better. To learn more about the next generation in voice self-service – Virtual Call Agents powered by Artificial Intelligence – watch this short video and listen to these virtual agent call audio samples.

At-Home Agents

10) There are an estimated 3 million Americans who work primarily from home today, an increase of 61% since 2005. (Source: Forrester)  Tweet This Stat!

11) An estimated 60% of contact centers utilize home agents today in some capacity and the forecast is 80% by year-end 2013. (Source: Customer Contact Strategies)  Tweet This Stat!

12) More than half of the contact centers in the U.S. today, 53% have some percentage of their agent population functioning from a home office. More than 70% of those currently supporting at-home agents plan on increasing the number of their at-home agents in 2013. (Source: National Association of Call Centers)  Tweet This Stat!

13) Ovum expects the number of home-based customer service agents to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 36.4%, one of the strongest expansion levels of any outsourcing market sub-segment. (Source: Ovum)  Tweet This Stat!

14) By 2016, 63 million Americans will telecommute. (Source: Global Workplace Analytics)  Tweet This Stat!

What these Home Working Stats Say about the Future of Contact Centers

Working from home is becoming an increasingly common practice – quite possibly the single biggest phenomenon changing the customer contact landscape in over a decade. Telecommuting offers employees a flexible schedule and higher job satisfaction rate. Without the limits of geography, employers benefit from the ability to cherry pick candidates from a vast labor pool beyond the confined radius of a brick-and-mortar facility. Consequently, more and more companies are hiring at-home agents, but this means they need a way to monitor the performance and productivity of the agents.

To learn more about best practices for implementing a successful at-home agent program,  download your complimentary white paper on ‘Call Center At-Home Agent Best Practices,’ authored by analyst firm DMG Consulting, and consider attending one of Michele Rowan’s world-class ‘At-Home Agent Strategies for Success Workshops.’ As the former VP of Performance Management at Hilton, Michele led the expansion of the Hilton@Home program from 200 to 1000 at-home agents, and has since helped hundreds of other organizations successfully deploy home working programs.

Quality and Performance Management

15) Only 31% of organizations closely monitor the quality of interactions with target customers. (Source: Forrester Research)  Tweet This Stat!

16) Two-thirds of organizations view access to real-time or nearly real-time metrics is a very important capability. However, very few companies (8%) receive their metrics as soon as they are generated. Fewer than one-fifth (18%) receive them on the same day, while at the remaining companies it can take up to four weeks for the metrics to be delivered. (Source: Ventana Research)  Tweet This Stat!

17) 92% of contact center leaders see high value in sharing metrics in real-time with front-line agents. The top 5 metrics of greatest value when shared in real-time with agents are # of calls in queue, service level, customer satisfaction, schedule adherence, and first contact resolution – in that order. (Source: Good to Great: Rapid Results with Real-time Performance Management, A Saddletree Research Paper, 2012) Read the full benchmark research report.  Tweet This Stat!

18) 60% of all repeat calls are process or training driven – business processes are not in place to meet the customer’s need, and agents have not been given the training required to meet the customer expectations that have been set by marketing or elsewhere in the business. (Source: Frost & Sullivan)  Tweet This Stat!

19) Organizations that focus on frequent training see advantages in first call resolution - 65% vs. 58% for those who don't. (Source: Parature)  Tweet This Stat!

20) Only 31% of organizations recognize and reward employees across the company for improving customer experience. (Source: Forrester Research)  Tweet This Stat!

What these Quality and Performance Management Stats Say about the Future of Contact Centers

Clearly, these stats show that companies need to pay more attention to agent quality and performance management in order to maximize the potential of each employee and provide the training the agents need to be successful.

When empowered with real-time performance metrics and information, front-line agents and supervisors thrive. The problem is that most contact centers struggle to extract customer insights from multiple siloed systems and applications that share data. It takes time and resources to produce spreadsheets and reports that have already become stale and outdated by the time they're delivered. Fortunately, with the availability of Real-time Performance Management software, the ability to consolidate metrics from multiple disparate contact center telephony and business applications and deliver them just-in-time to agents, supervisors and executives has now become an affordable reality.

To get more value from Quality Assurance efforts, it’s important to re-think your approach to Quality Assurance (QA). Traditional QA which has been primarily focused on monitoring and improving internal agent quality and compliance for the past 30 years, is now also being used to uncover valuable insights to improve business operations and customer satisfaction. The emergence of workflow automation and embedded analytics with new QA solutions are helping customer facing organizations around the world reduce the manual steps required by most traditional QA programs by 60 to 80 percent. Better yet, analytics-driven QA takes you straight to what really matters – delivering insight into critical business issues and opportunities to improve customer experience and revenue outcomes.

Multi-Channel

21) Contact channels other than the phone, such as email, Web self-service, chat, and other online techniques, now account for more than 30 percent of customer service engagements. Web self-service and email dominate this mix. (Source: CFI Group)  Tweet This Stat!

22) 25% of consumers utilize one to two channels when seeking customer care and 52% of consumers utilize three or four channels. (Source: Ovum)  Tweet This Stat!

23) 57% best in class companies measure support center success across email, chat, web, and voice, and 62% use integrated voice response (IVR). (Source: Aberdeen Group)  Tweet This Stat!

24) In the US, 21% of online shoppers prefer live chat, close to the same number as those who favor using the telephone (23%) and ahead of social media (2%). Email remains the most popular method for online shoppers to communicate with customer services, with 54% saying they prefer this method. (Source: BoldChat )  Tweet This Stat!

25) 60% of adults aged 25–29 live in households with only wireless telephones. (Source: Centers for Disease Control)  Tweet This Stat!

What these Multi-Channel Stats Say about the Future of Contact Centers

Today’s contact centers are using many different channels to reach their customers. In this era of constant, ‘round-the-clock communication, customers expect to be able to interact with a company through any channel – whether via phone, going online or even live Web chat. In addition, an increasing number of businesses and contact centers are implementing live chat to meet this rising demand. In addition to being able to evaluate and analyze voice interactions with customers, organizations need to place equal or greater weight on the ability to assess and extract insights from self-service, Web chat, email and social media conversations. This leads us into the next major trend – Speech and Text Analytics.

Speech and Text Analytics

26) Currently, there are 3,170 active, successful speech analytics implementations. (Source: SpeechTech)  Tweet This Stat!

27) Speech analytics was one of the top two fastest-growing call center tools in 2012 – the adoption of speech analytics grew by 59% and Web chat jumped by 60%. (Source: ContactBabel)  Tweet This Stat!

28) Speech analytics was among the top five technologies evaluated, with 24 percent saying that they intended to evaluate it for purchase in 2012. (Source: Saddletree Research) Tweet This Stat!

29) The speech analytics market is projected to continue to expand over the next several years, growing by 25 percent in 2013 and 20 percent in 2014. (Source: DMG Consulting) Tweet This Stat!

30) Speech analytics solutions are currently in use in 24% of all organizations, predominantly used by services, outsourcing and finance organizations. There is an appreciable amount of interest in implementing a new speech analytics system or replacing the one they have within the near future, especially in the medical sector (45% of companies), insurance sector (54%) and retail (40%). (Source: ContactBabel)  Tweet This Stat!

What these Speech Analytics Statistics Say about the Future of Contact Centers

These statistics clearly demonstrate that speech analytics may be the fastest growing trend impacting the future of contact centers today. The possibilities are endless. Speech analytics allows you to identify calls that can be better handled, helps you improve First Contact Resolution and reduce customer churn, and enables you to increase sales and collections by sharing best practices.

Social Media

31) More than 50% of Facebook users and 80% of Twitter users expect a response to a customer service inquiry in a day or less.(Source: Oracle)  Tweet This Stat!

32) Failure to respond via social channels can lead to up to a 15% increase in churn rate for existing customers. (Source: Gartner)  Tweet This Stat!

33) 56% of customer tweets to companies are being ignored. (Source: Huffington Post  “100 Fascinating Social Media Statistics and Figures from 2012 )  Tweet This Stat!

34) 19% of consumers who had unsatisfactory service interactions shared their experiences through social networks in 2010, a 50% increase over 2009. (Source: Forrester)  Tweet This Stat!

35) Customers who wrote about their contact center experiences on social media sites and then received follow-up from the company rated their overall satisfaction with the contact center experience nearly 20%higher and are 15% more likely to recommend the company than those who received no follow-up. (Source: CFI Group)  Tweet This Stat!

36) Servicing via social media boosts customer satisfaction by 15-20%. (Source: CFI Group)  Tweet This Stat!

37) 80% of users prefer to connect with brands on Facebook. (Source: Huffington Post)  Tweet This Stat!

What these Social Media Stats Say about the Future of Contact Centers

Social Media has had a huge impact on the future of the contact center industry. After interacting with your company, a customer can immediately vent theirfrustrations or share their positive experiences with the click of a button. This is why customer service you provide is more important than ever before. Additionally, since word now travels so fast, companies can lose business opportunities if they don’t regularly respond to their customers’ requests and comments on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, blogs and others. With the advent of Social Media, QA is becoming more important than ever before as it takes just seconds for a customer to rave about or complain and bash a brand to thousands.

Cloud Computing

38) By the end of 2015 more than 18 percent of contact center seats will be delivered by cloud-based contact center infrastructure providers. (Source: DMG Consulting)  Tweet This Stat!

39) At year-end 2016, more than 50 percent of Global 1000 companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in the public cloud. (Source: Gartner Predicts)  Tweet This Stat!

40) 57% of cloud computing users feel that it actually increased their security when compared to traditional methods for computing and data back up. (Source: Mimecast)  Tweet This Stat!

What these Cloud Computing Stats Say about the Future of Contact Centers

VPI was recently featured in Contact Center Association's Inbound Magazine in their special issue on 'What to Expect in the Contact Center in 2013.'  One thing is for certain, and that is trading floors and contact centers will be faced with implementing a series of process and technology changes in the coming year.

Authored by VPI's Vice President of Workforce Optimization Patrick Botz, the article 'Financial Contact Centers Face the Reality of Complying with Dodd-Frank' discusses the impact of Dodd-Frank call recording requirements, deadline dates and affordable call recording, analytics and electronic Coaching solutions that are helping trading floors and contact centers of all sizes and in multiple industries that are involved in swap activities – including financial services, manufacturing, oil and insurance – prepare for and ensure compliance with Dodd-Frank call recording requirements.

Financial Contact Centers Face the Realities of Complying with Dodd-Frank

New Dodd-Frank Call Recording Requirements 

Using Analytics to Detect Non-Compliant Activities 

Closing Knowledge Gaps with E-Learning and Coaching 

You’re probably familiar with Ventana Research and its highly acclaimed annual Value Index.  Ventana prides itself on providing insights and best practices guidance based on rigorous research-based benchmarking indexes of people, processes, information and technology across business and IT functions worldwide. The Ventana Research Indexes provide research-based business and technology guidance to businesses. I would imagine that every solution provider wants to feature prominently as a Ventana Index category leader – the designation carries some serious weight and helps bring the very best solutions to the attention of the business community. That said, in addition to being ranked as a “Hot Vendor” in the 2012 Value Index for Agent Performance Management, VPI earned the highest ranking of any vendor in Product Manageability – the ability to meet business and IT needs for installation, deployment and administration. Not too shabby, huh?

The solution that earned these accolades is VPI EMPOWER™ – an award winning suite that synchronizes call center workforce optimization capabilities including contact center call recording, call center quality assurance management, call center analytics, call center performance management and call center eLearning to help organizations rapidly identify and solve critical contact center operational and customer experience issues.

“With solutions for customer experience and workforce optimization, VPI delivers powerful analytics, metrics and coaching capabilities that improve agent and overall contact center performance,” said Richard Snow, global research director and vice president, Ventana Research. “The company thoroughly deserves its Hot Vendor rating and I recommend companies should include it on the short list of vendors they examine as they strive to improve the performance of their agents.”

VPI solutions routinely rate exceptionally well with industry analysts and publications, and the 2012 Ventana Index ranking is the latest in a long list of VPI's prestigious accolades, acknowledgments and awards. In response to the news, Andrew Marsh, president and CEO at VPI, remarked that, “Receiving a Hot Vendor rating from Ventana Research and earning recognition as the highest rated vendor in Product Manageability is a great validation of our strategy and ability to deliver market-leading solutions that are easy to deploy, easy to use, and extremely cost effective.”

Be sure to checkout the latest Ventana resources and news –  Ventana’s site is a treasure trove of valuable research and insights.

Boosting customer satisfaction is more important than ever before. Consumers today live in an instant gratification society and are not only choosier with how they spend their money, but also demand an exceptional customer experience. Now's the time to take control and learn how to improve customer satisfaction and reduce operating costs by reading VPI's article on 'Quality Assurance 2.0: Using Analytics to Focus QA on Outcomes," which has been featured as the top story in the Quality Assurance & Training Connection (QATC) newsletter.

Quality Assurance 2.0: Using Analytics to Focus QA on Outcomes

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?

 

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.

• 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

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

I always appreciate sitting down and chatting with leaders in the contact center industry. It gives me the opportunity to learn about new trends or issues and I get to share how VPI is helping solve those issues.  Patrick Botz, VPI’s VP of Marketing, recently had such a chat with Rich Hand, the Director of Membership and Publications for Contact Center Association (CCA). The topic was the critical nature of analytics in the performance and success of contact centers. Listen to the Queue-Talk podcast on the CCA Web site to learn how leveraging analytics improves not only the customer experience and quality of the contact center, but ultimately the business overall.

But wait there’s more! Patrick will also be speaking about the importance of analytics at CCA’s Contact Center Conference Fall 2011, Oct 3-6 in Phoenix, Arizona. His session, “Analytics-Driven Quality Monitoring and Coaching: The Next Generation in Contact Center Quality Management,” will be held on Wednesday, October 5 at 2:30 pm. This is an outstanding conference for anyone involved in the management of the customer experience and success of your contact centers. Hope to see you there!

Will you be attending the Contact Center Conference? Let me know!

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

Think contact center analytics may improve your operations and customer experience?

The latest research indicates it can – and will.  

Today’s toughening business landscape dictates that contact centers revamp their goals, processes and performance measures to improve the profitability of customer interactions.  This requires strong leadership and a clear view of the path to progress.  Both can be profoundly supported by contact center analytics technology that captures performance data and generates the metrics needed to drive improvement.

This major research on Contact Center Analytics, the latest from leading business technology research firm Ventana Research, analyzed input from hundreds of organizations around the world to assess the maturity and direction of their efforts. Ventana Research undertook this benchmark research to acquire real-world information about maturity, trends and best practices in how contact centers use analytics. It explores how they do this now, how their people feel about the current processes and tools, plans they have to change or improve them, and benefits they hope to gain by doing so.

"Organizations are advancing in their ability to apply analytics to improve both the operations of the contact center and its contributions to the organization's performance, but there is substantial room for improvement," said Richard Snow, VP of Ventana Research and head of its Customer and Contact Center Research practice. "This benchmark research shows that companies can still do more to improve the way they provide efficiency metrics and that most have yet to devise effectiveness metrics. It indicates that a narrow focus on cost is obstructing improvement in customer service and the customer experience. Moreover, the research makes clear that the timeliness of both metrics and the underlying data is increasingly an issue for companies."

Download your complimentary copy of the Contact Center Analytics Benchmark Research executive summary to learn about:

• Today's most commonly measured contact center metrics.
• How leading contact centers are using contact center analytics today.
• 15 strategic recommendations and best practices for use of contact center analytics.
• How contact center executives, managers and front-line employees feel about their current processes and tools, the plans they have to change or improve them and expected benefits.

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.

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.

First contact resolution (FCR) is one of the most important metrics in contact centers today. It speaks volumes about how effective your systems are, how on target your agents are, and ultimately, how satisfied your customers will be.

We can all use to learn a thing or two about improving FCR so watch this complimentary training Webinar on 'Accelerating First Contact Resolution with Analytics' presented by 20+ year call center industry veteran, Penny Reynolds, from The Call Center School, and Patrick Botz from VPI.

Improved FCR rates lead to substantially reduced operating costs, increased opportunities to sell, and improved employee productivity. However, many today’s contact centers struggle to find the best ways to track and improve this elusive metric. The good news is that new, affordable analytics tools are making the quest for enhancing FCR much easier.

View complimentary on-demand training session at here to learn the pros and cons of the various methods used to measure FCR; how tp make measuring FCR more accurate and actionable with analytics; how to identify the root cause of repeat interactions and how to prioritize tracking, analysis and improvement of FCR to maximize your business benefits. This is a jam-packed educational session you should be sure not to miss!

You may have felt the pain yourself. For three decades now, the Quality Assurance (QA) process for most contact centers has been a cumbersome undertaking. But there is a light at the end of this tunnel. New research reveals that the next generation of call center quality assurance solutions is here and can seriously streamline your QA processes.

Among the findings are that workflow automation and contact center analytics can reduce the manual steps required by most QA applications by 60 to 80 percent, while ensuring that you still hear the very important voice of the customer (VOC).

There is so much to learn about what's next for call center quality assurance, and you can get your complimentary white paper with all of the details at http://www.VPI-corp.com/New-QA.

The paper discussed how this new generation of call center quality assurance and workforce optimization (WFO) solutions automate low-value tasks that do not require human cognitive capabilities. It illustrates the differences between the 'old' way of doing QA and new closed-loop automated processes, and how those processes can enhance the customer experience, increase agent satisfaction and improve QA specialist productivity by 15-20%.

It's time to see how you can adopt a new approach to contact center quality assurance today! Download your complimentary copy of the white paper now.